On the 31st of May, I went to Hong Kong to attend a Techno conference called “RISE” that lasted for 3 days. Initially, I did not know what this conference was all about, I just took it as an opportunity to travel and meet new friends.
A few days before the conference, my friend sent me loads of information. He told me that I needed to prepare myself for this conference.
First, I need to download an app “like a conference app into your phone”.
In my mind, I was like “SERIOUS, what conference is this that there is an individual app created for it!?”
After downloading the app, I started to explore the function of the app, it was really detailed and useful. I can chat with the attendees like Facebook messenger, I can check the schedules for topics I am interested about. Hence, they also reveal the corporation that will be involved in this conference, speakers profile (which is pretty international), and schedules about the topics that would be spoken to the audience. My eyes were wide open, because there will be 4 stages open for different topics at the same time, and this will last for 3 days from 10am -5pm. Every speech only hold for 20 minutes, and some speakers sharing time would be held in an interactive way, as in you can ask the speaker question, like raise your hands and the volunteers would pass you a microphone for your questions to be heard by the crowd and speaker.
Hence, if you are not interested with the speeches, there is a stage called “The Pitch”, what took place in this stage is that, there are 4 panels from different company, they are professionals working as “Angel investors”. So different group of inventors will present their product, ideas or app to the 4 people. After presenting, the 4 professionals will ask them questions about how this product/service or invention will help make this world a better place, or why such big amount of money to be invest into this project and etc. As I was in the crowd listening to their presentation, it was an eye opening and mind blowing moment. How can this group of people from different background, age group and country come with all this out of the box ideas?
The projects of this particular group of students was mind-blowing, there were students in a group of 5, 1 looks like an Indian, 1 originally from Netherland and a few from different places. They showed that with similar interest, they are able to pull down the culture of discrimination and these passionate inventors came together to workout on the projects make see it became a succeed.
This conference has really inspired me in many ways. As if it tells me that even though I came out from an accounting background, working as a banker. I can invent or I can create new things with my ideas. I talked to some inventors, most of them do not come out of science background, they were either lawyers, or accountants or students with no experience. I was shocked to be honest, because they were so convinced of their ideas about a product/ services or software that they left their job, found a compatible business partner which has a totally different background from them like IT, scientist, engineers, or software technicians. Collected a good size of people to team up and making their idea a great invention.
Furthermore, this conference I rate 5 out of 5, because those who bring their ideas or products to the conference, when the panels felt that they could improve, they would gather your team and sit at this mentor section (which only inventors can access) and tell you the possibilities of the ideas/service/ products can improve.
The conference itself was quite heart-warming, because there were follow-ups for this group of new inventors, and the experienced entrepreneurs would spend time to mentor and guide them. Hence, every time the speakers finished their speech they would leave their emails to the audience, which I think is pretty awesome!
I have a few flyers here and I will explain to you what this different companies do, while also mention to you what background this founder were from.
Through the conference, it really helped me tear down something I called it “limit’! I was always being brought up to be conservative in my ways to thinking ideas, even though I find the life of inventors really weird but interesting. This conference gave me a shout out that anything is possible. If you have an idea and you think it works, come to the conference, we will line you up with a more experience mentors in your field.
After sharing with you why I got inspired from this conference, I hope you received the cliché that this conference is talking about, ‘Dare to Dream’ and do something different. Its never too late.
