Why Is Pause Fest A Big Deal In The Creative Tech Industry?

In the length of a tweet, what is Pause Fest? Pause is Australia's premier creative tech festival for the curious. #PauseDiscover

What kind of people would you encourage to go to Pause Fest — who's going to get a lot out of it? Pause is for everyone that is into creative, tech or business. Pause is a unique professional development platform where big business meets startup, creative meets tech innovators, where the networking turns into award-winning campaigns/new products/startup investments and you meet your co-founder or employer.

The festival has grown from having a few hundred attendees in its first year to more than 12,000 last year. What's the biggest thing the festival has achieved so far? The most important factor in business scaling, and for me personally is to keep the quality over quantity. We do this by attracting the best people in the business, by offering the content you can't Google and by having strong purpose behind it.

The biggest thing we ever done is acting as a catalyst for innovation to create creative collisions from which many things flourished — check the Zero Latency, the world's first wireless VR gaming that debuted at Pause 2014! 

Can you list a few Pause Fest participants who have gone on to find success thanks to appearing in the fest? Most brands seek brand awareness or to speak at Pause, some launch new products, services or businesses, others find their co-founders, many collaborate. There are many success stories from past years, such as the aforementioned Zero Latency (Melbourne), VGA Fest (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Radium Audio (London), Brad Hammond (tech creative at Melbourne's XY01) and Sander van Dijk (mographer at BUCK, NYC).

What are your digital/creative tech trend forecasts for the year? There will be more tech out there than you can imagine. So be prepared for the big data crunch, artificial intelligent software creeps and the driverless cars. Watch out, cabbies, GM just invested $1b in Lyft.

What's new at Pause Fest this year? For its sixth year we are bringing a slew of bright minds across the world into the three-day conference - Creative, Tech and Business. This year, you can send your team for professional development on a specific subject. Discover your future self and learn how to make ideas happen, build successful products and master disruption at Pause 2016.

Who are the must-see speakers at this year's fest? If you are a pro then the one- or three-day conference is engineered to set you up on a good start for 2016. There are quite few speakers that are worth seeing (all 74), however I'd say Adriana Gascoigne from Girls In Tech San Francisco and Bibop Gresta from Hyperloop Transport Technologies from Los Angeles. Not to mention 20-odd free events including the Startup Expo with the top selection of specially curated startups across the country.