Jōichi Itō

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Joichi Ito at Ars Electronica

Jōichi Itō ( Japanese 伊藤 穰 一 Itō Jōichi ) (born June 19, 1966 in Kyōto ) is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur and investor in venture capital .

Life

Ito was born in Kyoto in 1966 and emigrated to Canada with his parents in 1969, then to Michigan . He is a godchild of Timothy Leary . He returned to Japan at the age of 14 when his mother became President of Energy Conversion Devices , Inc. Japan.

Ito returned to America to attend Tufts University , where he met Pierre Omidyar , the later founder of eBay , among others . He soon found that the curriculum was too rigid for him. He left Tufts and later attended the University of Chicago as a physics student . He left this too, as in his opinion the program places more emphasis on training practical engineers than on teaching physics in order to enable an intuitive understanding of matter.

Jōichi Itō is the founder and managing director of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. He is currently also a board member of Creative Commons and Socialtext, Vice President of International Business and Mobile Devices for Technorati , Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and a contributor to Metroblogging .

Ito has received a lot of attention as an investor focused on internet and technology companies . He was involved in the founding of PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan, among others.

He runs a blog and a number of social media profiles, and until 2010 also a wiki and an IRC channel. Ito's blog deals with copyright law, the potential for democracy in the internet and occasionally nonsense (for example stealth disco - dancing next to a person without them noticing). He has been vegan since 2006/2007 . In 2005 he was accepted into the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation , to which he (as of 2019) no longer belongs.

From 2011 to 2019 Jōichi Itō was director of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts . Ito resigned from MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation , the Knight Foundation , PureTech Health, and the New York Times Company on September 7, 2019 after having financial ties to the sex offender and Financier Jeffrey Epstein as well as their concealment had been accused. Confidants such as Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig defended Ito, but withdrew their support after new details became known, due to which Ito ultimately ended all academic activities.

In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the IRI Medal .

Web links

Commons : Jōichi Itō  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mozilla Foundation forms new organization to further the creation of free, open source internet software, including the award-winning Mozilla Firefox browser. In: blog.mozilla.org. August 3, 2005, accessed September 8, 2019 .
  2. ↑ About us: Former board members. In: foundation.mozilla.org. Retrieved September 8, 2019 .
  3. ^ Director, MIT Media Lab . Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  4. ^ How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein . Retrieved September 8, 2019.
  5. ↑ Director of MIT's Media Lab Resigns After Outcry Over Jeffrey Epstein Ties . Retrieved September 8, 2019.
  6. ↑ Lawrence Lessig: On Joi and MIT. In: Medium. September 8, 2019, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  7. ^ Joi Ito Resigns as Director of the MIT Media Lab: raceAhead. Accessed November 17, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Itō, Jōichi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 伊藤 穰 一 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese activist, entrepreneur and venture capital investor
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Kyoto , Japan