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)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise

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.

Sponsor Posts

Google:

Generate videos with Veo 3 in Google Gemini — Create high-quality, 8-second videos with Veo 3, our state-of-the-art AI video generator. Try it with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan.

Warp:

The #1 Coding Agent — #1 on Terminal-Bench. 71% on SWE-bench Verified. Trusted by 600K+ devs. Try the top agentic dev tool for $1 for 1st month with code TECHMEME.

Zoho:

Do you need to start another business within your business? — IntroWhere do new ventures pop up? Starting the new business within your current businessWhen does the add-venture become a revenue stream?

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

F5:

F5's 2025 AI Strategy Report — Only 2% of Enterprises Are Fully AI-Ready. Most face security gaps like weak data governance and lack of AI firewalls, stalling adoption and innovation. What is your readiness to scale AI?

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Decoder with Nilay Patel:

Notion CEO Ivan Zhao wants you to demand better from your tools

A show from the Verge about big ideas - and other problems.

Subscribe to Decoder with Nilay Patel.

Grit:

Shishir Mehrotra on Building Tools Creators Love

Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.

Subscribe to Grit.

Tech Brew Ride Home:

(BNS) Could AI Spending Blow Up The Economy? With Paul Kedrosky

Tech news headlines every day. 15 minutes and you're up to date. From Tech Brew, Morning Brew's tech hub.

Subscribe to Tech Brew Ride Home.

Lenny's Podcast:

Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI)

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:

Does GPT-5 Live Up To the Hype?, AGI Wait Continues, Self-Loathing Gemini

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.

Hard Fork:

GPT-5 Arrives, and We Try the New Alexa+

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:45 AM ET, August 10, 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.