Andrew Keen – Keynote Speaker

Entrepreneur, author and broadcaster Andrew Keen is among the world’s best known contemporary analysts of digital business and culture, and commentators on the digital revolution. He is executive director of the Silicon Valley innovation salonFutureCast, the host of the popular Internet chat show “Keen On”, a Senior Fellow at CALinnovates, a columnist for CNN and a much acclaimed public speaker around the world. In 2015, he was named by GQ magazine in their list of the “100 Most Connected Men”.

In his sharp and witty book, The Internet is Not the Answer, Keen argues that on balance, the Internet has had a disastrous impact on all our lives. The London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening read” and the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe”.

He is also the author of two acclaimed books on social media and the internet. DIGITAL VERTIGO: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorienting Us critically evaluates social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In. CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How The Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani described the book as being written “with acuity and passion”.

His latest book is entitled How to Fix the Future and is based on research, analysis, and Keen’s own reporting in America and around the world, showcases global solutions for our digital predicament.

As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Keen founded Audiocafe.com and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He has also co-founded a number of other Silicon Valley start-up ventures including afterTV and now.tv.

He has been featured in hundreds of magazines and newspapers around the world and regularly writes for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, The San Francisco Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, Fast Company, Fortune and many other publications.

Keen is a regular lecturer at major international conferences, speaking on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. He was a featured speaker in 2011 at the E-G8, former French President Sarkozy’s pre G8 gathering of digital leaders in Paris, where he spoke about the impact of data on individual privacy.

He was awarded a First Class Degree in History from London University, was a British Scholar at the University of Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, and earned a Masters Degree in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has lectured at many universities around the world including Warsaw, Amsterdam, Stanford, Berkeley and Oxford.

Keen is also the co-founder of Amsterdam University’s Future of University Education conference, an event that maps out the 21st century university. He has made a series of commentaries for CNN looking at how internet trends are influencing social culture.