Voices: Collision, New Orleans' hot tech show
NEW ORLEANS — An influential tech gathering during the spring in a city known for its music, food and bohemian culture.
Austin's South by Southwest? No.
Meet the new contender in tech's trade show wars.
If the Consumer Electronics Show is considered the Super Bowl of tech shows and SXSW is Spring Break for Geeks, consider Collision not just the anti-CES but a stealth threat to SXSW's long-term dominance.
And it just might eventually supplant SXSW.
First, though, a quick explanation of the tech trade-show season, a geeked-up version of the red carpet awards gauntlet in Hollywood leading to the Academy Awards. It's a four-month slog, stretching from Las Vegas and Barcelona to Austin and San Francisco, that helps define the contenders and pretenders in tech.
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
The circuit starts at CES, the bloated consumer-electronics bacchanal in Las Vegas that kicks off the tech show season in January with interminable lines and more than 100,000 people. Next stop, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a showcase for new smartphones and the latest in virtual reality in February. SXSW follows in Austin in mid-March — around the same time Apple, Facebook and Google begin to stage events in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"There are events all the time," says Adam Miller, CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, developer of HR technology. "Collision is a nice mix of the big and small shows."
Somewhere into this slog of shows falls Collision, the concoction of Irish tech entrepreneur and futurist Paddy Cosgrave. "Paddy is building the next SXSW," says Oisin Hanrahan, CEO of Handy, a service that lets consumers book household service specialists. "He's created a vibe" with a melting pot of entrepreneurs, innovators and disruptors sharing ideas and life experiences, Hanrahan says.
In just its third year, Collision — the U.S. edition of the popular Web Summit conference in Europe — is expected to attract 11,000 people and 650 start-ups over three days in the Big Easy this week; the event gets underway on Tuesday. No doubt a large slice of them were motivated to attend because the tech extravaganza overlaps with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, commonly known as Jazz Fest. The first two Collisions were held in Las Vegas.
Collision tech summit is moving to New Orleans
It's not as big as CES or as well-known as SXSW, but Collision is a hybrid of sorts that straddles the inclusiveness of a CES with the exclusivity of Code Conference, where attendees pay a premium to hobnob with high-profile speakers. At Collision, it's a tale of two conferences: an open forum for developers, investors and reporters to mingle in an open-air setting during the day, and after-hours VIP events for a select few.
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
Collision's contrarian culture is a refreshing, outside-the-box treat for jaded showgoers. "I try not to go to trade shows," says Douglas Merrill, CEO of ZestFinance and former chief information officer at Google. "I prefer broad shows with sweeping themes that force you to think. (Collision) is delightfully pretty random."
Quirk is king at Collision, whose roots stretch to Web Summit, where Bono famously led a pub crawl in Dublin years ago. This year's edition features an eclectic mix of guests that includes uber investor Chris Sacca, former professional wrestler Mick Foley, pro football legend Brett Favre and Nico Sell, co-founder of Wickr, which makes an instant-messenger application. Nasdaq senior vice president Bob McCooey is ringing the closing bell from the show on Wednesday.
Collision is the anti-CES. Thank goodness for that
"We're seeing a great deal of tech innovation not just in the enterprise, but also in small businesses and mom-and-pop shops in areas such as HR, finance and data analytics," says Lisa Falzone, CEO of Revel Systems, makers of a point-of-sales app for iPads.
Then again, tech folks like to have a good time. Web Summit proved that in Dublin, and Collision might prove the trick again in New Orleans.
“We’ve had such a great experience speaking at and being a part of Web Summit, anything we can do to to help build an event and community like that here in the U.S., we will do," About.com CEO Neil Vogel says.
Leave it to tech novice Foley, who specialized in barbed-wire cage matches while in the WWE and is speaking for the first time at a technology show, to sum up his expectations for Collision.
"My name isn't often associated with technology," says Foley, the father of an autistic child who is representing non-profit Kulture City, which aids families touched by autism. "As technologically disadvantaged as I am, I've been able to make a difference without tech at hand. I hope to show that (at Collision)."
Swartz is USA TODAY's San Francisco bureau chief @jswartz