Imagine you are organizing a conference and in the middle of a panel discussion there is a technical glitch that stops the proceedings. Stressful, to say the least. Now imagine if that panel included the likes of Sergey Brin from Google, Queen Noor of Jordan, Watergate-buster Carl Bernstein, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, and furthermore, imagine if the entire audience was jammed with people just as digerati and influential as the aforementioned panelists. Yikes!

That’s exactly what happened last night at the annual TED Conference in Monterey California. In the middle of that panel discussion which was being recorded by the BBC, a technical glitch reared its ugly head and stopped the panel in its tracks. Some say silence is golden, but in the case of a conference with a live audience – it is deadly. But then something crazy happened. Like a dream come true for the conference organizers, a famous comedian by the name of Robin Williams stands up from the audience crowd and starts doing an improv comedy act. The audience is in stitches of laughter for 10 minutes while the organizers work out their ‘issue’. Technical glitch? What technical glitch?As crazy as this story sounds, I think this aspect of the story is even crazier. Where is the video clip evidence of this? I know the TED Conference is somewhat secretive, but c’mon! An audience full of technology leaders and tech-savvy people with their multimedia handsets and iPhones and not one, I repeat, not one video clip of this has been uploaded to YouTube. Shocking!!

TED 1, YouTube 0