25 most influential people on the Internet
BusinessWeek magazine, having surveyed its readers and authors, compiled a list of 25 people who, in his opinion, had the greatest influence on the formation of the modern Internet.
1. “Creator”
Tim Berners-Lee
In 1989, Berners-Lee laid down the fundamental principle of organizing information on the Internet by inventing hypertext, or more simply, a reference system. In the mid-1990s, Berners-Lee began developing a new concept called the Semantic Web, a method for more conveniently organizing information on a tag-based network. He currently leads the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization that develops standards that may become accepted on the Internet in the future.
2. "Pioneer"
Mark Andrissen
Marc Andrissen made a revolution in the field of Internet navigation, greatly simplifying it by creating the first Internet browser Mosaic. Later, together with Jim Clark, he founded the Netscape Communications network, which then became publicly available and was bought by AOL. He is currently working on a Ning startup that helps users create their own social network on the Internet.
3. The "Seer"
Jeff Bezos
In 1994, Jeff Bezos came across a statistic that struck him: Internet use is growing at a rate of 2300% per year. He had a good job at that time, but he came to his boss and said: "I am going to deal with one crazy idea - to sell books over the Internet." The idea was not bad and allowed to create the largest online store on the Internet Amazon.com.
4. “Searchers”
Sergey Brin, Larry Page
This practically inseparable couple was able to create without a doubt the most powerful Google website in the world, having come up with a method of analyzing links between resources that provides an effective search on the network. Brin and Page have become billionaires, but still try to adhere to their informal motto "Do no harm."
5. "Decorator"
Marissa Meyer
Another player on the Google team. In 1999, Meyer became the first female Google engineer. She is currently vice president of search and user products. Her ideas, embodied in the design and principle of devices of various Google services, helped to turn the brilliant technical concept of Brin and Page into a finished product, the most popular on the Internet. The way Google now looks is the result of its work.
6. The "Encyclopedist"
Jimmy Wales
Wales, along with Larry Sanger, launched the world's most popular Internet encyclopedia - Wikipedia. This resource has become a social phenomenon, just like Google. He brings less money to his creator, but Wales is working on it. Now he is trying to apply the principle of “nationality” in another product by creating a new search engine, a significant part of which users will occupy.
7. “Kommersant”
Margaret Whitman
Whitman has transformed the disordered eBay online auction into a powerful international e-commerce tool. Having achieved success in this matter, she took up the purchase of other related and far from 1f70 online trading projects. Her empire now includes services such as PayPal Internet payment system and Skype Internet phone. Whitman continues to take over, and you cannot blame her for illegibility.
8. The "Blogger"
Evan Williams
This man in 1999 created the Blogger website, a tool that allows everyone to create their own virtual platform, from which you can express whatever you want. The company is flourishing, however, now without Williams, who without hesitation sold his brainchild to the insatiable Google. How much he received is unknown, but there is no doubt that a lot. Now he can afford to engage in “little things” - for example, creating a system of “microblogging” - Twitter, which allows you to collect snippets of thoughts and statements of different people in one place who do not want to start their own full blog, but would like to share their thoughts with others.
9. The Gatherer
Kevin Rose
By building Digg's “live news aggregator”, Kevin Rose has created a new way to read news on the Internet. Now, to find out how the network lives, at least the American part of it, just look at its website. By a user vote, Digg determines which of the latter is really important and which is not worthy of mention. Now Digg Rose's efforts smoothly turns into another social network. Meanwhile, the community of "diggers" has already become an influential force, which is forced to reckon with, not only on the Internet, but also in the real world.
10. The "Dreamer"
Philip Rosdale
By creating the fictional world of Second Life, Rosedale was the first to effectively realize long-held dreams and predictions about virtual reality. The Second Life project, which began as an entertainment service, is becoming increasingly serious. Now it has 9 million virtual residents, and the turnover of the virtual economy surpasses 12 million of quite real US dollars. It may well be that in the future, “Second Life” in importance is compared with the first. The main thing is that the first does not turn into the world of The Matrix.
11. “Friend”
Tom Andersen
In 2003, Anderson and Chris Devolph founded MySpace.com to help musicians connect with their fans. By mid-2005, MySpace already had 22 million members and was bought by News Corp for $ 580 million. Now the average monthly audience of the world's most popular social site is more than 115 million unique users. However, Andersen still finds time to add all the new MySpace users to the friends list, however, he does this not without the help of a robot program. Without him, he would not have been able to devote time to strategic plans for expansion into China and defense with another growing social network - Facebook.
12. "Soul of the company"
Mark Zuckerberg
In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, along with roommates at a Harvard university dormitory, created a site for communication between students. Soon students of Stanford, Columbia and Yale universities began to use Facebook. Zuckerberg dropped out and moved from the university campus to Silicon Valley, where he began to develop the site. By spring, the social network expanded to 800 colleges, and two years later the site opened for public use. At the last count, 41 million active users of the site were recorded.
