People

Joi Ito     

Joi Ito
Title: Advisory Board

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org). He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage (http://www.garage.co.jp/) and the CEO of Neoteny (http://www.neoteny.com.) He is on the board of Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) and helps run Technorati Japan (http://www.technorati.jp/). He is a Research Fellow the at Keio University SFC Research Institute. He is the Chairman of Six Apart Japan (http://www.sixapart.jp/) the weblog software company. He is the board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS (http://www.witness.org/) and Global Voices (http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/). He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, etology Inc 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 Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/).

Howard Rheingold     

Howard Rheingold
Title: Advisory Board

Howard Rheingold, internationally syndicated author of the weekly Tomorrow column, author of best-sellers Virtual Reality and The Virtual Community, editor of best-seller The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, takes audiences on a journey through the human side of the technology-shaped future.

He's been in on the Web since the beginning, and long before. He's studied Internet enterprises and started them. Rheingold was the founding Executive Editor of HotWired, the pioneering online publication launched on the World Wide Web by Wired magazine. He was the founder of Electric Minds, named by Time Magazine one of the ten best websites of 1996. He's a participant-observer in the design of new technologies, a pioneer, critic and forecaster of technology's impacts, and a speaker who involves his audience in an adventure in group futurism.

Virtual Reality and The Virtual Community are published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese language editions, in addition to distribution in the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Rheingold has taught as appointed lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a non-resident Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Rheingold has spoken about the social, cultural, political and economic impacts of new technologies to:

* The American Library Association (keynote), San Francisco

* British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), London

* Sony Corporation, Tokyo

* Nokia Corporation, Helsinki

* Sprint Telecommunications (keynote), Atlanta

* Nynex FLAG Project (keynote), Bangkok

* Pacific Bell Texpo (keynote), San Francisco

* Canadian Telecommunication Alliance (keynote), Toronto

* Ars Electronica (Linz)

* Art Futura (Barcelona)

* Harvard Graduate School of Design (keynote), Cambridge

* Ford Motor Company (keynote), Dearborn

* Dentsu (largest advertising agency in the world), Tokyo

* Hakuhodo (Japan's 2nd largest advertising agency), Tokyo

* Researchers at Apple, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Paramount, Philips, LucasFilms and IBM

* Computer marketing managers in Lisbon, Copenhagen and Augsberg

* Communication researchers in Tokyo, Kyoto, Amsterdam, Montpellier, Stockholm, and Paris

* The Science Museum of London (featured speaker), London

* The Smithsonian Institute (featured speaker), Washington, DC

* Appearances on CBS News, NBC Today, ABC Primetime Live and Good Morning America, Macneil-Lehrer Report, NPR Fresh Air, Marketplace, and Talk of the Nation, BBC Horizon, Canal+ in Paris.

Rheingold shows his audiences a real-time, real-life, uncensored glimpse of the new cultures and societies emerging online and on the street. Then he helps them understand the questions about their businesses, personal lives, political freedoms and social values they need to be asking themselves.

Lili Cheng     

Lili Cheng
Title: Advisory Board

Lili is the Director in Microsoft Research who manages the Creative Systems Group and Social Computing Group.

The group is currently working on several projects in the area of social computing and design including Kodu (xbox 360 game to teach kids programming concepts), Salsa (email with social networking and redesigning inbox), c2 (cell phone aggregation), Micropedia (company wide wiki), and Tattoo (rethinking the way we view and share files in the operating system). The team also is responsible for several events including: Microsoft Research Design Expo and the MSR Social Computing Symposium.

From 2004-2006 Lili was the Director of User Experience for the Windows Division, overseeing design, user research, user assistance as well as advanced development for the release of Windows Vista.

Lili joined Microsoft in 1995, in the Virtual Worlds research group working on social applications such as V-Chat and Comic Chat. She then started the Social Computing in Microsoft Research in 2001, where the team built various social networking prototypes including Wallop (which spun out as a separate company in 2004) and Photostory (which shipped in Windows), and the Sapphire project (early vision of the redesign of windows)

Prior to Microsoft, Lili worked in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer in the User Interface research team. She worked on Quicktime Conferencing and QuicktimeVR.

