Richard Branson completed his latest adventure with a brief flight to the edge of space aboard his Virgin Galactic space plane, marking not only Branson's first trip to space, but the first time Virgin has flown a full crew cabin as well as the first ever Virgin flight to space.

The Verge notes that TED has struck a deal to offer exclusive drop-in audio chats to Clubhouse, letting TED sell ads and sponsorships for its conversations. It's not clear if the chats will be available as podcasts or other on-demand recordings, but the first series, Thank Your Ass Off, debuts on July 12th at 11am Eastern.

Apple is working on spatial audio technology for its AR headset, often dubbed Apple Glass, which rolled out the atmospheric three-dimensional audio technology last month for Apple Music subscribers last month. The company is now experimenting with how it could work in a mixed reality environment, including how it would present sound and other sensory delights.

A cloud native approach enables developers to build scalable IT applications across a mixture of on-premises infrastructure and cloud environments, allowing developers to decouple their applications from their infrastructure, mix and match IT resources, and deliver new services to market in a much shorter timeframe. As such, they are far removed from the monolithic mainframe environments that all banks and financial institutions traditionally used.

Google Cloud has released its Tau VM platform, based on AMD’s 3rd Generation EPYC processor, claiming best absolute performance and price-performance leadership related to general-purpose VMs in the public cloud. The Tau platform can support up to 60 vCPUs per VM with up to 32GB RAM per vCPU and up to32Gbps networking support.

Square is going to make a hardware wallet for bitcoin, CEO Jack Dorsey had said in June that the company was considering making one, and now Square has made the decision to move forward. The company's hardware lead said that the hardware wallet will make bitcoin custody more mainstream.

Microsoft has unveiled the Windows 11 operating system, which will be available as a free download for existing Windows users during the 2021 holiday season. However, new clues suggest that the update may arrive earlier than expected, with a date of Oct. 20 in the taskbar in press images.

A Las Vegas startup Halo and T-Mobile are teaming up to launch a driverless electric car service in Las Vegas powered on 5G to launch later this year. The service will work by connecting users to Halo’s pilot fleet of vehicles via an app, with nine cameras, radars and ultrasonics as backup.

The Flemish Scrollers is a tool that detects politicians who are distracted from their phones and tablets during a debate or a discussion over a proposed law. The tool also posts results on Twitter and tags politicians that it finds them distracted due to phones and other gadgets.

Heifer International and IBM announced that the blockchain-basedIBM Food Trust is being used by smallholder coffee and cocoa farmers in Honduras to enable them to earn more money. A study conducted by Heifer claims that small-scale coffee farmers operate at an average of 46-59% loss.

South Korea is becoming a hotbed of big technology startups, with new businesses emerging in areas such as biotechnology, ride-hailing and online payments, making it the third-largest hub for such companies in the Asia-Pacific region after the far more populous China and India. The rise of stand-alone businesses is notable in an economy long dominated by sprawling family-owned conglomerates.

In South Korea, almost every household owns smartphones or mobile phones, creating large potential online markets, and consumers have proved open to change. E-commerce’s share of total retail in the nation is the highest in the world, and more than 60% of people bank online, higher than in some other Asian markets.

A coalition of state attorneys general launched a new antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search giant of abusing its control of the Android app store, challenging Google’s policy forcing Google Play app developers to pay a 30 percent commission fee on sales made through the app. The lawsuit comes amid mounting federal pressure on Google, which is already facing three federal antitrust lawsuits.