Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson
Born	(1951-07-14) July 14, 1951 (age 60) Zürich, Switzerland

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]} Dyson is currently focusing her career on preemptive healthcare and continues to invest in health technology.^[8]

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.^[9]

Life

Dyson's father is the physicist Freeman Dyson; her mother is mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson; and her brother is digital technology historian George Dyson.^[10] In childhood she received, for alliterative purposes only, the nickname "Dodo" (pronounced dough-dough); there does not appear to be, however, significant use of this nickname beyond her primary school experience.^[11] After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities as "the research department",^[2] following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, renaming it EDventure Holdings. She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004, but left CNET in January 2007 after CNET declined to continue her PC Forum conference.^[12]

Publications and business ventures

Dyson said, "I'm flying!", 2007 courtesy Zero-G

Dyson in 2007

Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care/genetics, and space travel.^[13]

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

• Release 1.0, her monthly technology-industry newsletter, published by EDventure Holdings. Until 2006, Dyson wrote several issues herself and edited the others. When she left CNET, the newsletter was picked up by O'Reilly Media, which appointed Jimmy Guterman to edit it and renamed the newsletter Release 2.0.
• 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.
• Release 3.0, her bimonthly column for the New York Times, distributed via its syndicate and reprinted in Release 1.0 (now defunct).
• Release 4.0, her weblog. On March 4, 2005, that weblog moved to Dyson's Flickr account.^[14]

She is an occasional contributor^[15] and sits on the advisory board of a new Open Access, Open Source, Open Peer Review journal, the Journal of Participatory Medicine.

Dyson is an adviser to the First Monday journal, and an occasional contributor to Arianna Huffington's online Huffington Post as Release 0.9.^[16]

Dyson has also been a board member or early investor in several tech startups, among them TrustedID, Cygnus Solutions, Flickr, del.icio.us, Eventful, Netbeans, Powerset, Systinet, ZEDO, CV-Online, Medscape, Medstory, Meetup, Valkee and Vurve.^[13]

As of early 2007, Dyson describes herself as "spending more and more time on private aviation and commercial space startups"^[17] and also in health care and genetics. She has invested in XCOR, Constellation Services, Zero-G, Icon Aircraft, and Space Adventures. Since 2005, she has hosted the Flight School conference in Aspen.^[18] She is currently on the board of directors of 23andMe, and is one of the first ten volunteers in the Personal Genome Project. Her latest investment include: Applied Proteomics, Genomera, Habit Labs, HealthEngage, Health Loop, HealthRally, HealthTap, Keas, Medico, Medivo, Omada Health, Organized Wisdom, PatientsLikeMe, Resilient, Tocagen, Mequibrium, VitaPortal, GreenGoose, PatientsKnowBest, and Valkee.^[19]

Philanthropy

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, dedicated to defining a role for individuals in ICANN's decision-making and governance structures.^[2] She opposed ICANN's 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs).^[20] 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, and the Eurasia Foundation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of The After-School Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding educational opportunities for all students. She is also a member of the boards of the Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware, The Long Now Foundation, and a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Esther Dyson

• EDventure.com official website
• Column archive at Project Syndicate
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Esther Dyson on Charlie Rose
• Esther Dyson at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Esther Dyson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Esther Dyson collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Esther Dyson interviewed by Allan Gregg for TVOntario (1997) (See also programme information)