Techmeme: How WeChat works, and how it became so popular in China: millions of apps within the WeChat app, built-in payments, and more (Connie Chan/Andreessen Horowitz)

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August 10, 2015, 10:45 AM

Top News

James Crabtree / Financial Times:

Google to announce relaunch of its Android One project in India in coming weeks with a goal of specifying phones that will cost less than $50 — Google set to reboot Android One smartphone project in India — Google is to relaunch its Android One cut-price smartphone project …

Connie Chan / Andreessen Horowitz:

How WeChat works, and how it became so popular in China: millions of apps within the WeChat app, built-in payments, and more — When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China — This post is all about WeChat, but it's also about more than just WeChat.

Thanks:@larrychiang

Hunter Scott:

How a Twitter bot written to automatically enter contests won 1000 prizes in 9 months, or about 4 contests per day — Twitter Contest Winning as a Service — This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning on average 4 contests per day, every day, for about 9 months straight.

More: Business Insider, Engadget, Guardian, Fox News and TechSpot

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:

OEMs and carriers make Android's security update strategy ineffective at Android's scale; a major attack on unpatched phones seems inevitable — Waiting for Android's inevitable security Armageddon — Editorial: Android's update strategy doesn't scale, and that's recipe for disaster.

More: InformationWeek, BGR and Macworld

Terje Solsvik / Reuters:

Opera Sofware considers sale after lowering growth estimates for the second time in six months, hires investment bankers — Norway's Opera warns on growth, says firm may be sold — * Says has interest from a number of parties — * 2015 revenue now forecast lower at $600 mln to $618 mln

More: Web Browser, The Digital Reader, SiliconANGLE and Android Police

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:

Blockfeed, available in NYC, extracts location from news articles and serves users a feed based on where they are — Blockfeed App Surfaces Hyper Local News — The death knell has been sounded for local journalism at regular intervals during the digital era.

More: AVC, Digiday, The Drum and The New York Observer

Ariha Setalvad / The Verge:

Facebook makes it hard to find and take down copyright-infringing videos as it tries to establish itself as the go-to platform for viral videos — Why Facebook's video theft problem can't last — Earlier this year, Facebook's increased focus on video — which began with it introducing autoplay video …

More: Wired, Medium, Medium, Beyond Search, Re/code and Vox

Tweets: @dillonmbaker, @willoremus and @mkbhd

Dino Grandoni / New York Times:

States compete for burgeoning self-driving car business by loosening regulations, building research centers and testing facilities — Among the States, Self-Driving Cars Have Ignited a Gold Rush — Whether it is fuel savings, safer commutes or freed-up time behind the wheel, drivers have many reasons to embrace self-driving cars.

Mark Sullivan / VentureBeat:

Atlanta, Chicago top RootMetrics' list of cities with best mobile network performance in US — Atlanta has the best wireless service in the land, Denver and L.A. among the worst — Atlanta and Chicago have the best wireless service performance in the United States, says a new report from RootMetrics …

More: RootMetrics, WRAL Tech Wire, PCMag Australia Feed, Wireless Week, Channel Partners News … and RCR Wireless News

Jason Del Rey / Re/code:

Webvan founder Louis Borders working on $99/year shopping club offering same day delivery that will rely on heavily-automated warehouses — Webvan Founder Plots an Amazon Prime Competitor Powered by Robots — Fourteen years after his first same-day delivery service went belly up, Webvan founder Louis Borders is working on a redo.

Tweets: @seldo

Alice Truong / Quartz:

Linden Lab working on an Oculus game similar to its Second Life offering codenamed Project Sansar, plans to release it before end of 2016 — Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life? — Second Life—the online world once considered the hottest destination on the internet—never got much past a million users.

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