13. The Newspaper
Rupert Murdoch
The 76-year-old Australian media tycoon, before many of his colleagues, realized the importance of the Internet and the threat it poses to the traditional media on which Murdoch made his fortune. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Murdoch empire News Corp laid out several hundred million dollars for the purchase of the MySpace social network.
14. “Designer”
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple as CEO in 1996, is obsessed with trifles and, at first glance, meaningless details - it was this property that allowed him to create a number of products that many consider ideal. Thanks to his efforts, everyone knows that music is best played on iPods, and you need to download it from the iTunes store. Fortunately, a monopoly is impossible, and Jobs has to constantly come up with new moves to maintain the cult of Apple at the proper level.
15. The “Cowgirl”
Mitchell Baker
While working at Netscape, it was no coincidence that Baker earned the nickname “Shepherd’s Shepherd” - at the current position as the head of Mozilla, one of the largest open-source projects - the Firefox browser, she has to, on the one hand, maintain the spirit of freedom and enthusiasm, thanks to which she managed to create a free browser that is superior in quality to Internet Explorer from Microsoft, and on the other hand, to conduct business so that a company that does not make money on sales can make a profit. While her work is progressing well, Firefox was able to win 15% of the market from Internet Explorer.
16. The Savior
Jerry Young
Jerry Young founded Yahoo! portal with his friend David Filo in 1995. Since then, the page on which links to categories were simply collected has turned into a billion-dollar empire. However, until recently, Young had only the honorary title of “Chief Yahoo” in the company. Now, when things are not going well with Yahoo - the portal is losing the race in Google, Young got the post of CEO. Young should not only raise the moral level of workers, but also create a miracle - again bring her to the market leaders.
17. “Investor”
Peter Teal
One of the founders of PayPal's online payment system, Teal has also created the global hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, which manages investments worth over $ 2 billion. In addition, Teal is the managing partner of the Founders Fund venture fund, which invests in technology companies. Among the companies to which Teal has entrusted the money of his clients are startups such as Facebook, Slide and Ooma. In general, if you have a brilliant high-tech idea, but don’t have money to implement it, try to convince Tila of her genius. If he says yes, it means that you are halfway to success.
18. The Angel
Reed Hoffman
Another person whom the author of any promising startup in the USA meets is Reed Hoffman. Among the inhabitants of Silicon Valley, he probably has the best connections. And not only because he is the founder and head of the professional social network LinkedIn, but also because he is an investor in more than 60 companies, 2082 including Facebook, Digg and Last.fm, and also serves on the board of directors of companies such as SixApart, Kiva.org , and Mozilla.
19. "King of Ventures"
Michael Moritz
Moritz is the third investor in the list of the most influential on the Internet, but you need to go to it if you have already achieved some success. Before becoming the managing partner of the Sequoia Capital investment fund, he was a correspondent for Time magazine and wrote popular books about Apple and Chrysler. However, then he changed his pen to a calculator and succeeded. Recently, Forbes Magazine named him the most successful entrepreneur.
20. The Critic
Michael Errington
If Hoffman or Till has already invested several million in your company, then now is the time to try to establish good relations with Michael Errington, who is the head and founder of the TechCrunch blog. In just two years with a little, Errington managed to turn his resource into a small but influential media empire. If Errington mentioned your company, it means that you have already gone a quarter of the path to success, and maybe it's time to ask for money for further development from Moritz.
21. “Teacher”
Tim O'Reilly
O'Reilly began publishing books on computers back in the 1980s, and 20 years later reference books and guides issued by his company fill the computer departments of all bookstores in the world.
22. The Decorator
Max Levchin
In 1998, Levchin had to borrow $ 2 thousand to buy his stake in PayPal, one of the founders of which he was. By 2002, this native of Ukraine was busy, as if not cheap, selling Margaret Whitman from eBay for PayPal for $ 1.5 billion (the cost of Levchin’s share was about $ 34 million). Now Levchin hopes to earn even more thanks to his new company Slide, which produces the so-called "widgets" - small on-line applications (such as slide shows) that are built into popular Internet services to perform a specific set of functions.
23. “Seller”
Marc Benioff
Modern trading companies are actively switching to using a new generation of software, which is a service distributed on the network. The pioneer of this service was Salesforce.com, founded by Marc Benioff. A former Oracle sales representative, he is still developing tools that other companies can use to create their own programs.
24. “Provocateur”
Dave Weiner
Weiner is best known for creating an RSS format that allows users not only to view the content of several resources at once in one place, but also to immediately learn about updating third-party sites. With his sharp statements, Weiner made a lot of enemies, but he did not occupy popularity either.
25. “Strategist”
Ray Ozzy
After Bill Gates began to move more and more from direct management of Microsoft, Ozzy took on the role of strategist. It is he who should help the company, which is a monopolist in software for users, take its rightful place on the Internet. We can say that in the coming years Ozzy will have no time to relax - while his company is more than ever far from victory.