You know your conference has hit the big time when Robin Williams steps up from the audience to fill the dead air during an embarrassing, show-stopping technical glitch.

Before the host, BBC World presenter Matt Frei, could finish his introduction of panelist Sergey Brin from Google, he announced there was a technical issue. Frei didn't quite know what to do with the empty air while waiting for a fix

That's when a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED but "couldn't understand a fucking word" and was "wondering why at a technology conference everything is running so shittily"