It was a day of great contrasts as I bounced between one of the more inspiring people I have met, and listened to one of the more uninspiring speeches from a world leader that I have heard.

I did not expect US Vice President Joe Biden to sound so lacklustre. He was a serious possibility to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination this year, and I was looking forward to hearing a global overview from one the leading members of Obama’s administration that has a lot to shout about when they remember all they have done. Instead Biden gave us a straightforward review of how the progress made possible by technology can harm the workers, particularly if the employers do not think for the long term. He listed five ways to bolster the middle class — investing in education and training, strengthening social protection for employees, modernising infrastructure, getting more progressive tax regimes so that everybody pays their fair share, and make capital more widely available. “We have to go back to more of the basics,” Biden said.

Nothing wrong with what Biden said but it was a pleasure to meet Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the fringes of a Davos meeting. I knew he had invented the world wide web, which allows all to be connected to an unprecedented degree and has profoundly changed the way the human race will move forward, but I was not sure exactly what he had done.

So it was fascinating to hear the story from Sir Tim himself, as he described what happened in 1989.

“I invented the http language (hypertext transfer protocol) which I refused to patent. Then we implemented it in CERN in 1991. It was vital that the various companies involved in starting the web did not take out patents on their ideas otherwise the web would have been killed, and we formed a consortium of companies with similar ideas that is why the web succeeded”. Looking back, he pointed out that there had been a rival system called Gopher that failed because it was not patent free.

I asked him what he is doing today, and he still very much part of the web, as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, which oversees the Web’s continued development.

But he is also keenly aware that a large part of mankind does not have access to the web, and Sir Tim is working with the Alliance for the Affordable internet that is a combination of governments and large companies like Google and Facebook that is trying to get internet access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online.