Technology

Augmented reality is seen as a boon for the workplace of the future because it would allow co-workers to collaborate remotely using digital avatars and 3D virtual objects that can be viewed and manipulated in real-time during a meeting.

That vision is behind the announcement Thursday by Spatial and Nreal, who are teaming up to offer AR collaboration software and hardware.

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TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI brings together a wide group of the ecosystemleading minds on March 3 at UC Berkeley. Over 1,000+ attendees are expected from all facets of the robotics and artificial intelligence space — investors, students, engineers, C-levels, technologists and researchers. We&ve compiled a small list of highlights of attendees& companies and job titles attending this yearevent:

ATTENDEE HIGHLIGHTS

• ABB Technology Ventures, Vice President
• Amazon, Head, re:MARS Product Marketing
• Amazon Web Services, Principal Business Development Manager
• Autodesk, Director, Robotics
• AWS, Principal Technologist
• BMW, R-D Engineer
• Bosch Venture Capital, Investment Principal
• Capital One, President of Critical Stack
• Ceres Robotics Inc., CEO
• Deloitte, Managing Director
• Facebook AI Research, Research Lead
• Ford X, Strategy - Operations
• Goldman Sachs, Technology Investor
• Google, Vice President
• Google X, Director, Robotics
• Greylock, EIR
• Hasbro, Principal Engineer
• Honda R-D Americas Inc., Data Engineer
• HSBC, Global Relationship Manager
• Huawei Technologies, Principal System Architect of Corporate Technology Strategy
• Hyundai CRADLE, Industrial Design
• Intel, Hardware Engineer
• Intuit, Inc., Software Engineer
• iRobot, CTO
• John Deere, Director, Precision Ag Marketing and Innovation
• Kaiser Permanente, Director
• Kawasaki Heavy Industries (USA), Inc., Technical Director
• LG Electronics, Head of Engineering
• LockHeed Martin, Engineering Manager
• MoodyAnalytics, Managing Director
• Morgan Stanley, Executive Director
• NASA, Senior Systems Architect
• Nestle, Innovation Manager
• NVIDIA, Senior Systems Software Engineer
• Qualcomm Ventures, Investment Director
• Samsung, Director, Open Innovations - Tech Partnership
• Samsung Ventures, Managing Director
• Shasta Ventures, Investor
• Softbank Ventures Asia, Investor
• Surgical Theater, SVP Engineering
• Takenaka Corporation, Senior Manager, Technology Planning
• Techstars, Managing Director
• Tesla, Sr. Machine Learning Engineer
• Toyota Research Institute, Manager, Prototyping - Robotics Operations
• Uber, Engineering Manager
• UPS, Director of Research and Development

STUDENTS - RESEARCHERS FROM:

• Columbia University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Harvard University
• Northwestern University
• Santa Clara University
• Stanford University
• Texas A-M University
• UC Berkeley
• UC Davis
• UCLA
• USC
• Yale University

Did you know that TechCrunch provides a white-glove networking app at all our events called CrunchMatch? You can connect and match with people who meet your specific requirements, message them and connect right at the conference. How cool is that!?

Want to get in on networking with this caliber of people? Book your $345 General Admission ticket today and save $50 before prices go up at the door. But no one likes going to events alone. Why not bring the whole team? Groups of four or more save 15% on tickets when you book here.

One of the big weaknesses of many enterprise collaboration solutions is that they aren&t always good at letting employees work with external parties. Thata problem one of the latest entrants to the space tries to solve.

Collaboration without walls

Like many such solutions, Challo is a feature-rich, cloud-based enterprise-class collaboration tool.Whatinteresting is that it has been built to deliver all the collaboration tools you&d expect, along with externally facing tools and enterprise-class security.

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By now you&ve probably heard about the disappearing-profile bug in this monthWin10 1903 and 1909 cumulative update. The buggy patch went out on Tuesday, Feb. 11. Reports started rolling in shortly afterward about desktops that were wiped clean, wallpaper replaced, even files that disappeared. I wrote about it on Thursday morning:

Many people are in a tizzy — their desktop icons are gone, they can&t log onto their usual Admin account, and their files most definitely aren&t where they left them.

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DSP Concepts — a startup whose Audio Weaver software is used by companies as varied as Tesla, Porsche, GoPro and Braun Audio — is announcing that it has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding.

The startup goal, as explained to me by CEO Chin Beckmann and CTO Paul Beckmann (yep, they&re a husband-and-wife founding team), is to create the standard framework that companies use to develop their audio processing software.

To that end, Chin told me they were &picky about who we wanted on the B round, we wanted it to represent the support and endorsement of the industry.&

So the round was led by Taiwania Capital, but it also includes investments from the strategic arms of DSP Concepts& industry partners — BMW i Ventures (which led the Series A), the Sony Innovation Growth Fund by Innovation Growth Ventures, MediaTek Ventures, Porsche Ventures and the ARM IoT Fund.

Paul said Audio Weaver started out as the &secret weapon& of the Beckmanns& consulting business, which he could use to &whip out& the results of an audio engineering project. At a certain point, consulting customers started asking him, &Hey, how about you teach me how to use that?,& so they decided to launch a startup focused on the Audio Weaver platform.

Paul described the software as a &graphical block diagram editor.& Basically, it provides a way for audio engineers to combine and customize different software modules for audio processing.

&Audio is still in the Stone Ages compared to other industries,& he said. &Suppose you&re building a product with a touchscreen — are you going write the graphics from scratch or use a framework like Qt?&

Similarly, he suggested that while many audio engineers are still &down in the weeds writing code,& they can take advantage of Audio Weavergraphical interface to piece everything together, as well as the company&hundreds of different modules — pre-written, pre-tested, pre-optimized functions to build up your system.&

For example, Paul said that by using the Audio Weaver platform, DSP Concepts engineers could test out &hundreds of ideas& for algorithms for reducing wind noise in the footage captured by GoPro cameras, then ultimately &hand the algorithms over to GoPro,& whose team could them plug the algorithms into their software and modify it themselves.

The Beckmanns said the company also works closely with chip manufacturers to ensure that audio software will work properly on any device powered by a given chipset.

Other modules include TalkTo, which is designed to give voice assistants like Alexa &super-hearing,& so that they can still isolate voice commands and cancel out all the other noise in loud environments, even rock concerts. (You can watch a TalkTo demo in the video below.)

DSP Concepts has now raised more than $25 million in total funding.