Technology

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who defied prejudice in the &50s and &60s to help NASA send the first men to the moon, has died at the age of 101. Only recently famous after the film &Hidden Figures& was made about her and her colleagues, she maintained until the end that she was &only doing her job.&

For those who don&t know Johnsonstory, it is probably best told by reading the book (by Margot Lee Shetterly) or watching the movie — which although it takes some license with the events and persons depicted, is a fascinating and revealing triple portrait of its three protagonists. NASA has also collected numerous historical accounts and anecdotes at a special memorial page.

Johnson and her colleagues struggled unceasingly against racism and sexism, being three women of color attempting to enter an industry which was, and even half a century later remains, dominated by white men. Although Johnson always said her colleagues at NASA were kind and professional, there were nevertheless systematic and deep-seated biases against her at every step of her journey.

After the filmrelease and acclaim, she treated her sudden fame with bemusement, happy to be recognized but insistent that she had only been doing her job. Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015 was certainly a welcome perk.

But Johnson may have been wary of an over-concentration of credit. She more than anyone would have been aware of the others in similar positions who, while they may not have been quite as instrumental or prominent in the moment — John Glenn famously asked before a flight that a mechanical computercalculations be checked by &the girl,& meaning Johnson — were nonetheless indispensable and quite as hidden.

These women, like Johnsoncolleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, not only challenged the racist and sexist zeitgeist of the time, but very simply helped America achieve what is perhaps its most historically remarkable achievement — the Apollo program — but also to aid in the invention and definition of multiple industries.

Johnson was a remarkable mind and person whose achievements went for too long unnoticed. Had she not been brought into the attention of popular culture, her achievements would likely never have been known outside a few colleagues and historians — and we would all be the poorer for it. Who, and where, are todayhidden figures, and would we recognize them if we saw them?

Sony announces a camera-centric phone, Microsoft offers more details about the next Xbox and a liquid biopsy startup raises $165 million. Hereyour Daily Crunch for February 24, 2020.

1. Sony announces its first 5G flagship, the triple lens Xperia 1 II

Sony has announced its first 5G smartphone: The Xperia 1 II — for the curious or confused, itpronounced &Xperia One, Mark Two.&

As ever with Sony — a major B2B supplier of image sensors to other smartphone makers — it has made the camera a huge focus. The Xperia 1 II packs three lenses that offer a selection of focal lengths (16mm, 24mm and 70mm) for capturing different types of photos, from super wide angle to portraits.

2. Microsoft offers a closer look at the next Xbox

The headline feature of the upcoming Xbox Series X is, naturally, a new processor. Built on top of AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, Xbox says the chip is able to deliver four times the processing power of the Xbox One.

3. Karius raises $165M for its liquid biopsy technology identifying diseases with a blood draw

Liquid biopsy technology has been widely embraced in cancer treatments as a way to identify which therapies may work best for patients, based on the presence of trace amounts in a patientbloodstream of genetic material shed by cancer cells. Karius applies the same principles to the detection of pathogens in the blood.

4. EuropeTarget Global raises new €120M early-stage fund

Dubbed &Early Stage Fund II,& the new vehicle will see the firm continue to back early-stage tech companies across Europe and Israel, leading and co-leading seed and Series A rounds.

5. Sensors are the next big thing in space, not starships

&In 2020 I really, really look forward to and hope to see different, new creative types of sensors that are utilizing low Earth orbit for benefits back on Earth,& Bessemer VP Tess Hatch told us in a recent interview. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. The Plaid ‘mafia& begins with John Whitfield joining student loan fintech startup Summer

So far this year, one of the most eye-popping startup exits has been Visa$5.3 billion acquisition of fintech data services platform Plaid. Could this be the start of a brand new mafia born out of fintech, à la PayPal?

7. This weekTechCrunch podcasts

The latest full episode of Equity has a counter-intuitive message — equity isn&t always the answer for companies looking to fundraise. Meanwhile, the shorter Monday segment looks at declining stocks around the world. And on Original Content, we review the new Netflix series &Locke - Key.&

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Deviceplane, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 class, is developing an open-source toolset to manage, monitor and update Linux devices running at the edge.

