25 Innovators in Technology

11. Sam Palmisano
CEO, IBM

Major impact: Infrastructure

IBM has miraculously surfaced with the right sales pitch at precisely the right moment. Economies around the world are in crisis, so governments are pouring money into modernizing infrastructure like roads and electrical grids to create jobs. Global warming is a serious concern, driving investment in energy efficiency. And here comes IBM with its new strategy, guided by CEO Sam Palmisano. IBM says it's the only tech company big enough and broad enough to remake an entire nation's electrical grid by infusing it with electronics that help save energy, or build a smart road system for cities that can charge cars more for driving during rush hour. So far, Palmisano's pitch is working. In a down time, IBM keeps reporting up earnings.

War Chest: IBM is a $100 billion-a-year company that makes computers, has a giant consulting arm, and runs one of the biggest corporate research labs in the world.

Achilles' Heel: It's tough to grow a $100 billion business-to increase by 7 percent would mean adding a company the size of Yahoo every year.

12. Evan Williams
CEO, Twitter

Major Impact: Social networking

Twitter is nothing but 140-character-or-less broadcasts from users about what they're doing or thinking at any given moment. Yet it's one of the hottest properties on the Web-a way to keep track of friends but also a means by which marketers can reach customers or candidates can reach voters. Evan Williams is trying to guide this baby, but he's mostly hanging on as users find new things to do with the service. Williams is convinced that Twitter can be as big as Facebook-or maybe even bigger. Of course, it would help
if he could figure out a way for the company to make money.

Power Base: About 6 million Twitter users.

Achilles' Heel: Williams suspects that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all working on Twitter-killing clones.

Time-Eating Hobby: Following 900 Twitterers.

13. Richard Bookstaber
Author; financial risk manager

Major Impact: Finance

Just about every science-fiction movie has a similar theme: The machines seem all-powerful, but in the end, they're no match for humanity. This is the message that Richard Bookstaber has hammered into hardheaded Wall Street financiers. After a long career as a wizard at an algorithm-driven hedge fund, Bookstaber wrote 2007's A Demon of Our Own Design, in which he argues that technology fostered a high-speed, high-risk financial system about as stable as nitroglycerin. In the autumn of 2008, he was proved right. Now Bookstaber's tome has become a must-read for those experts charged with rebuilding Wall Street to prevent computers from morphing a financial hiccup into another full-blown crisis. The difficulty, though, is similar to that nagging problem in sci-fi flicks: Everyone continues to build better and badder machines.

Power Base: Respect for calling the meltdown.

Achilles' Heel: What's the encore?

14. John Yemma
Editor, Christian Science Monitor

Major Impact: Newspapers

Someone in this troubled industry had to jump off the cliff first. The internet has hacked away at the revenue of daily papers for years, yet editors and publishers have shied away from ditching the physical product. In October, the Christian Science Monitor made the leap, announcing that in April, the print edition would cease daily publication. The switch makes sense for the century-old CSM, explains John Yemma. Its national newspaper is delivered by mail to just 52,000 subscribers, while it operates a robust website with 1.7 million unique visitors a month. The rest of the industry is anxiously watching. In December, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press said they will end daily home delivery in favor of their websites. In January, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said it may go Web-only.

More will follow. Yemma has a chance to set precedents for news and newsrooms. "We're hoping not to replicate the print paradigm, but we're trying to hold on to accuracy and standards," he says. "Because there is an ability to be immediate, there is a danger we'll default to immediacy, so we have to tilt against that."

Achilles' Heel: There's no precedent for a newspaper's making the transition to Web-only publication.

Number of Facebook Friends: 112. "Is that a little or a lot? I don't know."

15. James Inhofe
U.S. Senator, Oklahoma

Major Impact: Energy

Alternative-energy technology has a grinch, and he resides in the U.S. Senate. James Mountain Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, has said that global warming is "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state." From his position as the ranking minority member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Inhofe will work as a counterweight to the Obama administration's expected clean-tech initiative.

Power Base: His supporters in the oil and gas industries.

Superhero Ability: Fearless belligerence. Anyone who could suggest that the Weather Channel is a propaganda machine for global-warming alarmists.

Achilles' Heel: Even if he had a point, his outrageous statements would undermine it.

Eccentric Side Project: Maintaining a biblically correct family. Inhofe was quoted in 2006 as saying, "I'm really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we've never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship."

