Day two of Pause Fest 2020 featured another 40+ sessions about creativity, business and technology. With the line-up of inspiring international speakers, Pause Fest is packed with information, resources, speakers and attendees who want to do business a little differently.

Missed day one lessons? Check them out there.

Below are five top lessons from day two:

1. Creatives should discuss Mental Health

With the uprising of remote and flexible working options, these creative humans discussed the ups and downs of doing creative work, freelancing and remote work, separating your self-worth from your work and addressing mental health in a healthy way. 

• Moderator: Mete Erdogan, Creative Director, Either Either Creative

• Panelist: Daniel Condon, Clinical Psychologist, Optimise Psychology    

• Panelist: Kat Bak. Designer, Illustrator & Writer, Kat Bak Design 

• Panelist: Steph Stepan, Writer, Steph Stepan Copywriting & Strategy

2. The Startup Pitch Competition - share your product, and your impact

Another group of ten startups tackling some seriously big problems. We heard more about the problems they’re solving, the solutions they’ve created - and most importantly, the impact they’re already having on people’s lives.

Congrats to Gabriel and Hivekeepers who got into the finals! There’s one more pitch qualifying round on Friday midday before the Startup Pitch finals start at 4.30pm

• Cream: Cream is a network of Australia's top chefs & restaurant owners providing insider restaurant

• Gabriel: We created Gabriel so seniors can live better longer. Gabriel uses multi modal technology to prevent and detect falls. Our passive monitoring technology is a world first, created for home and institutional use.

• Gheorg: Empower your child to develop resilience and manage anxiety. Meet Gheorg, a friendly robot designed to help your child improve their emotional intelligence and mental wellbeing.

• Homie3d: Homie 3D provides an Architectural Visualisation solution for Property Developers, Architects and builders which in turn helps them and their customers better visualise their next off the plan property.

• Hospohire: HospoHire is a pre-screening platform, designed to streamline the applicant assessment process, ensuring that organisations can make an informed choice on who they hire.

• KinKon: KINKON is here to provide you with a fun and simple digital solution for connecting to your peers and establishing long-lasting kinships while contributing to a paperless society. The mobile application provides a platform for creating, sharing and collecting digital business cards. Corporate cards can be issued by an organisation for their employees and include an in-app organisational chart of all colleagues and their details. All information is dynamic, meaning whenever a change happens, the updated info flows through to all connections seamlessly.

• ParKam: Changing the future of Smart City by reducing infrastructure and utilising multi-layer devices (cameras) for multiple AI & IP based solutions.

• Stowed: Maximise your space with on demand self storage. Manage your things and order deliveries with an app.

• Voop.global: The Voop.Global tool provides an early warning system for when an organisation’s culture is at risk. It also provides immediate feedback on the success of initiatives, regardless of which end of the spectrum your culture is at.

• HiveKeepers: Fast, reliable, easy to use record keeping for you and your bees.

3. Byrony Cole: Let’s Talk about Sex(Tech) - the $30Billion dollar industry

Byrony Cole hosts the Future of Sex podcast with over 1M downloads and is considered a world leader pioneering conversations around the massive SexTech industry. During the Let’s Talk About Sex(Tech) keynote, Bryony covered a wide range of topics and proposed lots of questions for us to think deeper about how we interact with products and technology.

There were many examples of: “Tech is behaving more like humans, and humans are behaving more like technology.” And there were many different cultural applications of SexTech based on what people and women in different countries experience: for example Callisto in America that is utilising technology to detect repeat sexual assailants - which is similar to She’s A Crowd here in Australia which uses storytelling data to make cities safer for women.

On the Future of Sex website, Bryony shares:

My wish is that the conversation about our bodies, sexuality and our identities catches up to the rapid rate of innovation in technology.

When we remove the stigma and shame, all of society benefits from sextech — and those who face sexual challenges due to distance, discrimination or disability lives can improve significantly.

4. The Conversation - fixing the broken media model

“Public interest journalism must be supported by the public.“

The CEO of The Conversation, Lisa Watts shared how the Melbourne based company started, how they’ve created hubs of independent journalism all around the world and that there are three types of info they share:

1. New research, with links to journal article 

2. Analysis of the news 

3. Ongoing series

It was impressive to hear about their massive audience, expert academic and journalists, and their extensive publication process which includes collaborative editing, final approvals and disclosures.

5. Future proof with passion and purpose

Founder and CEO of OzHarvest, Ronni Khan explored “perspective of a social- and purpose-led organisation and explore what it takes to create an authentic, value-led business.” OzHarvest has delivered over 120 million meals, supported over 1,300 charities and saved 44,000 tonnes of food!! So impressive.

One more day of #Pause2020 left!