Joi Ito

Joi Ito
Director, MIT Media Lab
Cambridge, MA

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab & Chairman of Creative Commons.

He is also the co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and on the boards of  The N.Y. Times, The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, Tucows. The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. Joi has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, and Dopplr.  Joi is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan and Joi has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching “The Sharing Economy” as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan.

Joi was listed by Time Magazine as a member of the “Cyber-Elite” in 1997. and as one of the 50 “Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 2000. He was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow”, chosen by Newsweek as a member of the “Leaders of The Pack” in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of “The Next Establishment” in 2007. Ito was also named by Business Week as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.

Joi maintains a weblog where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft Guild.