Esther Dyson | |
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Born | Zürich, Switzerland | 14 July 1951
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Relatives |
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Website | wellville |
Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) 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. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [ excessive citations ] Dyson's career now focuses on health [6] and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.
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. [7] She was educated at Harvard University where she studied economics and wrote for The Harvard Crimson . [8]
After graduating she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities [2] 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. [9] 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. [10]
In 1997, Dyson wrote that as of that time she had never voted. [8] The tagline of her email signature block reads “Always make new mistakes”. [11]
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. [12] She was a board member of Yandex, which is considered the “Google of Russia,” until March 2022. [13]
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:
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. [2] She opposed ICANN's 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs). [15] [16] 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.
Currently, she is a trustee of Charity Navigator, ExpandED Schools (outside-of-class services for kids), the Long Now Foundation, Open Corporates, and The Commons Project, where she chairs the comp and culture committee.
Dyson was one of the first ten volunteers for George Church’s Personal Genome Project where you can find her complete genome.
Dyson has served as a judge [17] for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in New York.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet, ensuring the Internet's stable and secure operation. ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the Central Internet Address pools and DNS root zone registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function contract. The contract regarding the IANA stewardship functions between ICANN and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States Department of Commerce ended on October 1, 2016, formally transitioning the functions to the global multistakeholder community.
Laika was a Soviet space dog who was one of the first animals in space and the first to orbit the Earth. A stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, she flew aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft, launched into low orbit on 3 November 1957. As the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, Laika's survival was never expected. She died of overheating hours into the flight, on the craft's fourth orbit.
In the computer industry, vaporware is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late, never actually manufactured, or officially cancelled. Use of the word has broadened to include products such as automobiles.
The Internet uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to associate numeric computer IP addresses with human-readable names. The top level of the domain name hierarchy, the DNS root, contains the top-level domains that appear as the suffixes of all Internet domain names. The most widely used DNS root is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In addition, several organizations operate alternative DNS roots, often referred to as alt roots. These alternative domain name systems operate their own root name servers and commonly administer their own specific name spaces consisting of custom top-level domains.
Dennis Anthony Tito is an American engineer and entrepreneur. In mid-2001, he became the first space tourist to fund his own trip into space, when he spent nearly eight days in orbit as a crew member of ISS EP-1, a visiting mission to the International Space Station. This mission was launched by the spacecraft Soyuz TM-32, and was landed by Soyuz TM-31.
Space Adventures, Inc. is an American space tourism company founded in 1998 by Eric C. Anderson. Its offerings include zero-gravity atmospheric flights, orbital spaceflights, and other spaceflight-related experiences including cosmonaut training, spacewalk training, and launch tours. Plans announced thus far include sub-orbital and lunar spaceflights, though these are not being actively pursued at present. Nine of its clients have participated in the orbital spaceflight program with Space Adventures, including one who took two separate trips to space.
Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-American software architect.
Anousheh Ansari is an Iranian American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI). The Ansari family is also the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize. On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, she became the first Iranian in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Her memoir, My Dream of Stars, co-written with Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.
Yandex LLC is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine called Yandex Search, launched in 1997, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. Yandex Holding Company was incorporated in 2000. As of 2016, it primarily served audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and countries with a significant Russian-speaking population.
Paul Garrin is an interdisciplinary artist and social entrepreneur whose work explores the social impact of technology and issues of media access, free speech, public/private space, and the digital divide. Starting as his assistant in 1981, Garrin eventually emerged as one of the most important collaborators of video art superstar Nam June Paik, working closely together from 1982 to 1996.
Soyuz TMA-13 was a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft was launched by a Soyuz-FG rocket at 07:01 GMT on 12 October 2008. It undocked at 02:55 GMT on 8 April 2009, performed a deorbit burn at 06:24, and landed at 07:16. By some counts, Soyuz TMA-13 is the 100th Soyuz spacecraft to be crewed.
The Soyuz TMA-14 was a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, which launched on 26 March 2009. It transported two members of the Expedition 19 crew as well as spaceflight participant Charles Simonyi on his second self-funded flight to the space station. TMA-14 was the 101st crewed flight of a Soyuz spacecraft, including launch failures; however, it was the 100th to launch and land crewed, as Soyuz 34 was launched uncrewed to replace Soyuz 32, which landed empty.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
MetaCarta is a software company that developed one of the first search engines to use a map to find unstructured documents. The product uses natural language processing to georeference text for customers in defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement, oil and gas companies, and publishing. The company was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Nokia in 2010. Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase, now renamed to Finch.
Jerry Michalski is an American technology consultant. He is the former managing editor of Release 1.0, a technology newsletter. He is the founder of Sociate.com and ReX.
Tracy Caldwell Dyson is an American chemist and NASA astronaut. She was a mission specialist on Space Shuttle Endeavour flight STS-118 in August 2007 and part of the Expedition 23 and Expedition 24 crew on the International Space Station from April 2010 to September 2010. She has completed three spacewalks, logging more than 22 hours of extravehicular activity. She is currently in space since March 23, 2024 for a third time, for a six-month mission onboard the ISS.
Lori Fena is an American internet activist, entrepreneur, and author, best known as the former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 1995 to 1998 and author of "The Hundredth Window". Fena is currently the co-founder and VP of Business Development for Personal Digital Spaces and Founder and executive director of the Sustainable Information Economy.
Benjamin "Ben" M. Rosen is the former chairman and former acting chief executive officer of Compaq and a co-founder of Sevin Rosen Funds.
Eric C. Anderson is an American entrepreneur and aerospace engineer. He is the co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures Ltd., the first commercial spaceflight company, which has arranged for eight missions for privately funded individuals to the International Space Station since 2001. Anderson is widely credited as having established the market for commercial spaceflight. He is also a founding partner of Space Angels Network, CEO of Intentional Software Corporation, co-founder and chairman of Planetary Power, Inc., co-founder and former co-chairman of Planetary Resources and chairman of Personal.com and Booster Fuels.
.nyc is a top level domain (TLD) for New York City. It was delegated to the root zone by ICANN on March 20, 2014.
Esther Dyson, former Chairman of the ICANN Board [..] She was appointed as one of ICANN's nine initial directors in October 1998. She served as an ICANN director until 16 November 2000.
Esther Dyson is editor of the computer-industry newsletter, Release 1.0, a CNET Networks publication