Joe Firmage - Projects After USWeb

Projects After USWeb

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." 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.

Prior to the dissolution of Intend Change in 2001, 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. 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. However, it struggled to secure funding to remain operational.

Firmage founded ManyOne Networks in 2002 as the successor to OneCosmos with the intention to reshape the content landscape of the Web. With another $10 million raised from angel investors, in 2005 he announced the purpose of ManyOne: to create a "Digital Universe", 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 and Web services The first elements of the Digital Universe to emerge include the Earth Portal (http://earthportal.org) and its Encyclopedia of Earth (http://www.eoearth.org). Some have described it as Wikipedia "with adult supervision."

Firmage has written extensively on “third millennium theories” of economics and physics. In 2006 Firmage released what may be the first "open source film" about the history of the Cosmos, Earth and human society called I Am Awakening. In pursuit of one of the film's motivations—to inspire children to seek peace in the Middle East—it has been translated into Persian, Arabic, Hebrew as well as Spanish. In May, 2008, the web site it had been on, IAmAwakening.org, changed ownership and the film was no longer there.