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Joichi Ito (伊藤穰一 Itō Jōichi, born June 19, 1966), more commonly known as Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated, activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.
Ito has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Early on, Joi was involved in running a nightclub in Japan, bringing industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan. He was an active player on the first Multi User Dungeons (MUD) at Essex University and once worked with Sega, on the Dreamcast's online features.
He also appears as a character in a webcomic, The Adventures of Epicenter, which was once linked to in his blog.
Biography
Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan, and moved to Michigan in the United States at the age of four with his family. At 14, he returned to Japan when his mother became President of the Japanese subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Ito returned to the U.S. to attend Tufts University near Boston as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay. Finding his course work too rigid and believing that "learning computer science in school was stupid", Ito dropped out of Tufts to later attend the University of Chicago as a physics student. He again dropped out on discovering, in his opinion, the program at Chicago to be to more oriented towards producing practical engineers than teaching physics with a goal toward intuitive understanding of the science. He stayed in Chicago for a year after dropping out of college working as a nightclub disk jockey, working regularly at the Limelight and occasionally spinning records at the Smart Bar.
Current Work
Ito is General Manager of International Operations for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and also currently a member of the board of Creative Commons, Socialtext, The Metabrainz Foundation and Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of the board of Creative Commons International. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In April of 2005, he was named to the board of the Open Source Initiative. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. In 2006 he was appointed to the board of [http://www.witness.org/ WITNESS.
He is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate focusing on the sharing economy. He is a fellow at The Annenberg Center for Communication of the University of Southern California (USC)[http://www.annenberg.edu/. Online and in his lectures, Ito is a vocal advocate of emergent democracy and the sharing economy.
Ito currently lives in Chiba Prefecture, Japan with his partner Mizuka. Ito's sister is Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist studying media technology use, and the musician Cornelius is Ito's second cousin. In addition, he is Timothy Leary's godson.
Ito is the Guild Master of the We Know * on Eitrigg, a US World of Warcraft server.
Ito is the co-author of a book (Dialogue: Ryu Murakami X Joichi Ito, 2006) with Japanese author Ryu Murakami.
Ito is on the Board of Directors of Wikia, Inc.
External links
- joi.ito.com - Ito's weblog
- Ito's Diary on LiveJournal
- Ito's Public Wiki
- #joiito, a channel on IRC
- Ito's Biography over at ICANN
- The Adventures of Epicenter, a web comic which Joi occasionally appears in as a character, and was once linked to on his site.
- The Future of Blogging - audio session from Accelerating Change.
1966 births | Living people | Japanese bloggers | Japanese entrepreneurs
Joi Ito | Joichi Ito | Joi Ito | 伊藤穰一 | Joi Ito
"Joi Ito"