Sandwiched between the two weekends of New Orleans’ iconic Jazz & Heritage Festival is Collision, America’s fastest-growing tech conference. In two short years, the “anti-CES” has grown to  expects more than 11,000 attendees from 50 countries.

It is the U.S. version of the popular Web Summit in Europe, and focuses on networking and social meet-ups, as much as its star-studded speaker line-up, ranging from Chris Sacca to Brett Favre. It’s a melting pot of entrepreneurs, innovators, CEOs, investors and disruptors.

It becoming a must-attend event, similar to SXSW.

Of the 650+ startups featured at Collision, here are five that should be on marketers’ radars.

Welo: www.welo.tv

Welo promises the ability to create TV clips in real time and share them from your mobile phone. Currently live in Argentina and entering the U.S. market, Welo allows fans to clip the exact moment from a program and distribute it across their social network – recording a stream of TV programming, compressing it, and sending it to users’ feeds.

This instantly allows you to share high quality clips from any show, game, or TV experience. Welo could be a great way for shows to sample content from peer-to-peer, as well as a fascinating data collection source.     

Octopus: http://www.octopus.cl/

How about VR, AR, and livestreaming all in one platform?
Well, Chilean-based Octopus launched the IQVI platform (https://www.iqvi.mobi) this week at Collision. The vision is to democratize this type of tech-forward content for the people, just as YouTube did with video.

The platform is free and is tremendously fun to explore. Opportunities for advertisers range from branded channels to custom native content and if they can create the platform where this type of content lives, they may be on to something enormous.

Cinderly: www.cinderly.com

Your fashion-forward fairy godmother, Cinderly, helps you out in that awkward dressing-room moment when you ask, “Does this look good on me?” Go into “Glass Slipper Mode” on its camera feature, and Cinderly will ask local users whether the consumer should buy the item or not.

All posts from “Glass Slipper Mode” are pushed to the top of feeds and voted on by others, so by the time you step out of the dressing room, you have guidance on whether to make the purchase. It has several social sharing incentives encouraging amplification and gamification.

Brands, of course, could get involved by making suggestions or cashing in on the location-based focus of the app to drive traffic to local stores.

Beachy: www.beachyapp.com

I am bullish on any business that makes purchases frictionless ­– and Beachy does just that for beach-goers. While you’re reading in the sun and you start to crave a beer, there is no longer any need to walk across the hot sand – just use Beachy to have a professional beach attendant bring your drink of choice (cocktail umbrella optional).

Beachy also pre-sets up chairs and umbrellas, as well as a whole set of beach-friendly purchases. It’s basically movie theater reserved seating for the sand. Brand integrations are quite obvious, from branded umbrellas to special sun tan lotions, and other beach-friendly products.

Vyking: http://www.vyking.io/

Clicks are a pretty lame way to measure engagement with digital video. Thankfully, several companies are trying to solve this. Berlin-based ad-tech company Vyking is utilizing artificial intelligence and a visual recognition system to measure emotion. By bridging the emotional gap between man and machine, they promise to provide campaign analytics around audience sentiment that allows advertisers to optimize their advertising based on consumer reactions.

While Collision isn’t as large as CES or SXSW (yet), it has captured the vibe of authentic innovation that propelled those two conferences to must-attend status. Time will tell if advertisers will be throwing beads at each of these startups, but one thing is certain: We now have a work excuse to go to New Orleans.