Lili is also a registered architect, and worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore Owings and Merrill on commercial urban design and large scale building projects. She has taught at NYU- Interactive Telecommunications as well as Harvard University.

She was born in Tokyo, is married with three boys, and lives in Bellevue Washington.

Linda Stone     

Linda Stone
Title: Advisory Board

Widely recognized as a visionary thinker and thought leader, Linda Stone is a writer, speaker and consultant focused on trends and their strategic and consumer implications. In 2006 alone, articles on her work have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, The Boston Globe and hundreds of blogs. Since March 2006, she has spoken at the ETech conference, GEL, the Collaborative Technologies Technologies Conference, the Hidden Brain Task Force for the Center for Work-Life Policy, and to executives at Edelman http://www.edelman.com/ and at McDonald's http://www.mcdonalds.com/. In June 2006, she was invited by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to speak to the Medici gathering of positive psychologists, an invitation-only gathering of leaders in this field.

Previously, she spent close to twenty years as an executive in high technology. In 1986, she was persuaded to join Apple Computer to help "change the world." In her 7 years at Apple, she had the opportunity to do pioneering work in multimedia hardware, software and publishing. In her last year at Apple, Stone worked for Chairman and CEO John Sculley on special projects. In 1993, Stone joined Microsoft Research under Nathan Myhrvold and Rick Rashid. She co-founded and directed the Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group, researching online social life and virtual communities. During this time, she also taught as adjunct faculty in NYU's prestigious Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2000, CEO Steve Ballmer tapped Stone to take on a VP role, reporting to him, to help improve industry relationships and contribute to a constructive evolution of the corporate culture. She retired from Microsoft in 2002.

Over the years, Stone has been recognized by Upside Magazine as one of the Upside 100 Leaders of the Digital Revolution, by I.D. Magazine as one of the I.D. 40, and she was featured in John Brockman’s book, THE DIGERATI, which described her as a visionary both within Microsoft and to the industry at large.

Stone served a six year term on the National Board of the World Wildlife Fund and is currently on the WWF National Council. She is an advisor for the Pew Internet and American Life Project http://www.pewinternet.org/, the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force for the Center for Worklife Policy http://www.worklifepolicy.org/, and is on the Advisory Board of the RIT Lab for Social Computing. In 2002, she was recognized as Outstanding Regional Volunteer of the Year by F.I.R.S.T., Dean Kamen’s non-profit dedicated to inspiring young people in science and technology.

Linda Stone can be reached at the email address: linda -at- lindastone - dot - net

Clay Shirky     

Clay Shirky
Title: Advisory Board

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.

Mr. Shirky frequently speaks on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations, including PC Forum, the Internet Society, the Department of Defense, the BBC, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Highlands Forum, the Economist Group, Storewidth, the World Technology Network, and several O'Reilly conferences on Peer-to-Peer, Open Source, and Emerging Technology.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Mr. Shirky was a Partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group in 1999-2001, an international investment group with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The Accelerator Group was focused on early stage firms, and Mr. Shirky's role was technological due diligence and product strategy.

Mr. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department's first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media, and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

Prior to his appointment at Hunter, he was the Chief Technology Officer of the NYC-based Web media and design firm Site Specific, where he created the company's media tracking database and server log analysis software. Site Specific was later acquired by CKS Group, where he was promoted to VP Technology, Eastern Region.

Before there was a Web, he was Vice-President of the New York chapter of the EFF, and wrote technology guides for Ziff-Davis, including a guide to email-accessible internet resources, and a guide to the culture of the internet. He appeared as an expert witness on internet culture in Shea vs. Reno, a case cited in the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Mr. Shirky graduated from Yale College with a degree in art, and prior to falling in love with the internet, he worked as a theater director and designer in New York. His company, Hard Place Theater, staged "non-fiction theater", theatrical collages of found documents.

Mr. Shirky's writings are archived at shirky.com, and he currently runs the N.E.C. mailing list for his writings on networks, economics, and culture.