The Top 10 Lists

 

10. Nick Denton - Founder, Gawker Media

British journalist and internet entrepreneur, the founder and proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com.

 

Denton was educated at University College School and University College, Oxford. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times. He co-wrote a book about the collapse of Barings Bank called All That Glitters. He was one of the founders of a social networking site called First Tuesday and co-founded Moreover Technologies with David Galbraith and Angus Bankes, schoolmates from UCS.

Denton was featured in the Sunday Times Rich List 2007 in position 502 with an estimated wealth of £140m (approximately $290m) based on the sale of his previous companies and the current value of Gawker Media. He was once featured in a Vanity Fair photoshoot.

Denton is openly gay.

 

9. Drew Curtis - Founder, Fark.com

Founder and an administrator of Fark.com. He graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1995. From 1996 to 2002, he owned and operated DCR.NET, an ISP based in Frankfort, Kentucky. Curtis published his first book It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007. It soon became a bestseller.

 

8. Bram Cohen - Cofounder, BitTorrent Protocol

American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon, organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, and the co-author of Codeville.

 

He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Jenna and their three children.

 

7. Jean-Francois Clavier - Founder and Managing Partner, Softtechvc.com

Angel investor in Web 2.0 startups like NetVibes, personal-finance service Mint, and social advertising network SocialMedia. Five of his investments have exited the market via acquisition by Yahoo!, AOL, and others.

 

6. Pete Cashmore - founder, Mashable.com

New media expert, technology consultant, and founder of Mashable, one of the top-twenty blogs in the world according to Technorati. Founded in July 2005, the site focuses on “all that’s new on the Web” including information about social networks, websites, and content.

 

Cashmore was selected as a top 25 Forbes Web Celeb in 2007 and was also featured in BusinessWeek.

 

5. Dries Buytaert – Founder and Lead, Drupal.org

An open-source software programmer and the founder and lead of the Drupal CMS. Buytaert defended his PhD dissertation in Computer Science on January 27, 2008 at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

From 1999─2000 he was the maintainer of the GNU/Linux WLAN FAQ.

 

On December 1, 2007, Dries announced, together with co-founder Jay Batson the launch of a start-up called Acquia. Acquia wants to be to Drupal what Red Hat has been to Linux.

 

On March 31, 2008, Dries launched Mollom, a service dedicated to stopping website spam: "Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server." Over 4,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service. More than 100,000 messages are being analyzed every day.

 

4. Sergey Brin – President Google Inc

Russian-American computer scientist best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology. As of 2009, Forbes ranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.

 

Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

 

The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an “Enlightenment Man," and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance," a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful."

 

3. Jeff Bezos – Chairman and CEO, Amazon.com

American founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Bezos, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University, worked as a financial analyst for D. E. Shaw & Co. before founding Amazon in 1994. He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999. In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's Best Leaders.

 

2. Steve Ballmer – CEO, Microsoft Inc

Steven Anthony Ballmer (born Detroit, Michigan March 24, 1956) is an American businessman who has been the chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation since January 2000. Ballmer is the second person after Roberto Goizueta to become a billionaire in U.S. dollars based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder. In Forbes 2008 World's Richest People ranking, Ballmer was ranked the 43rd richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $11 billion.

 

1. Michael Arrington - Blogger/publisher, TechCrunch.com

Entrepreneur and founder/co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. Wired magazine also included him in a flowchart of "internet blowhards" citing his obsession with "Web 2.0".

Source: wiki