OneCosmos

One Cosmos was a partnership between Joe Firmage, an Internet entrepreneur, Web visionary, and former CEO of USWeb, a $3B company at its peak, 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. 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.