Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004.

In the last few years, she has turned her sights on IT and health care, including two issues of Release 1.0, her newsletter (Health and Identity: No Patient Left Behind? in January 2005 and Personal Health Information: Data Comes Alive! in September 2005). Also in September 2005, she ran a seminal Personal Health Information workshop that laid out many of the challenges still bedeviling the health-care community. Currently, she is one of the initial ten subjects of George Church's Personal Genome Project.

Her healthcare investments over the years have included Medscape (board member) and Medstory, recently sold to Microsoft. She is also an investor in Ovusoft, Resilient, and Voxiva (board member), and is an informal advisor to DNA Direct.

Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include Boxbe, CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Yandex (Russia), and WPP Group. Some of her past direct IT investments include Flickr, Del.icio.us, BrightMail, and Orbitz.

For more than 20 years Dyson wrote the newsletter Release 1.0 and ran PC Forum, the IT market's leading executive conference. She sold them to CNET Networks in 2004, and left CNET at the end of 2006. Dyson was the founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000, and was also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 90's. In 1997, she wrote "Release 2.0 : A Design for Living in the Digital Age," which appeared in paperback a year later as "Release 2.1." In 1994, she wrote a seminal essay on intellectual property for WIRED magazine.

In both her investments and her nonprofit activities, she has always been concerned with the impact of information technology on business and society.