Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson, CEO of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, health care, private aviation, and space travel.
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2012-01-26
| The Russian protests – called “mitings” – are no longer just for old people, radical extremists, or jobless, unskilled feral youth. They are for sociable people who have time and money not just for politics, but also for shopping and, yes, even cosmetic procedures.... read |
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2011-12-23
| Unfortunately, many new technologies and business models make money for investors without creating jobs for workers, causing unemployment and “cognitive surplus” – unused brainpower. But what if all that unused inside information about companies could be monetized?... read |
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2011-12-19
| Too much of the talk nowadays about how social media have affected politics and the quest for greater democracy focuses on awareness: People adopt social media, discover they are not alone, start to protest, and eventually their “Facebook revolution” overwhelms those in power. But, even if such a revolution succeeds, that is only the beginning.... read |
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2011-11-17
| Building a company is a lot harder than having a good idea, for it requires attracting people and organizing them to work together. That fact is lost on too many Internet "entrepreneurs" nowadays, who sell themselves to Google, Facebook, and other large firms before they have created real companies.... read |
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2011-10-07
| In the personal-computing business, Steve Jobs was the only true showman of what is now one of the world’s biggest industries. Others have become “business” leaders, but only Jobs became someone known and admired by millions.... read |
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2011-09-20
| It is fashionable nowadays to talk about personal attention as a commodity or even a currency. But attention is neither: it can be bought and sold, to some extent, but it cannot be traded to third parties, and it is not entirely fungible.... read |
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2011-08-25
| The Internet's governing body, ICANN, is allowing for a dramatic expansion of the namespace with a host of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), the suffixes that go after the dot, such as .com, .org, and, soon, .anything. That is likely to create money for ICANN’s primary constituents, but only added costs for companies and the public at large.... read |
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2011-07-26
| No one expects venture capitalists to divert their resources to village schools, but perhaps they could focus a little more on training new employees rather than poaching them from the competition at inflated salaries. They could also encourage their employees to donate their time to a local entrepreneurs’ club.... read |
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2011-06-22
| Most companies regard online privacy warily, seeing only expensive disclosure requirements, constraints on their ability to collect information about their customers, and a potential source of legal liabilities. But companies should be turning personal data into an asset by giving it back to their customers in an enhanced form.... read |
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Illusions of Democracy
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Esther Dyson 
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The Internet has changed how we do business, how we do politics, and even how we change our leaders – at least some of the time. But we should not let that fool us into believing that the online world is even remotely like democracy.... read
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2010-01-18
| Google's threat to leave China probably stems from a combination of – or rather, a changing calculus around – its business interests and its values. The censorship issue has long grated at the company, but so have the constraints on any foreign company's ability to make serious long-term profits.... read |
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2009-03-19
| The best approach to computer security is to view it as an issue of public health and economics, in which people can protect themselves but must pay for the costs they impose on others. From this perspective, the Internet service providers, because they are the entities best equipped to do so.... read |
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2009-02-19
| Ten years ago, consumers were lucky to find the phone number and address of the manufacturer on a tube of toothpaste. Now, blogs and rating services offer independent views of products, and consumers are applying that same curiosity to their governments.... read |
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2009-04-21
| Advertising must change from sending “messages” to passive consumers to sponsorship, product placement and, conversations with active consumers. As it does, the traditional skills of advertising will give way to those of public relations. ... read |
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2008-11-20
| Why would somebody with a few extra million dollars lying around choose to spend it on training to become a space tourist? Dyson offers her own reasons for entering cosmonaut training, writing from Russia's Star City facility outside Moscow.... read |
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2009-05-21
| Excitement about electric cars abounds nowadays, but it wouldl take years of new-car sales to make a dent in the number of existing gasoline-powered cars, which is about 850 million. That fact at first depressed Jiri Räsänen, a civil servant in Helsinki, but then it gave him and his friends a good idea: Why not keep the cars but replace their engines?... read |
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2009-01-19
| The new US administration is planning to appoint a chief technology officer, following the lead of most large corporations nowadays. But what most countries need is a chief information officer – someone who thinks about information as an agent of change, not just as an agent of efficiency.... read |
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2008-12-19
| Google doesn’t merely point users to existing information on the Web; it also collects information that it doesn’t share about its users’ behavior. That gives Google a degree of power that both the company itself and governments around the world could readily abuse.... read |
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2009-06-19
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| Forget about innovation and exotic new technology. People still haven’t learned to use the technology we already have, and nowhere is this more evident than in the use - and misuse - of e-mail.... read |
2011-11-17
