Collision Conference - What fun I had!

I was fortunate to attend the Collision Conference which wrapped up today here in Toronto at the Enercare Centre. This conference had so much to offer – World Class Speakers, Celebrities (Timbaland, Seth Rogen), Global Startups (Portugal, Taiwan, US), Professional Development, Mentoring and Fun events.

I was blown away by the amount of attendees! Over 25,000! When I arrived on Tuesday morning the line to register was at least 1,000 people snaking all over the lobby to get registered. Walking into the trade show floor, there was an energy and excitement that is not often felt at trade shows. The stages were the talks took place were beautiful!

What was great was that 45.7% were female attendees this year. There was a Women in Tech Lounge sponsored by BMO. Here, women could network and be mentored. They also had a Women in Tech networking night – unfortunately too full for me to attend.

Inside, there were many stages with talks going on and then the booths! Wow.. there were many!

I attended so many talks my head was spinning. Great platform for networking, connecting, finding investors, talent, knowledge and serendipitous collisions!

Alex Chung, CEO and Founder of Giphy talked about the exponential growth they have had. In Alex’s words “Unless your communication is entertaining, it’s useless, people won’t pay attention” Here is a video snippet of that talk

Another great session were the speakers from NPR, GlamourMag Ireland and Viacom. This discussion was around sharing your brand across multiple platforms. The key message was to meet consumers where they spent their time be that on traditional or digital channels.

Divided into Alpha and Beta tech companies all vying for attention from the attendees, eager to try out their pitch on you.  I don’t have all the information about them, here’s a list of who was there https://collisionconf.com/featured-startups

There was also many different talks taking place on various stages, the bright minds, the presentations and the messages were amazing. Our future truly is bright!

A fun adventure was meditating with HOAME meditation studio right in the middle of the trade show floor – and during a false fire alarm! So cool!

I picked up some great swag (wireless charging pad – thank you to Pinellas County) Pop Socket – Invest Canada) shopping bag – we work, phone light from Dell, Charging cables from O’Reilly and so much more!!

A small sample of the booths I visited:

Raven – Effortless scanning to the cloud

Quartermaster – all the tasks for managing your house

Zing with us – forget part-time work, switch to your-time work.

Panic Lobster -a platform that help people develop public speaking and other business skills

SendGrid – email newsletters with confidence

O’Reilly – online learning

Journey – meditation is better together

Fotaflo – turn every guest into an advocate great for tourism and adventure companies

How2fund – cool fundraising platform for schools and non profits

Lingo for me – first online school providing unlimited one on one

LooksGoodAI – good looking slides in 1 click

UnSkool – P2P Educational marketplace

Many companies were also looking to hire – companies such as Flipp, Airbnb and Hopper had booths to recruit.

There were some great booths representing Canada and it’s bright star companies including Calgary, Edmonton, MaRs, York Region, InvestCanada Pavilion

Overall an awesome show of some of the brightest minds in our world!