The Collision Conference has recently gained traction as the new SXSW. Clearly this garnered our interest. 🙂 The Wall Street Journal wrote this conference is where “the giants of the web assemble”; and they weren’t kidding! There were over 300 speakers and moderators, 630 startup companies in exhibit, and over 400 investors from leading funds in attendance.

From the creators of Web Summit, Collision – held in New Orleans – is just two years old and last year recorded over 7,500 attendees from 50 plus countries. At the close of the 3rd year’s 2016 conference attendees totaled more than 11,000 from 106 countries. Impressive to say the least!

There is something for everyone at Collision. This three-day conference is just about as multifaceted as is diverse the attendee list; with Startup Exhibits, Mentors Sessions, Office Hours – where investors meet with startups, and Speakers and Panels on a variety of topics every 20 minutes, it is a dizzying and exciting experience that Bloomberg rightly says is “buzzing” and “electric”.

Upon entering the convention floor on Tuesday morning, our team spent the better part of an hour wandering like kids in a candy store- shaking hands, trying on various VR headsets, playing with impressive little gadgets that came straight from 3D printers.

The first talk that I attended set an excellent tone for the rest of the conference. The fourth industrial revolution: robot ethics, by Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics. She brought up some of the more important questions regarding robotics technology and how it fits into our human lives. What robots are bad for us? What robots are good for us? Yes, we have all of this amazing new tech, but now how are we going to use it to improve the human condition?

The remainder of the conference would continue along these same lines: meeting innumerable entrepreneurs while being fully immersed in a culture of enthusiasm for making our world more livable for all its inhabitants; talk after talk about design, marketing, machine learning, IoT, giant data, and how these pieces fit together; eat lots of good food; repeat.

Each conference day concluded with a “Night Summit” – a gathering of attendees to mingle, network, sample New Orleans world-famous food and drink, and just wind down from the day’s  activities in preparation for tomorrow’s.

I cannot begin to convey just how impressive was the pool of assembled talent, wealth of information from 14 tech tracks with take-a-ways for everyone, and how energizing and inspiring were the speakers —  all which caused so many of there to yell “Yeah! Let do this again!” Because Collision *IS* Where The Tech World Meets!