Opening Keynote Presentation
Innovation in Open Networks
Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab
The combination of Moore's law and the Internet has changed everything. Innovation happens on the edges in ecosystems where standards are developed in non-governmental bodies, where intellectual property can become more of a burden to agility than an asset and where planning can cost more than doing. This massive reduction of the cost of production, distribution and collaboration has created an explosion of innovation in consumer Internet and software through startups. Hardware and biotech are going through a similar transformation.
Ito will discuss innovation in open networks, the nature of risk, startups and the role and trajectory of the MIT Media Lab in this environment.
Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is also General Manager of Neoteny Labs, a startup fund focusing on Asia and the Middle East. He is the Chair of Creative Commons, co-founder and board member of Digital Garage JSD:4819, and on the boards of CCC TYO:4756 and Tucows AMEX:TCX. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute and the Internet & Society Lab at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University ( http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jito ). He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. He 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, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is an adviser to Twitter, Zynga and DeNA. He maintains a weblog where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know. He is a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, an Emergency First Responder instructor and a Divers Alert Network instructor.
Ito was listed by Time Magazine as a member of the "Cyber-Elite" in 1997. Ito was listed as one of the 50 "Stars of Asia" by BusinessWeek 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 named by BusinessWeek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom.
