19 Facts About Nicholas Negroponte

1.

Nicholas Negroponte was born on December 1,1943 and is a Greek American architect.

2.

Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and founded the One Laptop per Child Association.

3.

Nicholas Negroponte was born to Dimitrios Negropontis, a Greek shipping magnate and alpine skier, and grew up in New York City's Upper East Side.

4.

George Nicholas Negroponte is an artist and was President of the Drawing Center from 2002 to 2007.

5.

Nicholas Negroponte attended Buckley School in New York, Fay School in Massachusetts, Le Rosey in Switzerland, and The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1961.

6.

Nicholas Negroponte earned a master's degree in architecture from MIT in 1966.

7.

In 1985, Negroponte created the MIT Media Lab with Jerome B Wiesner.

8.

Nicholas Negroponte became a proponent of intelligent agents and personalized electronic newspapers, for which he popularized the term the Daily Me.

9.

In 1992, Nicholas Negroponte became involved in the creation of Wired Magazine as the first investor.

10.

Nicholas Negroponte expanded many of the ideas from his Wired columns into a bestselling book Being Digital, which made famous his forecasts on how the interactive world, the entertainment world and the information world would eventually merge.

11.

Nicholas Negroponte is a digital optimist who believed that computers would make life better for everyone.

12.

In 2000, Nicholas Negroponte stepped down as director of the Media Lab as Walter Bender took over as executive director.

13.

When Frank Moss was appointed director of the lab in 2006, Nicholas Negroponte stepped down as lab chairman to focus more fully on his work with One Laptop Per Child although he retains his appointment as professor at MIT.

14.

In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the concept of a $100 laptop computer, The Children's Machine, designed for students in the developing world.

15.

Nicholas Negroponte is an active angel investor and has invested in over 30 startup companies over the last 30 years, including Zagats, Wired, Ambient Devices, Skype and Velti.

16.

Nicholas Negroponte has sat on several boards, including Motorola and Velti.

17.

Nicholas Negroponte's fellow founding committee members are Louis Boccardi, Thomas Bray, Jack Fuller, and the late former Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn.

18.

Nicholas Negroponte has influenced modern day futurists such as David Houle.

19.

Nicholas Negroponte was reported to have said that in the fund-raising world these types of occurrences were not out of the ordinary, and they shouldn't be reason enough to cut off business relationships.