A few weeks ago, the Spark Centre team attended Collision From Home — a virtual edition of the massively popular tech conference, Collision. Over the course of three days, the online conference launched multiple channels of programming, workshops, a mingling area and more. Thirty-two thousand attendees from 140 countries attended the conference to listen to over six hundred speakers — from Justin Trudeau, Margaret Atwood and Spotify’s Dawn Ostroff, to Paris Hilton, Google’s Kate Brandt, Wired’s Editor-at-Large Stephen Levy, and more.
Here are just a few of the sessions we most enjoyed:
“I really enjoyed hearing about the growing tech hub in Europe at the Invest Cyprus Workshop and it was interesting to learn about how Europe is currently positioning itself to all the neighbouring countries.” – Aimee Slater, Marketing Specialist, Spark Centre
“Being a part of the startup community, I personally enjoyed the PITCH events the most since I was able to see all the great new ideas as well as how they present the idea. In terms of sessions, I enjoyed Fundraising During a Global Pandemic as it showed how investors are still putting their funds into ideas and teams they truly believe in.” – Osaffat Khan, Venture 13 and Northumberland CFC
“I found Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal’s discussion about Twitter’s use of machine learning to control misinformation, especially during COVID and the BLM Movement, quite interesting in Empowering Public Conversation. I also was inspired by Huda and Mona Kattan from Huda Beauty in Building a Community-First Empire. My favourite quote was from Huda Kattan herself: “The craziest ideas are the right ideas.” – Melissa Nowakowski, Communications Specialist, Spark Centre
“The conversation between LinkedIn CMO Melissa Selcher and co:collective Co-Founder Neil Parker on How Brands Connect in a Virtual World really stood out to me. It helped me to see the shift to remote work and digitization as an opportunity for innovation rather than an inconvenience.” – Hannah McInall, Venture 13 and Northumberland CFC
“My favourite event was the talk Can designers save the world?. The idea that designers can expedite positive change in the wold, (Especially considering numerous challenges we’ll be facing in our generation) was very interesting. I thought Karen Hofmann in particular had a lot of interesting things to say about the designer/artists role facing these challenges. Hopefully more people step up, particularly to the climate change crisis!” – Jasper Davis, Design Specialist, Spark Centre
