During the past week I’ve been lucky enough to attend WCIT 2019, a major tech conference in Yerevan, Armenia.

The guest of honour was the infamous Kim Kardashian, a US billionaire, entrepreneur and celebrity who is pushing for increased tech adoption.

Not only did Kim gave quite an interesting speech, but the panel discussion was composed of people like Alex Chung, the founder of Giphy and Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit and Hovhannes Avoyan, founder of PicsArt.

Why Kim got into tech?

Kim Kardashian has a cumulative following of some 250 million people worldwide, in a plethora of social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Interestingly, she claims to launch around one new product every month, in the areas of fragrance, cosmetics or clothing.

She says she keeps a close team of five people working around her ideas and loves to meet on a weekly basis, when time allows, to see what can be created that adds value to her large community of followers.

Kim Kardashian developed and released a game “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood”. According to the celebrity:

“A lot of it has to do with the clothes the character is buying and wearing in photoshoots in Hollywood”.

Gaming is clearly a great way to get in touch with your public. It is clear Kim knows how to reach her wide network and how to take advantage of her image.

To answer my own question, it seems Kim is not pushing for brand new technology per se, but she is able to take maximum advantage of current technology. Personally speaking, that is a key lesson to any want-to-be entrepreneur, much like myself. That is, to effectively use the tools you have available in the present to solve current problems.

How will technology impact the world?

The panel discussion between Alex and Alexis was absolutely incredible.

If you use gifs or trust Reddit as a source of information, as much as I do, you will love how both entrepreneurs not only explain their quite personal journeys, but more importantly, why they built tools to improve communication over digital realms.

If Alexis wanted a better way for people to discuss ideas, through a written forum, Alex created GIFs to allow people to express emotions.

I had never thought of GIFs in such a way, but it is clearly how we all use them. To express some emotion through a known movie, or a succession of moving frames.

The panel discussion touched the topics of how new ideas can impact future technology, why building better tools for communication is key if we want a better, more inclusive world, as well as the importance of letting people express themselves freely and openly.

More to come over the next few weeks!

I hope you’re excited for some awesome interviews.

As I attended the conference, I was able to speak to really cool people.

As such, a couple of my next posts regarding WCIT 2019 will contain interviews with leaders in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

From Tom Trowbridge (Hedera Hashgraph) to Arthur Vayloyan (Bitcoin Suisse) and Aram Jivanyan (Zcoin), I spoke to a bunch of quite interesting folk during those three days at the beautiful capital of Yerevan.

As the conference was quite well organised, we had plenty of time to go deeply into how each company was developing, within and around the crypto-space, if they saw a bright future for Bitcoin and altcoins, as well as their short-term and long-term goals.

Stay tuned for more.

Safe trades!