ManyOne
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ManyOne Networks is an Internet services company headquartered in Scotts Valley, California. The company is backed by individual and institutional investors, but is attempting to pioneer a new kind of business structure. A Canada-based foundation has been set up, the ManyOne Foundation, which will be the recipient of profits from ManyOne Networks, which is selling Internet access and other premium services. Those monies will be used to acquire all investor and other stakeholder owned stock in ManyOne Networks so that ultimately ManyOne Networks will be wholly owned by the philanthropic ManyOne Foundation. It is stated in company material that this will insure that the company’s activities and assets will remain dedicated to public service.
ManyOne Networks was started in 2002 as a Web portal company by Joseph Firmage, an Internet entrepreneur, Web visionary and former CEO of USWeb, a $3B company at its peak. Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch serves as Chief Science Officer of ManyOne Networks.
ManyOne is a successor to a project called One Cosmos, a partnership between Firmage and Ann Druyan, a science writer and widow of astronomer Carl Sagan, who co-wrote the PBS series Cosmos with Sagan and later co-produced the 1997 film Contact starring Jodie Foster.
One Cosmos was to be a science-based education and entertainment portal using advanced graphics and other innovative Web capabilities. The inspiration, according to Firmage, came from Sagan’s reference in Cosmos to an Encyclopedia Galactica -- a term borrowed from Isaac Asimov – referring to a fictional repository of universal knowledge. One Cosmos was to be the initiation of such an encyclopedia. Approximately $11M in venture capital was spent before One Cosmos was terminated by its Silicon Valley financial backers during the Internet bubble collapse of 2000. Firmage was able to purchase the intellectual property rights to One Cosmos in late 2001, and these formed much of the conceptual basis for ManyOne Networks.
With the founding of ManyOne Networks, the creation of an Encyclopedia Galactica has been replaced by a more ambitious Digital Universe project, which is also frequently described in company announcements as a “PBS of the Web.” In addition to an online encyclopedia the Digital Universe aspires to become an archive of information, a multimedia learning center, news source and directory of the Web. To create a domain of credible, non-commercial, advertising-free information, the volunteer efforts of a world-wide network of experts and educators (referred to as “stewards” by the company) is necessary. To enable this, a second foundation, the non-profit Digital Universe Foundation, has been set up by the company. It is to be the organization that runs a worldwide stewardship program, and that will evolve independently of ManyOne Networks even though the rich-media capabilities of the ManyOne browser are tailored to deliver the optimal experience of Digital Universe content, such as 3D rendering. The entire software and technology is slated to become open-source and access to the Digital Universe via other browsers is planned, although with a loss of some presentation features. The ManyOne browser itself will be free.
One of the first components of the Digital Universe will be an encyclopedia, modeled after the Wikipedia and guided in part by Wikipedia’s chief architect, Larry Sanger, a director of the Digital Universe project. Three major points of contrast with Wikipedia are the existence of expert-only created material, segregation of publicly-contributed material from expert-vetted material, and the requirement that all contributions and edits (by experts or the public) be signed by authors using real names. The Earth Portal, comprising the efforts of a number of environmental organizations and headed by Boston University professor Cutler J. Cleveland, is the first coalition of organizations to launch a part of the Digital Universe in January 2006.
