Esther Dyson

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Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space.<ref> Multiple citations:

Education and early life

Esther Dyson's father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, of Swiss parentage; her brother is science historian George Dyson. Her paternal grandfather was the composer Sir George Dyson.<ref>Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite Template:Webarchive by John Brockman (HardWired Books, 1996)</ref> She was educated at Harvard University, where she studied economics and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.<ref name=REL2.0.Newsweek1997/>

Career

After graduating she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities<ref name="ICANN"> Template:Cite web </ref> following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research in 1982. In 1983, when she bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, Dyson renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his Rosen Electronic Letter newsletter Release 1.0.<ref>about which she wrote in 1997: "RELease 1.0 - get it?"</ref> She and business partner Daphne Kis sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and left CNET in January 2007.

On 7 October 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi's trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009.<ref>"Space Adventures Announces Esther Dyson as Back-Up Crew Member for Spring 2009 Spaceflight Mission" Template:Webarchive. Space Adventures. 7 October 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-12. "Esther Dyson, an investor in Space Adventures [..] will train as the back-up crew member alongside orbital spaceflight candidate Charles Simonyi, PhD, who is currently planning a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in spring 2009. [..] The price of the back-up crew member program is $3,000,000 (USD), which includes the required spaceflight training costs, along with accommodations in Star City"</ref>

In 1997, Dyson wrote that as of that time she had never voted.<ref name=REL2.0.Newsweek1997>Template:Cite magazine</ref> The tagline of her email signature block reads “Always make new mistakes”.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Publications and business ventures

File:Esther Dyson-20071119.jpg
Dyson said, "I'm flying!", 2007 courtesy Zero-G
File:Esther Dyson-20070919.jpg
Dyson in 2007

Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care, logistics, artificial intelligence, emerging markets, and space travel.<ref name="edventureboard">Esther Dyson's Board Seats & Investments. EDventure.</ref> She was a board member of Yandex until March 2022.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Previously, Dyson and her company EDventure Holdings specialized in analyzing the effect of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She produced the following publications on technology:

  • Release 1.0, her monthly technology-industryTemplate:Vague newsletter. Until 2006, Dyson wrote most issues herself and edited the others.<ref>Release 1.0 and 2.0 Template:Webarchive at O'Reilly</ref>
  • Rel-EAST, a sister newsletter focused on the technology industryTemplate:Vague in Eastern Europe.
  • Release 2.0, her 1997 book on how the Internet affects individuals' lives. Its full title is Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. The revision Release 2.1 was published in 1998.

Philanthropy

File:ICANN History Project - Interview with Esther Dyson, ICANN Board Chair (1998-2000) (Part 1) (206E).webm
Interview with Dyson on her time as the board chair of ICANN

Dyson is an active member of a number of non-profit and advisory organizations. From 1998 to 2000, she was the founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of 2004, she sat on its "reform" committee (the At-Large Advisory Committee), dedicated to defining a role for individuals in ICANN's decision-making and governance structures.<ref name="ICANN"/> She opposed ICANN's 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She has followed closely the post-Soviet transition of Eastern Europe, from 2002 to 2012 was a member of the Bulgarian president's IT Advisory Council, along with Vint Cerf, George Sadowsky, and Veni Markovski, among others. She has served as a trustee of, and helped fund, emerging organizations such as Glasses for Humanity, Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, StopBadware, and the Sunlight Foundation. She was previously a member of the Global Business Network.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Other pursuits

Dyson was one of the first ten volunteers for the Personal Genome Project.Template:Citation needed

Dyson has served as a judge<ref name="Foot 4">Template:Cite web</ref> for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in New York.

See also

References

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