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Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson
As editor-at-large at CNET Networks, Esther Dyson writes Release 0.9, a blog devoted to "early looks at things that matter." She also serves as a contributing writer for other CNET properties, and runs a variety of topic-specific panels and events that foster entrepreneurship and bottom-up thinking across industries.
Through her editorial responsibilities at CNET and in her private investment activities, Ms. Dyson provides insight on emerging technologies and markets, in addition to new companies. Among the topics she has covered for her newsletter, Release 1.0, and which she plans to cover in upcoming posts on Release 0.9, are applications for politics, health care, education, identity management, and other real-world concerns.
She serves on the board of directors for Meetup.com, Eventful Inc., NewspaperDirect and WPP Group. Long ago she sat on the board of Medscape, and more recently she participated in the sales of Flickr and del.icio.us to Yahoo!
She has explored the significant impact of the Net on intellectual property and, in 1997, she wrote “Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age,” about the influence of the Net on individuals’ lives, which addresses several of today’s hot-button issues such as security, privacy, anonymity and intellectual property.
From 1998 to 2000, she was founding chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), responsible for overseeing the Domain Name System. Ms. Dyson is a respected thought leader in policy-making concerning the Internet and society, and a variety of government officials worldwide turn to her for advice on Internet policy issues.
Ms. Dyson also donates time and money as a trustee to organizations including Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Eurasia Foundation. For several years in the ’90s she served as chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, Ms. Dyson joined Forbes in 1974 as a fact checker and eventually became a reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities as a securities analyst. In 1982, she joined Rosen Research, which she bought in 1983 and renamed EDventure Holdings. She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in early 2004.