James Higa addresses APPGs for East Asian Business and Japan

On January 15th, Lord Wei was delighted to host Mr James Higa who spoke to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for East Asian Business in conjunction with the APPG for Japan. Mr Higa, a second generation Japanese-American, who was born in the US and grew up in Japan and previously reported directly to Steve Jobs in the Office of the CEO, Apple. During his long career at Apple and NeXT that spanned nearly three decades, Mr Higa was instrumental in developing industry firsts. Among his most significant contributions to the global IT industry that we now enjoy include his involvement in the development of major milestones such as: leading the work on developing KanjiTalk, the Japanese operating system for the Macintosh and the Unicode encoding standard that is the foundation for multi-lingual support of all the world’s languages on personal computers, browsers, and apps, being part of the core team that created; negotiated, and launched iTunes which changed the face of music forever; and iTunes University, the education platform that sparked the online MOOC revolution. Mr Higa shared his experiences of his high tech career and his blue sky thinking work with Steve Jobs at Apple. Since leaving Apple 8 months after Steve Jobs passed away in 2012, Higa, a Stanford graduate, has continued to advise tech start-ups as a mentor and  devotes most of his time to philanthropy.  ]]>