Joi Ito Joins Oblong Industries Board of Directors
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) March 17, 2014 -- Oblong Industries is pleased to announce that Joi Ito has joined its board of directors. This is the first appointment of an outside member to the board of the Los Angeles based company. The addition coincides with a period of rapid growth following the successful 2013 introduction of Oblong’s Mezzanine™ product.
Joi Ito is an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur, and digital advocate. He is currently the Director of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA and holds board positions with Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, and several non-profits including The Mozilla Foundation. He is also a founder of Digital Garage, an Internet company headquartered in Japan, and has a long list of successful startups to his credit.
Says Oblong Industries co-founder and CEO John Underkoffler, “We’re utterly thrilled to have Joi with us. He’s long been a crucial force terraforming present into future, turning pale technologies into those we’ll all need for the next century: vivid, socially relevant, powerful, expressive. His vision complements Oblong’s in an ideal way.”
Foundry Group managing director Brad Feld, an Oblong board member since the company's founding, added, "As Oblong makes the science fiction of Minority Report a reality -- as a new way for humans to interact with computers, and with each other -- having Joi Ito join us on this journey is awesome.”
"Oblong is a great example of a Media Lab spinout. Oblong lives at the convergence of software and hardware, and pushes the edge of human/computer interface in disruptive and creative ways. Entrepreneurship is an increasingly important pathway to impact for the Media Lab, and I am pleased to be joining the Oblong board as the company looks to radically change business practices with technology that grew from Media Lab research," said Joi Ito.
Since its debut, Oblong’s Mezzanine system has been selected for the conferencing, collaboration, and presentation spaces of global leaders such as GE and IBM as well as upstart innovators like Sonos and Beats Music.
About Oblong Industries
Oblong Industries’ innovative technologies change the way people work, create, and communicate. With roots in more than two decades of research at the MIT Media Lab, Oblong’s flagship product, Mezzanine™, is a collaborative conference room solution that defines the next era of computing: multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, multi-location. Mezzanine’s groundbreaking Infopresence™ capabilities multiply the effectiveness of distributed organizations and catalyze new, more effective, more collaborative workflows. Oblong is headquartered in Los Angeles and supplies Mezzanine systems to Fortune 500 enterprise customers and reseller partners. Learn more at http://www.oblong.com, and connect via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Jennifer Uner, Oblong Industries, http://www.oblong.com, +1 (213) 683-8863 Ext: x301, [email protected]
Share this article