
Nicholas Negroponte
Education, Innovation, Technology, TED Talk Speaker
Travels from Massachusetts, USA
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Nicholas Negroponte Profile
MIT Media Lab Founder, Nicholas Negroponte is one of the world’s credible authorities on what the future holds. Since the 1970s, he has been researching, developing, and speaking on disruptive technologies, many of which became mainstream tools decades after he spoke on them.
Negroponte is the Founder of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, which has provided laptops to an estimated 2 million children in developing nations around the world. The long-term goal of the project is to bring the world out of poverty by leveraging children’s ability to “learn learning.” For the program, Negroponte and his team specifically designed computers that were cheaper, more durable, and energy efficient.
Negroponte’s formal academic background is in architecture, but his pioneering research of computer-aid design at MIT led him to his career as a renowned tech visionary. In the 1970s, he pioneered projects in touch screens, voice interfacing, and digital street mapping. During the 1980s, he became famous for his prediction that telephones would eventually use airwaves while unwired technologies like televisions would come to depend on wire wires, a transition that was dubbed “the Negroponte Switch.”
Negroponte was the first investor in WIRED and a regular guest columnist throughout the magazine’s first five years…
Many of those columns served as the basis of his best-selling book, Being Digital, which predicted the merging of interactive technology, entertainment, and information.
Negroponte has been an angel investor for more than 40 startups including Skype and Zagats. He has delivered 15 TED Talks, including a speech at the first TED event in 1984.
- View Extended/Alternate Bio
Nicholas Negroponte is a world-renowned technology visionary with the keenest understanding of technology and its impact on business and society. An exceptional speaker, his broad range of experience and thorough understanding of digitization and its impact on industry make him the foremost authority on transformations that define our future. Negroponte is a new media pioneer and the driving force behind One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit that seeks to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves via computers.
After earning two professional degrees in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Negroponte joined its faculty in 1966. Based on his extensive research in computer graphics, computer-aided design and human-computer interface, he founded MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank, which studied new approaches to human-computer interaction. He later also founded MIT’s legendary Media Lab (1985), one of the world’s leading interdisciplinary research centers that applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life.
Negroponte continued to demonstrate his big-picture thinking by becoming the first investor for WIRED magazine, for which he also contributed a monthly article. Combining and expanding upon those ideas, he wrote the best-selling book Being Digital (Vintage Books, 1996), which solidified his status as an expert on how the worlds of interaction, entertainment and information would eventually merge. Being Digital has since been translated into 40 languages. He was the first speaker at TED and spoke over 10 times thereafter.
But, perhaps, his most notable and controversial achievement is his current non-profit program OLPC, a project to bring durable, affordable and innovative computers to children worldwide. Believing that a nation’s most precious resource is its children, Negroponte aimed to put low-cost, robust, connected laptop technology into the hands that need it most – the nearly two billion children in developing countries. This revolutionary way to promote learning started with Negroponte building five schools in rural Cambodian villages that do not have electricity, telephone or television – but now have broadband wireless.
In 2005, Negroponte unveiled a $100 laptop computer designed for children ages 6–12 years old in developing nations. As of March 2011, the OLPC program produced XO laptops for roughly two million children around the world in 25 languages and 40 nations, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Palestine. In addition to his academic and philanthropic contributions, Negroponte also served the private sector on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. (1995-2009) and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has also provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies including Zagats, Ambient Devices, Skype and Velti.
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