Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Collision Conference Day One Roundup: Weed, hackers and robots

Collision Conference

Courtesy Collision Conference

More than 1,000 startups are exhibiting at this year’s Collision Conference. The two-day event kicked off Tuesday at the World Market Center in downtown Las Vegas.

Standing at the Owlintel booth among the rows of startups on the first day of the second-annual Collision Conference, founder Donavon Urfalian looked over longingly toward the Pitch Stage.

“It's hard to look over there and see where I want to be,” Urfalian said, watching as investors and executives judged competing startups.

Just being on the floor at Collision meant he'd already come a long way. Urfalian's Owlintel made over $11,000 on its Kickstarter campaign, and Urfalian took out another $50,000 in debt to take on a partner to handle web development. But that puts him a long way from those on the Pitch Stage, like Y Combinator-backed Unbabel, which raised $1.5 million last July.

Owlintel is just one of more than 1,000 startups exhibiting at Collision Tuesday and Wednesday, along with a constant slate of speakers from every level of the tech industry.

Here's a roundup of some of the best bits from Collision's Day One:

Small weed, big money

In conversation with Guardian US business editor Dominic Rushe, Brendan Kennedy of Privateer Holdings talked up marijuana, medical and otherwise, as the coming growth industry in the global retail market. Privateer calls itself “the world's first private equity firm investing exclusively in legal cannabis.”

Rushe repeatedly compared the battle over cannabis prohibition to the fight over legalizing gay marriage when it comes to the wide variety of states' approaches.

Kennedy was more circumspect. “Each state is experimenting with regulation in their own way,” Kennedy said, calling cannabis legalization “an experiment in democracy.”

But it's not the product that interests Kennedy so much as the brand. “The right brands can fuel change. They can help create legitimacy,” Kennedy said.

The right brand for Privateer is Marley Natural, a line of cannabis products that licenses musician Bob Marley's name, from “heirloom cannabis strains” to cannabis-based skin care products. Kennedy said Privateer is also working with Jamaican regulators to legalize medical cannabis in that country.

Tony Hsieh's plans to restructure Zappos

In a chat with conference creator Paddy Cosgrave, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh mentioned his plans to reorganize the company. Holacracy, a system of nonhierarchical corporate governance, would be the main tool in the new iteration of Zappos, Hsieh said.

Those changes are already happening: More than 200 Zappos employees took buyouts as the company moved to eliminate “people manager” positions over the past few months.

Hsieh also touted the success of his Downtown Project and its investments in local businesses downtown. Conference organizers are channeling attendees downtown for post-conference networking at local bars like Commonwealth and the Gold Spike.

A more automated, networked future

Human-looking robots are a dead-end, Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics told the crowd at the Center Stage. They're clumsy, inefficient and require enormous resources. More successful robots are functional, like the Fetch warehouse robot, based on Willow Robotics' PR2, but at only a tenth of the PR2's $400,000 price tag.

And robots are increasingly networked, collaborative and communicative, teaming up and coordinating with other bots to complete tasks.

Breakneck innovation leaves security holes

This could be a problem, according to so-called “celebrity hacker” Samy Kamkar. In 2006, a 19-year-old Kamkar found himself arrested by a horde of federal and local agencies for hacking and crashing MySpace. Banned for life from using a computer, Kamkar bargained the sentence down to three years.

Now he hacks for good. He intended his freely available open source hack for drones, SkyJack, to reveal the security flaws inherent in wireless-enabled drones. SkyJack takes over one drone and uses it to hack and control other nearby drones along with their surveillance equipment.

“We're forgetting about security and the risks of releasing so quickly,” Kamkar said. As new technology develops at an ever-faster rate, so do security holes. And just like the best technology innovations are cross-platform, so are the best security exploits.

Kamkar ran through a dizzying and terrifying array of recent “inverse hacking” techniques: using a laser beam projected on a laptop lid to detect the sound of keystrokes and record what's being typed; using a smartphone to record the sound made by a laptop's drive and decipher what it's doing.

What's the solution? “No security through obscurity,” Kamkar said.

Real security “means encryption that's been publicly scrutinized,” he said. “If I see a company that says (they're) secure but won't tell you how, I know they'll be hacked in a few years.”

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