Speakers » Joichi Ito
Joichi Ito spends his time working in the public, private and non-profit sectors focusing on the Internet and innovation.
Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) a global non-profit organization providing the technical and legal framework for sharing content which is currently used by organizations such as the US White House, Al Jazeera, Merck, Nike, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ridley Scott, Wikipedia, MIT and Stanford. There are currently over 250 million pieces of content using a Creative Commons license.
In the past, Ito worked primarily in traditional media, having worked in Hollywood developing motion pictures and as the associate to the executive producer on Sean Penn's first film as a director, "Indian Runner". He worked at NHK, the public Japanese broadcaster and as a columnist and contributor to both US and Japanese publications and television shows.
About The Talk
Joichi Ito is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation which makes the Firefox browser, the second most popular browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer and the most successful open source consumer software project in the world. In addition to Digital Garage, he has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan - the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan and Infoseek Japan - the first Internet search engine in Japan. He was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm, Kongregate, and other Internet companies. He 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 Doctoral candidate of Business Administration at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. Ito serves on the board of trustees of Nishimachi International School, a bilingual English and Japanese K-9 school in Tokyo.
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 also named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.
