Esther Dyson is the Internet’s court jester, a person of no institutional importance who somehow manages to speak the truth and to be heard when and where it matters. She does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004.

You can find out more from links at www.edventure.com, and especially about Flight School. Or you can e-mail her at edyson@boxbe.com. (You'll be challenged with a captcha, but give it a whirl!)

Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include 23andMe, Boxbe, CVO Group, Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Yandex (Russia)…and WPP Group (not a start-up). Some of her other direct IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Orbitz (sold to Cendant), Medstory (sold to Microsoft), ActiveWeave, BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Mashery, Ovusoft, Plazes, Powerset, Resilient, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo.

Source: The Huffington Post