ClariNet Most notably, Templeton was founder and CEO in 1989 of
ClariNet Communications, the first company founded to engage in commercial activity over the early Internet.
Electronic Frontier Foundation Templeton has been involved with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation since 1997, including being chairman from 2000 to 2010. His involvement in online civil rights also includes being the subject of one of the first major internet bans and being a plaintiff before the
Supreme Court of the United States in
Reno v. ACLU Templeton's strongest efforts have been in the areas of free speech, computer security, privacy and intellectual property.
rec.humor.funny and USENET Templeton played an active role over the life of
Usenet, including the development of software tools for it. His most notable activities involved the creation and moderation of the newsgroup "rec.humor.funny", a moderated newsgroup devoted to comedy. USENET statistics reported by
Brian Reid reported rec.humor.funny as the most widely read online publication starting in 1989, continuing in that position into the mid-1990s, with an estimated 440,000 readers.
e-Books Templeton was editor and publisher for
ClariNet's Hugo and Nebula Anthology 1993, one of the largest early commercial e-Book projects. It offered 5 full novels still in hardback release, along with a wide array of short fiction and multimedia. In later years, it has become the norm for the administrators of the
Hugo Award to produce an annual digital anthology of award nominees. This was an adjunct of the "Library of Tomorrow" project, which offered a full library of fiction on an "all you can read" subscription basis.
Foresight Institute Since 2004, Templeton has been a board member of the
Foresight Institute.
Singularity University Templeton joined the founding faculty for
Singularity University, an educational institution and think-tank devoted to rapidly changing technology and its effects. Since 2010 he has been Chair for Networks and Computing on that faculty.
Robocars Templeton has been an active writer in the field of
Robocars since 2007, building the site Robocars.com and writing regularly at Brad Ideas. In 2010, he joined the
Google self-driving car project (now known as Waymo) where he consulted on strategy and technology. He has also served as a consulting advisor for
Starship Technologies in the delivery robot space and Quanergy
LIDAR, among others. He writes frequently on this topic on his own web site, the
Forbes site and others. Templeton is inventor on 21 patents in self-driving cars and telephony. == Speaker ==