Rocket Lab’s 20th Electron launch ends in failure with the loss of its payload

Rocket Lab flew its 20th Electron mission on Saturday morning, but the launch ran into a significant issue just after its second-stage engine ignited. The engine appeared to shut down just after the ignition, which is not what it’s supposed to do, and is likely the result of an automated emer

Amazon launches free video streaming service in India

Amazon has long maintained that its video streaming service, Prime Video, helps drive more sales on the shopping app. Now the e-commerce giant is testing what happens when it brings a video streaming service directly to the shopping app. The e-commerce giant, which launched an ad-supported streamin

Solana, a blockchain platform followed by top crypto investors, says it’s far faster than Ethereum

Solana isn’t widely known yet outside of the crypto community. But insiders think the blockchain platform is interesting for a wide variety of reasons, beginning with its amiable founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, who spent more than a dozen years as an engineer working on wireless protocols at Qual

Extra Crunch roundup: Selling SaaS to developers, cracking YC after 13 tries, all about Expensify

Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules. Software companies that sell directly to end users share

Daily Crunch: Stripe buys Y Combinator alum Bouncer for undisclosed sum

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Wrapping the week here at Daily Crunch with a big thanks to Henry for taking over yesterday and a fist bump to everyone who has written in with notes on its forma

Google’s ‘DVD Screensaver’ Easter egg makes the logo bounce around your screen accordingly

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a good Easter egg out of Google. Not too long ago it felt like someone would discover a new hidden gag in Google’s products every few weeks. The company cranked them out like it was their job. While we haven’t seen as many new ones pop up l

New Relic's business remodel will leave new CEO with work to do

For Bill Staples, the freshly appointed CEO at New Relic, who takes over on July 1, yesterday was a good day. After more than 20 years in the industry, he was given his own company to run. It’s quite an accomplishment, but now the hard work begins. Lew Cirne, New Relic's founder and CEO,

California Gov. Newsom proposes $3.2B in EV investment as part of economic recovery package

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a vocal proponent of electric vehicles, on Friday debuted a new proposal that would earmark $3.2 billion to boost EV infrastructure and adoption in the state. “This is a big deal,” Newsom said at a press conference Friday. “The Biden administration’

As M&A accelerates, deal-makers are leveraging AI and ML to keep pace

The global pandemic has changed the way we work, including how and where we work. For those involved in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry, a notoriously relationship-driven business, this has meant in-person boardroom handshakes have been replaced by video conference calls, remote col

Opportunity knocks: Exhibit at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

No matter what slice of the mobility market you've claimed as your own — AVs, EVs, data mining, AI, dockless scooters, robotics or the batteries that will charge and change the world — you won't find a better place to showcase your extraordinary tech and talent than TC Sessions: Mobilit

Every early-stage startup must identify and evaluate a strategic advantage

Whether you’re building a company or thinking about investing, it’s important to understand your strategic advantage. In order to determine one, you should ask fundamental questions like: What’s the long-term, sustainable reason that the company will stay in business? The most imp

What to expect from Google's all-virtual I/O

While Apple, Microsoft and the like were scrambling to bring their respective developer conferences online, Google made the executive design to just scrap I/O outright last year. It was a bit of an odd one, but the show went on through news-related blog posts. While we're going to have to wait

Stripe acquires Bouncer, will integrate its card authentication into the Radar fraud detection tool

On the heels of a $600 million fundraise earlier this year, payments giant Stripe has been on an acquisition march to continue building out its business. In the latest development, the company has acquired Bouncer, a startup based in Oakland that has built a platform to automatically run card authe

Facebook loses last-ditch attempt to derail DPC decision on its EU-US data flows

Facebook has failed in its bid to prevent its lead EU data protection regulator from pushing ahead with a decision on whether to order suspension of its EU-U.S. data flows. The Irish High Court has just issued a ruling dismissing the company’s challenge to the Irish Data Protection Commission