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. 

4 min
Is internet access a human right? Even if it's not now, Nicholas Negroponte says it will be considered as such in due time.
3 min
The founder of MIT's Media Lab imagines a future in which information and knowledge can be delivered to the brain through the bloodstream.
7 min
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte discusses what it means for the atomic world to turn digital.
4 min
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?
2 min
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.
2 min
How the digital age has made an “omelet” out of life and work—and why that’s exactly the way we like it.
4 min
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.”