&We solve the hard infrastructure problems that all these companies face, including network conductivity, SSH access, orchestrating and deployment of remote updates, hosting, application monitoring and access and security controls. It100% open source, available under an Apache License. You can either host it yourself or you can run on the hosted version,& company founder and CEO Josh Curl told TechCrunch.

He could see this working with a variety of hardware, including robotics, consumer appliances, drones, autonomous vehicles and medical devices.

Curl, who has a background in software engineering, was drawn to this problem and found that most companies were going with home-grown solutions. He said once he studied the issue, he found that the set of infrastructure resources required to manage, monitor and update these devices didn&t change that much across industries.

The over-the-air updates are a big part of keeping these devices secure, a major concern with edge devices. &Security is challenging, and one of the core tenets of security is just the ability to update things. So if you as a company are hesitant to update because you&re afraid that things are going to break, or you don&t have a proper infrastructure to do those upgrades, that makes you more hesitant to do upgrades, and it slows down development velocity,& Curl said.

Customers can connect to the Deviceplane API via Wi-Fi, cellular or ethernet. If you&re worried about someone tapping into that, Curl says the software assigns the device a unique identity that is difficult to spoof.

&Devices are assigned an identity in Deviceplane and this identity is what authorizes it to make API calls to Deviceplane. The access key for this identity is stored only on the device, which makes it impossible for someone else to spoof this device without physical access to it.

&Even if someone were able to spoof this identity, they would not be able to deploy malicious code to the spoofed device. Devices never have access to control what software they&re running — this is something that can be done only by the developer pushing out updates to devices,& Curl explained.

The company intends to offer both the hosted version and installed versions of the software as open source, something that he considers key. He hopes to make money supporting companies with more complex installations, but he believes that by offering the software as open source, it will drive developer interest and help build a community around the project.

As for joining YC, Curl said he has friends that had been through the program in the past, and had recommended he join as well. Curl sees being part of the cohort as a way to build his business. &We were excited to be tapping into the YC network — and then being able to tap into that network in the future. I think that YC has funded many companies in the past that can be Deviceplane customers, and that can accelerate going forward.&

Curl wasn&t ready to share download numbers just yet, but itstill an early-stage startup looking to build the company. Itusing an open-source model to drive interest, while helping solve a sticky problem.

Commercial aviation isn&t typically the place to look if you&re after carbon-light initiatives. Jet fuel isn&t generally very green, and airplanes burn a lot of it when traversing the skies. But supersonic flight startup Boom wants to change the perception of commercial aviation as an emissions-costly prospect, starting with their testing development program for the XB-1 supersonic demonstration aircraft that will eventually lead to the development of its Overture passenger aircraft.

Boom claims this will make it the first commercial flight OEM to achieve this level of sustainability, especially from the very beginning of its aircraft flight testing and certification process. And while XB-1 and eventually Overture aren&t electric or hybrid aircraft, the way the company hopes to achieve this milestone is through a combination of using sustainable jet fuel and carbon offsets (effectively the process of buying carbon &credits& by funding projects that net reduce greenhouse gases) to reduce its overall carbon footprints to zero.

The fuel that Boom is using comes from partner Prometheus Fuel, which is a company that uses electricity from renewable power sources, like solar and wind, to turn CO2 scrubbed from the air into jet fuel. Already, Boom has tested this fuel in use during some of its initial ground tests, and its findings indicate that it should be able to use it effectively through both the remainder of ground testing, as well as into its flight program.

While there is some debate about the overall validity and efficacy of carbon offsets, provided that money from these programs is funneled into the proper initiatives, they do seem to result in more ecological good than not. And any attempt to offset the economic impact of a flight program like Boom&s, especially if itcarried through to flying production aircraft, should be better for the environment than had no attempt been made whatsoever. Which, by the way, is the case for most new aircraft development programs.

