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Rocket Lab is launching its ninth Electron rocket today, with the launch set for 00:41 UTC (8:41 ET/5:41 PT). The mission, called “As The Crow Flies,” will be taking off from the company’s LC-1 launchpad in New Zealand, carrying a payload from Astro Digital to orbit. The launch was actually supposed to take a different spacecraft up to low Earth Orbit, but the payload was swapped late last month – an unusual move for a rocket launch, and one that Rocket Lab is using to demonstrate the flexibility of its commercial service model. Rocket Lab’s other customer had a delay, and Astro Digital was ready to send up one of its ‘Corvus’ imaging satellites, so it got to move up the timing of its launch as a result. Rocket Lab is currently on track to launch as planned, and the launch stream for the mission will be live above starting at around 20 minutes out from the T-0 launch window. Get Articles and ICO whitepapers written by Williams Alfred Onen

Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia. That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all. No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them. This problem came to a head recently when Facebook formalize...

If you had to slip a couple AAs into your smartphone every morning to check your email, browse Instagram, and text your friends, chances are the mobile revolution would not have been quite so revolutionary. Fortunately the rechargeable lithium-ion battery was invented — a decades-long task for which three men have just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry . The prize this year honors M. Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino, all of whom contributed to the development of what is today the most common form of portable power. Without them (and of course those they worked with, and those who came before) we would be tied to even more wasteful and/or stationary sources of energy. Lead-acid batteries had been in use for nearly a century by the time people really got to thinking about taking things to the next level with lithium, a lightweight metal with desirable electrical properties. But lithium is also highly reactive with air and water, making finding suitable su...

Adriana Herrera first came up with the idea for EpicHint , a training and staffing service for cannabis dispensaries, while she was surfing off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Decompressing after the dissolution of her last startup venture — her second attempt at running her own business — Herrera realized quickly that surfing and #vanlife wasn’t her ultimate calling. The serial entrepreneur had previously founded FashioningChange , a recommendation engine for sustainable shopping, back in 2011. The company was gaining traction and had some initial support, but it ran into the buzzsaw of Amazon’s product development group, which Herrera claims copied their platform to build a competing product. Undeterred, Herrera took some of the tools that FashioningChange had developed and morphed them into a business focused on online marketing to shoppers at the point of sale — helping sites like Cooking.com pitch products to people based on what their browsing history revealed about their intent....

Essential CEO Andy Rubin has been pretty silent over the past year for, well, lots of reasons — both business and otherwise . The company has struggled to sell devices, reportedly shipping only 88,000 handsets in its first year. On a far more serious note, Rubin has been plagued by reports of inappropriate behavior during his time at Google. A bombshell report from The New York Times highlighted sexual misconduct accusations prior to his receiving a $90 million exit package from the company.  The former Google executive last used Twitter to state that the story “contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google.” Now, a year later, he’s back on the platform touting a new device. It could be the next Essential handset, or it could be something else entirely. It’s not the shiny “GEM Colorshift material” on the back that’s caught viewers’ eyes, as much as the “new UI for radically different formfactor.” The closet thing I can thing to compare the long, skinny handset t...

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all. The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and over $100 in consumer spending. Beyond that, the business of user acquisition and advertising generates even more money. And all because we’re spending more time on our phones than we do watching TV . This week, the news was centered on the app stores’ ability to censor, the censorship in apps, and also how the antritrust investigations are forcing companies to open up access more to third parties. Headlines Third-party iOS apps will get to tap into Siri According to Bloomberg and confirmed elsewhere , Apple will allow third-party messaging and phone apps to work better with the Siri digital assistant. That means, if you regularly use WhatsApp to message friends, Siri will lau...

Several months back, we invited HTC cofounder and CEO Cher Wang to appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Sometimes, however, life happens. Two weeks ago, the company announced that Wang would be stepping down from the role, which would immediately be filled by longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitres. Thankfully, the former Orange exec also agreed to appear on stage at this week’s event. Maitres took the stage immediately following a one on one with OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei. The contrast of the two companies couldn’t be more stark. In six short years of existence, OnePlus has managed to buck a number of industry trends with a controlled growth that flies in the face of wider industry smartphone trends. HTC, meanwhile, has been struggling for years. In Q2, the Taiwanese hardware maker posted its fifth consecutive quarterly loss. Last July, it laid off around a quarter of its staff. It’s been a precipitous fall. In 2011, the company comprised around 11 percent of global smartphone sales...