Techmeme: Pew: 70% of Facebook users log in daily, 36% of smartphone owners use messaging apps, Instagram and other social sites see increase in engagement (Maeve Duggan/Pew Internet)

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August 20, 2015, 8:20 AM

Top News

Mark Bergen / Re/code:

Sources: Google Express to shut down its two Bay Area delivery hubs, looks to outsource delivery to on-demand startups — Google Express Plans to Shut Down Its Two Delivery Hubs — Google Express, the search giant's same-day delivery service, is shutting down its two delivery hubs …

More: 9to5Google and VentureBeat. Tweets: @rdrake98, @ourielohayon, @theromit and @mdudas

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Ashley Madison's data breach could have profound consequences for users and will likely be catastrophic for the company — The mind-bending messiness of the Ashley Madison data dump — Massive data breaches have become so routine as to become background noise.

More: Wall Street Journal, Salon, BuzzFeed, Washington Post, Geek Beat, Fox 59, NEWS.com.au, Fusion, Fusion, PC Magazine, Above the Law and Ars Technica

Joseph Bernstein / BuzzFeed:

Ashley Madison's $19 ‘Full Delete’ Option Made The Company Millions — The hacked cheating site sold peace of mind to tens of thousands of users. — Ashley Madison, the hacked affairs site, made nearly $2 million dollars off of its so-called “Full Delete” function in 2014, according to private company documentation leaked yesterday.

More: Guardian, New York Times, Business Insider, The Hill, KitGuru, The Verge, Reuters, Quartz and CNET. Tweets: @bernstein

Maeve Duggan / Pew Internet:

Pew: 70% of Facebook users log in daily, 36% of smartphone owners use messaging apps, Instagram and other social sites see increase in engagement — Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015 — In today's world, people — particularly young people — are continually finding and adapting …

More: Social Media Today, Marketing Land, SiliconBeat, CNNMoney, USA Today, Business Insider, The Hill, SocialTimes and Nieman Lab

Amin Vahdat / Google Research Blog:

How Google's networking infrastructure has evolved over ten years and five generations to deliver more than 1 petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth — Pulling Back the Curtain on Google's Network Infrastructure — Pursuing Google's mission of organizing the world's information …

More: Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Dice Insights, Tnooz, CIO.com and Google Cloud Platform Blog

Yevgeniy Sverdlik / Data Center Knowledge:

Lightning strikes Google Compute Engine data center in Belgium; services disrupted and 0.000001% of data lost — Lightning in Belgium Disrupts Google Cloud Services — Not even the mighty Google data centers are immune from acts of god it turns out. — A series of successive lightning strikes …

TechCrunch:

Here Are The 52 Startups That Launched At Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day 2 — Hardware was the clear-cut theme of Day 1, but Demo Day 2 of Y Combinator's Summer 2015 was a bit more... eclectic. Moving services! Streaming services! Hotel booking, augmented reality, esports!

More: MediaNama

Mark Wilson / BetaNews:

Google releases version 1.5 of its programming language Go, last vestiges of C removed from code — Go, Google's C-killing programming language, hits version 1.5 — Six years and six updates later, Google's own programming language, Go, has reached version 1.5.

More: eWeek, blog.golang.org, VentureBeat, SD Times, ReadWrite, Wired, InfoWorld and Slashdot. Thanks:@sparklemarkle

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:

WhatsApp launches a desktop web app for iPhone users, can work in conjunction with mobile to mirror real-time conversations — WhatsApp's web client now works for iPhone users too — WhatsApp's web client is finally arriving for iOS users, eight months after it first arrived for Android.

More: Inquirer, The Next Web, BGR, Engadget, TechnoBuffalo, iMore, The Verge, TechCrunch, Tech2 and SlashGear

Steve Lohr / New York Times:

Alex Rampell, co-founder and former CEO of TrialPay which was acquired by Visa this year, joins Andreessen Horowitz as general partner — With an Eye on Fintech, Andreessen Horowitz Adds a New General Partner — The leaders of Andreessen Horowitz believe that experience is the best teacher.

More: Andreessen Horowitz

Stacey Higginbotham / Fortune:

Meet Ring, the connected door bell company that just scored Richard Branson as an investor — Jamie Siminoff, CEO of Ring, a maker of a video doorbell, is proof that a missed connection isn't the worst thing that can happen to an entrepreneur. — Fourteen years ago he met Richard Branson …

More: Gizmag, Los Angeles Times, VentureBeat and Business Insider. Thanks:@peterpham

Bob Van Enkenvoort / Wisconsin State Journal:

Social marketing firm Spredfast acquires competitor Shoutlet — Madison-based Shoutlet sold to Spredfast — Two former competitors in the social technology industry — Madison-based Shoutlet and Austin, Texas-based Spredfast — are now on the same team. Spredfast's acquisition of Shoutlet was announced Wednesday morning.

More: TechCrunch, JSOnline, SiliconHills, bizjournals, Marketing Land, Social Media Today and VentureBeat

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