Techmeme
August 20, 2015, 11:45 AM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft's Surface Pro 4, Band 2, and new Lumias set for October launch event  —  Microsoft is planning to hold a massive hardware launch event in October.  Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software giant will use the event to unveil two new Lumia handsets, the Surface Pro 4, and a Microsoft Band 2.
Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:
Amazon will no longer accept Flash ads on its site or advertising platform as of September  —  Amazon puts another nail in Flash's coffin  —  Adobe Flash is having a rough month.  —  Amazon said this week that starting in September, it will no longer accept Flash ads on Amazon.com …
James Vincent / The Verge:
Sony's SmartBand 2 monitors heart rate, is waterproof, will be available in September for $132  —  Sony's SmartBand 2 will monitor your heart rate and field your calls  —  Sony has officially unveiled its SmartBand 2 after accidentally publishing details about the activity tracker earlier this year.
Gina Hall / Silicon Valley Business Journal:
Mobile marketing automation startup Kahuna raises $45 million in Series B funding to grow its platform  —  Mobile marketing automation startup Kahuna raised $45 million in Series B funding Wednesday to grow its platform.  —  Tenaya Capital led the round with participation from previous investors …
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
96.8 percent of new smartphones sold are either iPhone or Android devices  —  The latest quarterly smartphone sales data from Gartner is out today, and it tells a very familiar story.  BlackBerry keeps shrinking, Microsoft is stagnating, and Google and Apple are tightening their already dominant grip over the entire market.
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.
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

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Beyond productivity: Why live captions belong in every meeting  —  You join a meeting, someone starts talking, and within a minute, there are names, numbers, ideas, and unfamiliar terms flying around.  You could ask them to repeat it.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Sources:
Factory CEO on why AGI is already here
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Lenny's Podcast:
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:45 AM ET, August 20, 2015.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Yevgeniy Sverdlik / Data Center Knowledge:
Kevin Tofel / ZDNet:
Sam Biddle / Gawker: