Joe Firmage

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Joseph Firmage (born October 26, 1970 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American Internet entrepreneur. He founded several business ventures during the dot-com boom and currently is involved with two closely linked organizations: ManyOne Networks of which he is CEO, and the Digital Universe Foundation of which he is a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors.

1 Business
2 Current projects
3 Unorthodox beliefs
4 Fringe science involvement
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Business

Firmage attended the University of Utah, where his father was a law professor, on a physics scholarship but only stayed through his sophomore year. In 1989 he started his first company, Serius, which produced a fifth generation graphic programming langague, that grew out of a Macintosh program he had written for his mother's greeting card business. He sold Serius to Novell for $24 million in 1993 and became vice president of strategic planning for Novell's NetWare division.^[1]

Firmage left Novell in 1995; later, in the context of the SCO-Linux controversies, he would explain that this stemmed from a disagreement over the company's strategy in selling its Unix licensing rights and a failure to compete with Microsoft in the network operating system market.^[2] Together with two other former Novell executives, Toby Corey and Sheldon Laube, he founded USWeb.^[3] Originally a Web design company, USWeb grew to become a publicly traded Internet consulting firm. In quick succession, Firmage resigned as CEO in November 1998 to become chief strategist while the company merged with CKS, and then left entirely in January 1999.^[4]

After leaving USWeb, Firmage's next business project was known as Intend Change, launched together with USWeb co-founder Toby Corey, and also supported by the investment of an undisclosed amount from USWeb itself. Intend Change also went into the consulting business, this time as an advisor to new Internet businesses seeking venture capital. In exchange for its services, Intend Change would take a ten percent equity stake in the client, which an analyst described as "pretty significant."^[5] The company did not plan to contribute any capital for these equity stakes, but Firmage and his partners indicated they might invest personal capital or help arrange funding with Intend Change's own venture capital partners. They also sought commitments from startups to set aside stock and dedicate it to charitable causes, saying they would donate half their equity in Intend Change to unspecified nonprofit agencies.^[6]

As Intend Change dissolved in 2000, Firmage began working with Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and her Cosmos Studios organization on a concept known as "Project Voyager," which would develop a web portal focused on science-oriented entertainment.^[7] They raised $23 million for the project from the same venture capital firms that supported Intend Change. The site was launched in 2001 at www.onecosmos.net and emphasized the use of three-dimensional navigation over text hyperlinks. The venture planned to draw content from the Sagan-founded Planetary Society while helping to support that organization and the SETI@home project in their other endeavors.^[8] However, it struggled to secure funding to remain operational.^[9]

[edit] Current projects

Firmage persisted with the idea and founded ManyOne Networks. With another $10 million raised from angel investors, in 2005 he announced his plan to launch the Digital Universe project, which he called "the PBS of the Web." This would consist of a number of subject-area portals, serving as "an ad-free alternative" to large portals such as AOL or Yahoo. It would also partner with nonprofit organizations to sell Internet service and develop content for the project, starting with a non-profit encyclopedia called Digital Universe to compete with Wikipedia.^[10]

[edit] Unorthodox beliefs

Around the time of Firmage's departure, word began to circulate about his belief in extraterrestrial intelligences, which was the subject of a book he wrote called "The Truth".^[11] Published online at www.thewordistruth.org, it contended that extraterrestrials had appeared on Earth periodically to help spur human technological advancement. For example, important elements of modern technology were explained as deriving from an alien spacecraft supposedly recovered from the 1947 Roswell UFO incident. Firmage also related his own contact with an otherworldly figure, shortly before the USWeb IPO, with whom he discussed space travel. To pursue this, Firmage reportedly spent over $3 million to buy ads for the book and establish a "Project Kairos" in support of his ideas.^[12]

[edit] Fringe science involvement

Some of Firmage's statements are clearly influenced by Bernard Haisch (see stochastic electrodynamics) and Hal Puthoff (see polarizable vacuum):

We have discovered that the Cosmos in which we live is a field of intense but mainly uniform energy - in other words, all that you are, touch, see, hear, taste, smell, feel, or think is a pattern of light - a suspension within a single Universal force... We have realized that all things have formed through the function of this light - all ideas, animals, plants, worlds, suns, and galaxies...We have leading physicists who are well-grounded in their belief that gravity is caused by this light - in my words, gravity is like a shadow cast in time by the patterns of space... We have discovered that the light that makes the Cosmos - this "seething vacuum potential" of spacetime - is engineerable through electromagnetic devices.

– Joe Firmage, quoted at Skepdic

Firmage has also stated (see remote viewing):

We have definitively confirmed millennia-old anecdotes of "unusual" powers of mind. In experiments spanning decades at some of the most respected universities in the world, human subjects have consistently demonstrated the ability to influence truly random events and random number generating machines, through the power of their conscious intent alone. There is growing agreement among experts that there is only one explanation for this: the function of consciousness is a manipulation and manipulator of the vacuum potential that makes all things. Your mind can directly interact with the Cosmos, at a distance!

– Joe Firmage, quoted at Skepdic

According to a Washington Post story by Joel Achenbach, a paper by Haisch was the immediate cause of Firmage's life changing mystical experience. However, while Firmage certainly appears to endorse the theoretical speculations of Haisch, the converse is not true.