Smart Break creates a snowball in 28°C weather.

Steve Ferrante said it best, "success is like a snowball. It takes momentum to build and the more you move it in the right direction the greater it gets". After spending several days in New Orleans attending Collision Conference, Raisoft Oy's product Smart Break was able to start gaining momentum in the United States. With various development meetings and summits, Smart Break had gained valuable knowledge while having multiple opportunities to network. Collision had over 22,000 attendees, including 3,750 CEOs and 5,600 companies from over 120 countries. They were a small fish in a big pond, but that didn't hold them back from making a splash. 

Although they say "what happens in New Orleans, stays in New Orleans", we were able to get some information out of Smart Break's International Account Manager, Lawrence Smith, With plenty to do and see in New Orleans, Mr. Smith let us know what his favorite part of the trip was, "my favorite part of Collision was a toss up between the sheer amount of diversity that came from all the different international companies,along with the events formed outside the conference such as the Pub Summit and Night Summit. The Pub Summit was more intimate in terms of networking and being able to meet new people than the Night Summit, however it was still an excellent networking event. Collision chose unique venues to listen to music, that created good environments to relax with fellow attendees and exhibitors”.

This event included some of the newest AI, robotics, gaming, IOT, and cyber security developments. Lawrence discussed some of his favorite inventions he saw while in New Orleans. “There were many different inventions being displayed there and some of the most interesting to me were one of the robots. It was the shape of a ball and had voice activation. To be honest, it acted more like a pet than a robot. It followed an individual who activated its system. The next one that was really cool was the new computers called BAK. These were rugged 2-in-1 laptops that were displayed by dropping them with some force proving the durability. The last one was the Yellow Jacket stun gun case. Walking around the event I would hear the buzzing noise and I finally realized it was a phone case. Watching people test this was frightening but impressive. These were some of the coolest things I saw at the event”.

Being that it was such a huge event, Lawrence did not attend the event alone, Johan Boholm, Raisoft’s Information Director, was in attendance as well. During the event there was an array of speaker, all having different backgrounds. Al Gore, Sophia Bush, Anjali Sud, and John Flynn were just a few of the hundreds of speakers there. Johan was able to give us some feedback on one of his favorite speakers from the event. “I especially liked Monica Adractas (Global Director, Workplace by Facebook). The subject of her talk was "Leading in Tomorrow: People and Pixels". She pointed out that Gen Z (the always on generation) is accustomed to emojis, hashtags and short video clips, which means that workplaces need to start adjusting how they do their communication. This generation has a very short attention span, 2.8 seconds”!

When asked to comment on Smart Break’s biggest takeaway from the event, Lawrence opened up about what the future looks like for Smart Break. “The biggest takeaway for Smart Break from this event was the feedback from some of the larger companies saying that this kind of program or product would be needed in the US. On top of that the interest from Indian companies and investors was appealing also. All in all, smart break had one goal and that was to get our name out and we did that, while also making friends along the way” said Smith. 

Collision was the momentum that Smart Break needed. As Smart Break is ready to apply all the knowledge and lessons they learned from Collision to future endeavors. They begin preparing for two big events at the end of May down in Helsinki. We will have a press release about the events in the upcoming week.