NEW ORLEANS—The president of the Montreal-based information technology company, DistantJob, looks at adult industry and mainstream tech conferences the same way.
“The concept of ‘adult’ and ‘mainstream’ is a ridiculous concept for me,” Sharon Koifman said Tuesday at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Day 1 of the Collision Conference.
“We live in a somewhat prudish world that people care about that. For me the adult conferences are IT conferences.”
Koifman, who founded his growing outsourcing operation in 2011 and counts Mindgeek as one of his top clients, attends a dozen shows a year—10 of which are mainstream. This week marks his first trip to Collision, which is produced by the creators of the annual Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, and billed as “the fastest growing tech conference in North America.”
“We provide programmers and developers for the IT world and this is a great IT conference,” Koifman said. “I came to Web Summit and this seems like a continuation of that. It feels like the same show.”
Koifman, who has a background in engineering but specializes in managing IT, says even though DistantJob is based in Montreal, he has zero employees living there.
“We have 19 internal employees, marketers and recruiters all over the world,” he says. “I practice what I preach and it’s really all about creating a company culture through remote.”
DistantJob’s No. 1 priority is “educating” clients about the benefits of hiring remote, according to Koifman, who took the advice from his head of marketing and wore a bright red suit to the show.
“Most recruitment agencies have a challenge finding candidates,” Koifman continued. “When you cross that border of your region you have a significantly bigger pool of talent to choose from. That is a massive benefit in a world where people are having such a hard time finding IT. So we are always educating people about remote. On blogs, on social media and in person, it’s always talking about why remote is awesome.”
Now in its fifth year, Collision is projecting 25,000 attendees—including more than 3700 CEOs— for the four-day conference unfolding just a few blocks from the historic French Quarter.
Organizers on Tuesday announced plans to move the 2019 show to Enercare Center in Toronto May 20-23 after three straight years in the Big Easy. The first show in Las Vegas in 2015 attracted 5000 attendees.
“New Orleans, Collision’s home for three years, is a very special town, but as Collision grows we needed to find a bigger base with more global connectivity,” said Paddy Cosgrave, CEO and co-founder of Web Summit. “I believe that Canada and Toronto have lived to some extent in the technology shadow of America. But that’s changing and changing fast.
“A new wave of Canadian founders are building companies not just out of Canada but all over the world. At the very moment when some countries around the world seem to be shutting their borders, when intolerance is on the rise, Toronto stands for diversity and inclusion.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Toronto has become “a global tech hub.”
“Tech talent is coming to our country in record numbers and with our skills and innovation plan our government is making it easier for innovators to succeed and for investors to support them,” Trudeau said in the joint announcement.
The adult tech scene was well represented Tuesday as veteran executive Joey Gabra held court at the New Media Services Ltd. booth in the center of the spacious convention hall, making his presence felt during his first visit to Collision.
Founded in Bangkok in 2007 by Martin Eyking with a staff of five, New Media Services now has more than 200 home-based employees that fuel his company’s extensive messaging and web support services.
“We’ve had to go where the wind blows, when there’s a demand,” said Gabra, the solutions director for New Media Services, which is now based in the Philippines with native-speaking staff in countries such as Guatemala, Japan, South Korea and Italy.
He said New Media Services has fielded numerous inquiries from “de-centralized start-up companies and financial service companies” in recent months.
“Right now a lot of regulation and compliance requires them to have customer support or some FAQ type of service, where people have questions and they need somebody to answer them,” Gabra continued.
“And then a lot of the startups—they can’t afford the 10 bucks an hour to have a guy do data entry all day and grinding—so a lot of the times they float towards us. When that started happening we started exploring it further and [Collision] was a good place to start obviously because it’s all here. It just felt like the right place to be based on some of the people that have been coming to us in the last year.”
Among the other adult industry vets spotted making the rounds through the rows of start-up companies and blue-chip tech leaders were Charlyn MacNamara, the vice president of marketing for AdultFriendFinder who is a pioneer in search engine marketing in the adult digital space; Dariusz, general manager of Clips4Sale; Actual Mike Ackerman, owner of Actually Helping and well-known moderator; Avi Slavin from Mistral; and executives from Montreal-based live-cam stalwart, Cam4.
Several other former adult industry players who asked not to be named walked the show floor as they continue to penetrate the mainstream advertising and legal cannabis markets.
Collision brought out big names from more than just the tech industry—the music business also was well represented as notables such as Kareem Burke, co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records; rapper-actor Wyclef Jean; and Jillionaire, who is one third of the EDM trio Major Lazer, all were scheduled to speak about the intersection of music and technology.
Jillionaire, also known as Christopher Leacock, told AVN the cannabis industry is coming on strong.
“The next frontier is going to be cannabis technology,” Jillionaire said. “In other words it’s going to be agriculture because once cannabis is legalized on a federal level the cannabis industry is going to be exponentially greater than the tech industry ever thought it could be.
“And the reason for that is because it is true peer to peer. You have small businesses that are working together. It’s not owned by large companies. And the second part of it is it’s a lower barrier to entry. It’s easier for the average person to conceptualize cannabis than it is to conceptualize the whole idea of technology. So in the same way the porn industry was able to grow year over year, the same became a key technological driver because of accessibility and ease of understanding. Cannabis is going to happen next.”
