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.
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 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.
Software career
Templeton began as the first employee of VisiCorp the first PC applications software company, where he published several games and tools and assisted on Visicalc the first spreadsheet and personal computing productivity tool. He also developed the IBM-PC version of the VisiPlot companion before release of the PC. He was CEO and Founder of Looking Glass Software Ltd. in Ontario. His software specialty has been languages, tools and spreadsheets, as well as software for USENET.
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. The library failed, but presaged many similar attempts to sell online content by subscription.
Since 2004, Templeton has been a board member of the Foresight Institute, one of the oldest futurist organizations and the leading one in the field of Nanotechnology.
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.
Templeton has been an active writer in the field of Robocars since 2007, building the site and writing regularly at . In 2010, he joined the Google self-driving car project where he consulted on strategy and technology. He has also served as a consulting advisor for Starship Technologies in the delivery robot space and QuanergyLIDAR, 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.
Templeton was a director of Bittorrent Inc.. Bittorrent's software was the largest driver of internet bandwidth use during the early 21st century. He is also the author of several well known internet essays on copyright and netiquette. He was also an active artist at Burning Man creating installations based on photography and telephony.
