Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte

Co-Founder, MIT Media Lab; Founder, One Laptop Per Child

Nicholas Negroponte is the co-founder (with Jerome B. Wiesner) of the MIT Media Lab (1985), which he directed for its first 20 years. A graduate of MIT, Negroponte was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. He gave the first TED talk in 1984, as well as 13 since. He is author of the 1995 best seller, Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2005 he founded the non-profit One Laptop per Child, which deployed $1 billion of laptops for primary education in the developing world. In the private sector, Negroponte served on the board of directors of Motorola (for 15 years) and was general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has personally provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Zagats and Wired magazine. 

4mins
Is internet access a human right? Even if it's not now, Nicholas Negroponte says it will be considered as such in due time.
3mins
The founder of MIT's Media Lab imagines a future in which information and knowledge can be delivered to the brain through the bloodstream.
6mins
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte discusses what it means for the atomic world to turn digital.
4mins
The chairman of One Laptop per Child has also founded MIT’s Media Lab, invested in Web startups, and written a column for Wired. Which undertaking was the hardest?
2mins
As Rupert Murdoch dukes it out with Google, the founder of MIT’s Media Labs assesses how freely information will flow in the information age.
2mins
How the digital age has made an “omelet” out of life and work—and why that’s exactly the way we like it.
4mins
Twenty years after predicting the “Negroponte switch” between wired and wireless technologies, Nicholas Negroponte describes another advance that will soon seem inevitable: the convergence of “biology and silicone.”
3mins
The physical book will disappear, says Nicholas Negroponte. Teachers who resist dispensing with them because “laptops are distracting” must change their methods.
7mins
Citing zero truancy rates and teachers requesting late retirement, the chairman of One Laptop per Child argues that his program has succeeded all over the world—especially the Third World.
6mins
How One Laptop per Child got started, and how its rainproof, sunproof machines with “cute little ears” were designed to appeal to kids across the globe.