Techmeme
August 20, 2015, 11:40 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.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Twitter Expands Its Program For Ads Outside Twitter  —  Twitter is unveiling several new features for advertisers who want their campaigns to go beyond Twitter itself.  And it's giving the program a new name, the Twitter Audience Platform.  —  Last year, the company launched something called …
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!
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Earlier Picks

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