For the last two days during the second-annual Collision Conference, the pavilions at downtown Las Vegas’ World Market Center have played host to a horde of startups, investors, marketers, developers and tech visionaries.
The conference has grown fast. About 7,500 “colliders” came to Las Vegas from 89 countries, a steep increase from last year’s 1,500 attendees.
On day one, organizer Paddy Cosgrave and NASDAQ Vice Chairman Bruce Aust led a ceremony to ring the closing bell for the NASDAQ exchange remotely from Las Vegas — a symbolic testimony to the promise of financial world investment for any of the 1,000 startups in attendance. Collision facilitated 600 one-on-one meetings between investors and startups, according to conference organizer Declan Kelly.
Most attendees came from the United States, Great Britain and Canada. But there were plenty of international visitors. Narrative, a Swedish company, offers a tiny wearable camera that takes photos of your life every 30 seconds and automatically picks the best ones to share and store. Indian robotics startup Vulcantronics showed off video of its automated bartender that mixes cocktails in seconds and pushes data to its smartphone
app. And Polish startup Booke is starting a U.S. experiment with its social reading app to annotate and share notes for paper books on San Francisco Bay Area college campuses this fall.
Here’s a few of the highlights from day two of Collision Conference:
Vegas tech companies on display
“Dronesmithing” startup Skyworks Aerial Systems got its start as a student project at UNLV. They’ve already sold their customizable, programmable QuaRK drone kits to college clients like their alma mater. And now they’re getting ready to offer their QuaRK-e educational drone to high schools.
The QuaRK-e is easy to build and program. “It’s designed to teach you to code,” said Skyworks sales officer James Eguina. “We have engineers creating a curriculum to teach you how to program it.”
Eguina said the QuaRK-e will be offered for around $600, but a Kickstarter launching in June will offer a discount to funders.
Big news from Vegas and beyond
On Wednesday, fast-growing startup Banjo, partially based at the InNEVation Center, announced it scored an additional $100 million in funding and plans to double in size by the end of the year.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh announced Tuesday that the company would be moving forward with plans to implement Holacracy, a non-hierarchical corporate structure, and eliminate managers at Zappos. More than 200 Zappos employees took buyouts, spurred by the impending reorganization.
In the middle of a talk about cutting edge smart home technology and the long curve for the adoption of new technology, August CEO Jason Johnson announced that his company would partner with Comcast to offer the August Smart Lock, a smartphone and television-integrated house lock, to Comcast Xfinity customers.
Crowd-driven advertising and smart displays
Playing a clip of Tom Cruise in the film “Minority Report” to set the mood, CEO Nanxi Liu of Enplug showed off her startup’s interactive displays. Enplug’s open platform lets clients customize a display that their customers can interact with. She called it “public computing,” but it’s more like enabling the public to advertise to themselves.
“People care what people around them are saying more than what a marketing manager can tell them,” Liu said.
She demonstrated examples, like using Centers for Disease Control flu data to push flu shot reminders to public displays, or issuing crime warnings in specific areas. Enplug’s technology is already in use at Las Vegas businesses like Kuma Snow Cream.
Perhaps because she began her talk with an example from a dystopian science fiction film, Liu fielded questions about privacy from potential users and control over social sharing from potential marketers.
A science fiction future
This one seems straight out of the Joaquin Phoenix film “Her.” Your future search engine will know what you want before you know you want it, said author Stefan Weitz, formerly senior director of search at Microsoft. The coming change in search technology means an engine that doesn’t just log and return data, but one that understands the real world and takes action on its own.
Amazon is already working on something similar. Its patent for “pre-delivery” proposes analyzing customer behavior to anticipate and fulfill your needs before you’ve even clicked the “buy” button.
The search of the future will be an unconscious act, not a conscious one: “It will contribute to world knowledge and derive conclusions, not just index,” Weitz said.
An AI companion with the voice of Scarlett Johansson can’t be far behind.