Wozniak’s speech caps sixth edition of C2 Montréal
The circus has pulled up stakes and left Griffintown.
Described by one wag as a cross between a TED talk and the Cirque du Soleil, the C2 Montréal conference closed out its 6th edition Friday with a keynote speech by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the morning and some blowout DJ parties in the evening.
The sold-out gathering of about 6,000 people from 60 countries and 20 industries — a wide crosssection from business, the arts, entertainment, marketing and the tech scene among others — describes itself as a “playground of imagination and inspiration.”
Staged in the sprawling Arsenal contemporary art complex in a Griffintown industrial heritage building, the three-day event offered a bewildering array of panels, lectures, workshops, labs and offbeat “exercises” like sitting in chairs suspended in mid-air or participating in a collaborative giant cake bake.
The latest C2 iteration also included for the first time a parallel conference on artificial intelligence highlighting Montreal’s role as an emerging hot spot for AI.
Global entertainment group Cirque du Soleil is a C2 founding partner, along with the Sid Lee advertising agency and there are close to 20 private-sector players involved, with only about 20 per cent of the $10-million budget coming from federal, provincial and municipal governments, said Chloé Langevin, C2’s vice-president for partnerships.
Among the many venues at the site was the Big Top by the Lachine Canal for in-the-round talks by noted speakers, including Linda Boff, chief marketing officer at GE and Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal machine learning pioneer.
“It’s completely spaced out for me,” Edouard Sinor, managing director with BNP Paribas in Montreal, said about the event. “I’m a traditional banker,” he said, adding, “On the negative side, I’m not sure what the fit is. It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what the point is.”
Langevin said an independent Pricewaterhouse-Coopers study last year estimated a total value of about $170 million in business deals struck — representing one in four companies present — over the course of the conference.
There are plans to export the C2 concept to Melbourne, Australia, she said.
“It’s really a new foray for us. We’re really embarking on a new phase where the brand will start to really come into its own on the international scene.”
Andy Mauro, co-founder and chief executive officer of Automat, a Montreal chatbot startup offering conversational marketing for brands, says he’s impressed by the C2 experience.
“It’s a little bit like the city. It’s walkable, it’s small, it’s communityoriented, it’s super creative, there’s a ton of taste, it’s very diverse.”
But he feels the conference could be a tad more ambitious with greater emphasis on featuring internationally recognized personalities.
“I think we absolutely should be showcasing local, regional stars but we also need to really focus on attracting top talent and making sure people understand this event is really top notch and really great,” he said.
“I think it’s an amazing event that could be a world-class event. We need to have the ambition to be globally great.”
UdeM’s Bengio said in an interview that C2 is an ideal venue for discussing critical issues raised by AI, including the social and political implications.
“We’re trying to do something important to change our society. We want Canada and Montreal to be leading this new technological revolution. So it is important to get people to think about what’s happening, to get entrepreneurs to know what’s going on so they can start thinking about how to change their businesses.
“It’s also important to talk to ordinary people about the social and political changes that probably will need to happen to manage those transformations that are coming.”
Among other speakers and workshop leaders at C2 were Google machine intelligence scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas, video game developer Jade Raymond, food and culture maven Nicola Farinetti and mixed martial arts competitor Georges St-Pierre.