16. Jon Wellinghoff
Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

Major impact: Power grid

Traditionally, a new FERC chief generates about as much excitement as a Captain & Tennille reunion tour. But President Obama's appointee-mathematician and longtime energy lawyer Jon Wellinghoff-will oversee a massive overhaul of the U.S. electrical grid. We're talking regulatory changes that affect billions of dollars in contracts and funding for new inventions. Turns out the 100-year-old way of moving electricity around is ridiculously inefficient. A smart grid loaded with chips that can sense supply and usage could negate the need to build more coal-burning electric plants. Companies like Google will be seeking Wellinghoff's approval for projects. Remember, the Federal Communications Commission was once a Washington backwater too.

Superhero Ability: Stealth. Who outside of policy wonks
worries much about FERC?

Achilles' Heel: Dullness. If the public doesn't get excited about smart-grid technology, it may be hard to build momentum for it.

Number of Facebook Friends: "None. My teenage
sons won't let me join."

17. Marc Andreessen
Investor in startups; chairman, Ning

Major impact: Startups

While he'll always be known for his first venture, Netscape Communications, Marc Andreessen has become Silicon Valley's mentor in chief. He gives guidance to Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who put Andreessen on the company's board, and he was one of the first investors in Evan Williams' Twitter. Andreessen and business partner Ben Horowitz pump smallish sums ($25,000 to $100,000) into one startup a month, spreading Andreessen's knowledge and influence among a young generation of entrepreneurs. Andreessen is also chairman and co-founder of the hot startup Ning, which gives people a way to create their own online social networks.

Power Base: Money and a track record from selling Netscape to AOL, for $4.2 billion in 1999, and another company, Opsware, to Hewlett-Packard, for $1.6 billion in 2007.

Derailed Side Project: His blog at blog.pmarca.com. Its torrid beginning, in 2007, made it a tech industry must-read, but then Andreessen abruptly quit writing last August.

18. Brad Anderson
CEO, Best Buy

Major impact: Consumer electronics

Under Brad Anderson, Best Buy has come to reign over consumer-electronics retailing-even if that just means being the strongest among the weak in a horrendous economy. He's retiring in June, and president Brian Dunn will become CEO. Anderson, who will stay on as vice chairman until 2010, leaves Dunn a company that can decide the fate of electronic gadgets just by putting them on its shelves.

Representatives from tech giants like Microsoft and startups such as internet phonemaker Ooma trek to Minneapolis to lobby Anderson and his cohorts. Anderson, 59, took charge from founder Richard Schulze in 2002, bought Geek Squad, and helped his company drive chief rival Circuit City to its liquidation this year. But the diving economy has Best Buy making layoffs and cutting capital spending by half.
superhero ability Listening. Best Buy has altered individual store offerings and layouts based on suggestions from the stores' sales-floor staff.

Eccentric Management Tactic: Keeps a mock "retail hospital" in his office, with effigies of companies such as Kmart lying in beds as a warning about what happens when retail strategies become stale.

19. Arianna Huffington
This item was updated as January traffic information became available.
Co-founder, The Huffington Post

Major Impact: News business

Chaotic and noisy, the Huffington Post comes off like an online mashup of British tabloids, American blogs, and a tailgate party. But Arianna Huffington's invention-she calls it an internet newspaper-is playing a huge role in redefining the news outlet. Huffington co-founded the site in 2005 with former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer. These days, about 2,000 professional and amateur writers contribute to it, including famous Huffington friends such as Larry David and Nora Ephron. HuffPo, as it's known, gets as many as 7 million unique visitors a month, and in December, it raised $25 million in a round of funding amid the worst credit crisis in decades. The site's worth, though, has stirred controversy of its own. Insiders allegedly pinned the number at $200 million. Bloggers analyzed HuffPo's numbers and gleefully came up with a different figure: about $2 million.

Power Base: A vast collection of high-profile friends, including the Clintons, Barry Diller, and Alec Baldwin.

Superhero Ability: Her willingness to dish anything and everything she hears from her famous friends.

Achilles' Heel: The site lost traffic after the election (though it spiked back up in January).

Ambitious Stalled Project: Local HuffPos for cities. So far, there's only one, for Chicago.

20. Rex Tillerson
CEO, Exxon Mobil

Major Impact Energy: Tillerson sits atop a company that brings in more than $100 billion in revenue each quarter. He has the power to exert enormous influence in energy technology, yet he's using his resources to make sure as little changes as possible. His intention, he has said in interviews, is for Exxon Mobil to be doing in 30 years pretty much what it does now. Tillerson is cagey, investing small sums in R&D for inventions like a long-life battery and playing it up in commercials. It's enough to mute critics, but not enough to actually affect the demand for oil.

