The Internet, big data, and you

It was a room full of bloggers, online journalists, lawmakers, technology experts, members of the academe, and other Internet users gathered for the big data summit #ThinkPH on August 23 sponsored by Rappler, Google and +Social Good. But Andrew Keen, a US-based author who flew in for the summit, pulled no punches in blasting the Internet as an “epic failure” nearly 25 years after its invention. Jumpstarting the summit as its first speaker, he minced no words against one of the organizers, Google, which he called a “central character” in the Internet’s failure. But Nancy Roberts, co-founder of analytics start-up CORE Lab at the US Naval Postgraduate School, challenged Keen’s arguments, pointing out the immense power of the Internet to connect problems to solutions and empower users to drive change wherever they want from wherever they are.

Read the stories on Keen and Roberts here and here.