Esther Dyson

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Esther Dyson (born 14 July, 1951 in Zurich, Switzerland) is an authority on emerging digital technology.

Dyson is the daughter of Freeman Dyson, a physicist, and Verana Huber-Dyson, a mathematician, and the sister of the digital technology historian George Dyson. After graduating from Harvard 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," following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer 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.

Dyson and EDventure specialize in analyzing the impact of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She is mainly known for the following numbered sequence of media ventures:

Release 1.0, her monthly technology-industry newsletter, published by EDventure Holdings. Each year, Dyson writes several issues herself and edits the others.
Release 2.0, her 1997 book on how the Internet affected 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.
Release 4.0, her weblog. On March 4, 2005, this weblog moved to Dyson's Flickr account ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/ ).

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. She has followed closely the post-Soviet transition of Eastern Europe, and is 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 also a member of the board for The Long Now Foundation, and is a part-owner of the First Monday journal.