Bragging Rights: More money than God.

Appropriately Effective Trait: Slickness. He's too savvy to get pinned down as an anti-environment ogre.

21. Jerry Shen
CEO, Asus

Major impact: Personal computing

For 25 years, personal computing was driven by a constant march toward faster, more-whiz-bang machines. In late 2007, Jerry Shen, the CEO of Taiwanese electronics-maker Asus, turned that philosophy on its head. He and chairman Jonney Shih introduced the Eee PC, a shrunken laptop that cost $300. It runs on Intel's downscale Atom chip and has a fraction of the power of a high-end laptop. The trade press gushed and labeled the Eee PC the first of a new breed called netbooks. Since then, Asus has sold more than 5 million Eee PCs. Acer, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard followed with their own versions last year.

Power Base: Asus has long made computer parts, mobile phones, and laptops for other brands.

Achilles' Heel: If the Eee PC gets too popular and competes with Sony, Apple, and other companies Asus manufactures for, will they still want to do business with Asus?

22. Lawrence Lessig
Professor, Stanford Law School

Major Impact: Internet law

Lawrence Lessig is to the Web what the professor was to Gilligan's Island. Lessig has brought intellect and reason to some of the Web's thorniest problems, chief among them copyright law. While Lessig hasn't solved the standoff between content owners and "pirates" who make free copies, he has offered a third path with his Creative Commons copyright license. He's influenced the debate about who should get radio spectrum for wireless internet and has the ear of his old friend President Barack Obama. (They taught together at the University of Chicago Law School.) In the past year, Lessig has focused on ways to use the Net to keep an eye on Congress and reduce corruption. This summer, he moves to Harvard.

Useful Talent: Drama. Watching a Lessig presentation is like viewing performance art.

Pop-Culture Moment: Lessig was portrayed in a 2005 West Wing episode by actor Christopher Lloyd.

23. David Bohrman
Washington bureau chief, CNN

Major Impact: TV news

On election night, CNN suddenly appeared to be broadcasting from the set of a Star Trek episode. Anderson Cooper interviewed a "hologram" of rapper Will.I.Am, who was seemingly beamed onto the set like Spock in the transporter room. Correspondent John King used his fingers to move around graphics and election results on something called the Magic Wall. The flashy broadcast was credited to David Bohrman, a longtime network-TV news veteran who had taken a detour to become CEO of Pseudo Entertainment, an interactive-TV company. CNN hired Bohrman and put him in charge of election-night coverage. His toys made CNN the pioneer in using technology to tell news stories, even though the holograms received mixed reviews. Some critics said they were distracting tricks-as if that were new to TV newscasts.

Bragging Rights: CNN had more viewers on election night than any other cable channel.

Questionable Timing: Bohrman joined Pseudo in early 2000, right when the tech bubble burst.

Number of Facebook Friends: Zero. "Here's my confession: I have a lurking-only account."

24. Reid Hoffman
Founder, LinkedIn

Major Impact: Social networking

MySpace and Facebook get most of the credit for making social networking into a phenomenon, but the force behind the trend is really the hyperconnected entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. He pioneered the form with SocialNet, in 1997. It didn't last, but Hoffman moved on to start LinkedIn, which claims 31 million members and is geared toward professionals. He's also invested in many of the hit websites that include a social aspect, including Digg, Flickr, Ning, and Facebook.

Eccentric Past: A master's in philosophy from Oxford in England.

Achilles' Heel: Time. Look at his résumé on LinkedIn: He can't possibly keep doing all that and remain sane.

Promising Side Project: Zynga, a new social-gaming site that Silicon Valley insiders believe will be huge.

25. Robert Zemeckis
Film director

Major Impact: Movies

Robert Zemeckis keeps changing the role of special effects in mainstream movies. In Forrest Gump, he used computers to drop the title character into historical footage. In The Polar Express, he pioneered motion capture, which uses sensors to record an actor's moves and translates them into animation. In 2007, his Beowulf combined motion capture and digital 3-D. Next up: His remake of Dickens' A Christmas Carol will be one of the first live-action movies shot in digital 3-D.

Power Base: Hollywood will fund any film he wants to make.

Achilles' Heel: Sometimes the effects are better than his movies.

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