Already, Boom is in the process of building the XB-1, which it will then flight test in partnership with Flight Research during a program in the Mojave Desert at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The goal is to begin testing this summer, and eventually use the information gathered from the XB-1 program (which will be able to hold a pilot but no passengers) to build out the final Overture aircraft that will offer commercial passenger supersonic flight services. Boom has secured agreements with a number of airlines for pre-orders for Overture, including JAL and Virgin.

FacebookCreator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as well as publish, schedule and make adjustments to posts, respond to fan messages and more.

Facebook Director of Entertainment for Northern Europe Anna Higgs took the stage at last weekVidCon London, along with creator Ladbaby, who has more than 4 million Facebook followers, to share the news of the new applaunch.

There are a few key areas where the app can be of use to creators and publishers, starting with its metrics and insights section. Here, users can analyze both Page and post-level insights, retention and distribution metrics in order to adjust their strategies accordingly. For example, they&ll find content performance metrics like &1-minute views,& &3-second views& and &avg. minutes viewed,& plus engagement metrics like comments and shares, and follower counts, earnings and more.

The app also serves as a mobile companion for viewing both published and scheduled posts, allowing creators to make quick adjustments like editing the video titles or descriptions. And they can use the app for deleting or expiring posts, rescheduling posts or publishing drafts.

From the inbox section, users can respond to incoming messages and comments while on the go.

Creators can toggle between their different accounts during the same session, instead of having to log out and back in as a different user. This could be helpful for those who have a large social media presence, as well as those whose business involves supporting multiple creator pages.

The Creator Studio app will also send out immediate notifications for key milestones and other important events.

This isn&t the first time Facebook has offered a dedicated app for its creator community. The company in 2017 debuted a Creator app that had also offered a unified inbox and analytics, among other things. But that app was shut down early last year, and creators were pointed toward the Pages Manager app or desktop version of Creator Studio instead. Before that, Facebook had offered a Mentions app that was only available for verified public figures and Pages.

The new Creator Studio app isn&t a direct replacement for the shuttered Creator app, as it sports a similar, though not identical feature set and a new user interface. It also notably lacks Instagram integration and the ability to upload and post new content — the latter which is contributing to poor user reviews, following the applaunch. Many complain theretoo much overlap with the Pages Monitor app, as well. But the missing features are something Facebook will likely address in the future, as it rolls out more functionality to the app.

Itworth noting that Facebookdesktop hub and app sport a name similar to YouTubeservice for creators — YouTube Studio, rebranded from YouTube Creator Studio in 2017. By including both &studio& and &creator& in the new appname, it will perform better in App Store search results — including those that appear when someone searches for the YouTube Studio app for creators. That reflects the competitive nature between the two companies, both hungry to woo video creator talent.

Facebooknew app is a free download on iOS and Android.

With TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 a little over a week away, you likely thought we were finished with our big announcements. Understandably. We have top executives from Amazon and Toyota Research, and some of the hottest startups and biggest VCs. But therestill some excitement left to announce.

On March 3, Disney will be returning to the event to discuss some of the breakthroughs the entertainment giant has been making around robotics for its theme parks. We&ll be joined by Disney Imagineers Dawson Dill, Selina Herman and Joe Mohos.

The trio have been working on using advancements in technology to enhance rides at the park, blending physical trackless vehicles with other physical and virtual tools to transport riders both figuratively and literally. The team will discuss their latest breakthroughs in the space and the applications such technologies will have in entertainment and beyond.

Tickets are now available for $345 right here. Take advantage of this discounted pricing now, as prices will go up soon! Students, book a super-discounted $50 ticket right now and get in on the action.

Join the TechCrunch team and 1,000+ of todayleading minds in robotics and artificial intelligence for this single-day conference. The event will feature great panels and fireside chats, breakout sessions and plenty of networking opportunities. There also will be an expo hall packed full of startups looking for their big break, and awesome hands-on demos for you to interact with.