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The busy MIT Media Lab has named a new director, choosing Joichi Ito, the former CEO and chair of the board of the nonprofit Creative Commons.
In addition to founding Creative Commons, which is focused on legal and technical tools to encourage and aid legal sharing and reuse of content online, Ito, 44, also sits on the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation. In 1994, when he was just 28, Ito founded Eccosys, which eventually became Digital Garage, a publicly traded Japanese Internet company. He also helped establish and later became CEO of PSINet Japan (formerly IIKK), the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, and helped found Infoseek Japan, the first commercial search engine there, according to a release from MIT.
Ito was founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co Ltd.; and general partner of Neoteny Labs Startup 1, an early-stage investment fund. He was an early investor in more than 40 companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter, and Twitter.
While a native of Japan, Ito is no stranger to Boston, as an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
In a statement, Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab co-founder and chairman emeritus, said that Ito “is the perfect director for the Media Lab going forward.”
Ito succeeds Frank Moss, who was director of the Media Lab since 2006, when he took over from Walter Bender, when he left that position to join Negroponte, who stepped down from his role as chairman of the Media Lab, for both of them to work on One Laptop Per Child.
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