Joi Ito
Joichi Ito (伊藤穰一, born 1966), more commonly known as Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is Vice President of International Business and Mobile Devices for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, also currently a member of the board of Creative Commons and Socialtext. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. He is a contributor to Metroblogging. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN and is expected to join in December of 2004.
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 and an IRC channel.
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 in 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 is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy[1] as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate focusing on the sharing economy.
Ito is also a vocal advocate of emergent democracy and the sharing economy.
Ito currently lives in Chiba prefecture, Japan with his partner Mizuka.
Ito's sister, Mizuko, is a "cultural anthropologist studying media technology use, particularly how digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities" at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California.
Ito's brother is an assistant professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology where he teaches at the School of Engineering.