Joi Ito

Some brief googling shows this: https://joi.ito.com/coi.html So at minimum he's a great networker who can help his students get good placements. He's also been involved heavily in creative commons and helped secure funding to keep it going. He might rub you the wrong way but I'd give the probably not-stupid MIT people the benefit of the doubt that they chose him because they think he adds value to the institution, not because of some fluffy feely thing.

Joi Ito has another view on this: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2009/04/15/followup-to-my.html

“After it was unveiled parents loudly objected to the proposal. Less than a month later, the district repealed the proposed new school start times. As Dimitris Bertsimas, a professor who led the MIT team, pointed out in a presentation about the solution, those who favored the status quo had the most to lose. “When your kids are affected negatively, it is hard to see the big picture,” he said.” Joi Ito wrote on this https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2018/12/05/what-the-boston-school-bus-sched… : “In very polite email, they told me that I didn’t have the whole story. Kade and I met later that month with Arthur, Sebastien, and their adviser, MIT professor Dimitris Bertsimas. One of the first things they showed us was a photo of the parents who had protested against the schedules devised by the algorithm. Nearly all of them were white. The majority of families in the Boston school system are not white. White families represent only about 15 percent the public school population in the city. Clearly something was off.” “Optimizing the algorithm for greater “equity" also meant many of the planned changes were "biased" against families with privilege. My view is that the fact that an algorithm was making decisions also upset people. And the families who were happy with the new schedule probably didn’t pay as much attention. The families who were upset marched on City Hall in an effort to overturn the planned changes.”

You're both right, here's his blog entry on leadership in World of Warcraft: https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2006/03/13/leadership-in-w.html I'd guess by this point, he'd already made some money as a tech founder and CEO in Japan. He was apparently an early investor in Twitter, which was founded eight days after he wrote this blog post.

As someone that actively engages in disobedience it is disheartening that they'd award $250k to a single winner instead of $50k to five, $10k to twenty-five, etc. So many people struggle to make a difference, no matter how small, and being honored for their efforts, when it's most likely that it rarely if ever happens in real life, would be inspiring to them to keep up what they're doing. For those interested in reading about the original post covering in detail the thoughts behind the award, see this blog post: https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/03/21/on-disobedience.html

He founded the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative, so he must have a pretty good grasp of the domain (http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2015/04/15/announcing-mit-dci.html). He also held stakes in Blockstream, who favors small blocks (http://joi.ito.com/coi.html).

Joi has posted to his blog about the announcement: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2011/04/25/joining-the-mit.html Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483392

Two reasons: Because when researched and managed properly you can still get a quality product at much lower costs. It just requires more effort on your part (a decent supply chain department that does their research and manages the risks, mobilizing an appropriate team in country and all the costs associated with that, which may or may not end up working out more). I'm not from the US but we (Australia) have similar issues here. At the moment I work on projects with fabrication of big steel structures with high quality requirements, design once, build three or four slightly the same. So maybe take what I say next about manufacturing (design once, build millions) with a grain of salt. Chinese manufactures can do things that no one else can. There was a blog around 12 months ago where a group of MIT students went to Shenzhen. This quote stood out to me and really summed up the situation for me. "In an interesting twist, the factory boss suggested that we could build the precision molding tools in China and then send these tools to a US shop for running production. Due to our requirement for clean-room processing, he thought it would be cheaper to run production in the US -- but the US shops didn't have the expertise or capability that his shop in China had to produce the tools; and even if they did, they couldn't touch his cost for such value-added services." http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html

I loved the HipTop. It really was one of the first "smart" phones on the US market. The article's claim "we all started microblogging/lifestreaming" needs a little context as it claims credit that I feel belongs to someone else... While Danger had a very basic implementation running internally (pretty cool, see [1]), they surely didn't have a clue of the potential/value of lifestreaming/public status updates. Neither did I. As an initial beta-tester in May/June of 2002 I too had developed a HipTop mobile blogging site for private use (CF/SQL/Email, mostly cat and food shots!) -- demoed it to Om Malik who introduced me to T-Mobile -- but it was really Mike Popovic's HipTopNation [2], the first communal moblog launched on Oct. 4th 2002 and his Oct. 31 Halloween Photo Scavenger Hunt that sparked the popularity and showed the potential. After HipTopNation quickly gained traction [3] with 1000+ mobloggers, Danger decided to launch a "hiplog" service/site to consumers on Jan 13, 2003 [4]. Joi Ito has a nice timeline [5] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041205233554/http://www.spies.com/~jerse… [2] http://hiptop.bedope.com/[email protected]&GI… [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20050915215559/http://www.guardian.co.uk/o… [4] http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/01/13/danger-announce.html [5] http://archive.today/e4Ie#selection-685.35-685.47

This is a yak: http://www.springbrook.com/Tibetan-yak/Tibetan-yak-picture-files/yak%2… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yak This is “yak shaving”: http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2005/03/05/yak-shaving.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html

1. AVC : http://avc.com/ 2. Feld Thoughts : http://www.feld.com/ 3. Benedict Evans : http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/ 4. andrewchen (Growth at Uber): http://andrewchen.co/ 5. Ben Horowitz: https://a16z.com/author/ben-horowitz/ 6. Accel: http://theaccelblog.squarespace.com/blog/ 7. Both Sides of the Table：https://bothsidesofthetable.com/ 8. cdixon blog：https://medium.com/@cdixon/ 9. Coding Horror：https://blog.codinghorror.com/ 10.Erica Swallow: https://ericaswallow.com/ 11.First Round Capital Review: http://firstround.com/ 12.Guy Kawasaki：https://guykawasaki.com/ 13.Hunter Walk: https://hunterwalk.com/ 14.Joi Ito : https://joi.ito.com/weblog/ 15.Marco.org: https://marco.org/ 16.Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/ 17.Sam Altman: http://blog.samaltman.com/ 18.Simply Statistics: http://simplystatistics.org/ 19.Ben Thompson: https://stratechery.com/ 20.The morning paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/

There were app stores in Japanese phones from 1999. We're not forgetting that they sucked. We're pointing out Apple didn't invent this stuff. Touchscreens, had those for years. Multi-touch? Lots shown in the ARS article. Here's some http://tactiva.com/demo.html. Includes pinch to zoom, 2 finger rotate objects. Also includes tactile feedback, something no tablet has introed yet AFAIK. Apps, had those too for years. Oh look, it's instructions from 2001 on how to write apps for phones http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Cupertino/1621/ App stores? Did you ever bother to look? There's been app stores since at least 2001. None of them were that popular but they did exist. Oh look, my WinCE box boots into a grid of icons in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/japan/ce/dsc03224.jpg Maps, I had 3d first person maps on my 2004 feature phone, something still missing from any iPhones I know of. They had 2d maps in 2000 Games, Yep, last 5 phones I owned before my iPhone all had downloadable games. Here's me playing mappy I just purchased from an online app store in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/what_s_this_/ Cameras? Here's pictures from my 2001 cellphone camera http://blog.greggman.com/blog/pictures_from_cell_/ Facetime? Here's Facetime on a P2101V from 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/more_cellphone_madness/ Front and back cameras? 2002 http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2002/11/15/my-new-p504is.html Airtime, i.e. TV playback?…