Smarte2t people in tech..

Smartest analyst: Mary Meeker
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Mary Meeker's 1995 Internet report heralded the birth of an industry and soon became required reading for investors and entrepreneurs alike. As a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of its global technology research team, Meeker, 50, has made a career of analyzing the prospects of tech companies. She was hailed as the queen of the Net in the late '90s, a title that drew criticism when the dotcom bubble burst and many of the companies she'd praised went belly-up. But Meeker's methodical, numbers-based analysis held up, and over time she's been right far more than she's been wrong. Some of the optimistic calls for which she was dinged a decade ago have turned out to be prescient. Case in point: Amazon.

Now Meeker helps set the tech agenda in her annual state of the Internet address at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. And last December she and her team issued a 424-page report on the mobile Internet. Among its themes: In the future more of us will access the Internet from mobile devices than from personal computers. By 2020, she predicts, various forms of mobile devices will sell 10 billion units -- that's 10 times the number of PCs today. It's a bullish prediction that readers can be sure is based on thorough and thoughtful research.

Analyst runner-up: Mike Arrington
Founder and co-editor, Techcrunch

The corporate lawyer turned media mogul started TechCrunch as a hobby back in 2005. TechCrunch today is one of the world's preeminent tech blogs, expanding its coverage from startups and gadgets to nearly every facet of the technology industry. The site repeatedly breaks news (its big scoop: Google's purchase of YouTube in 2006), and Arrington can propel a startup to success simply by mentioning it on his site. And it isn't just entrepreneurs who seek an audience with Arrington, 40: He interviewed many of the presidential candidates on their tech policies during the 2008 presidential primaries.




Analyst runner-up: Charlene Li
Founder, Altimeter Group

Since leaving Forrester Research in 2008 to start Altimeter Group, Li has been pulling in big clients (HP, Microsoft). She has a history of staying ahead of the curve: She got into social media in the mid-1990s and was one of the first industry analysts to blog. Her firm focuses on disruptive technologies and is running a social commerce conference this fall to look at how social media is shifting power between consumers and retailers. "Nobody looks at the boring side of the business when you're in social media," says Li, 44, "but it has huge impact."



Analyst runner-up: Clay Shirky
Consultant and professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications program

Shirky's rule: Once people who know what they are doing show up, it's time for him to move on. That's why after almost a decade as an authority on the socialization of the Internet, he's shifting his focus to what he calls "journalism in the age of the amateur." He's taking a leave from New York University to teach at Harvard's Kennedy School on the topic and come up with some solutions for the ailing industry. "It's no fun just being the guy who's diagnosing the problems," the 46-year-old professor says.


Analyst runner-up: Fred Wilson
Blogger and VC, Union Square Ventures

Since he has investments in a who's who of tech companies -- Zynga, MeetUp, Twitter, Foursquare -- you might think we've put this venture capitalist in the wrong category. But Wilson isn't closely watched only for where he puts his money. His musings on his blog, AVC.com (he posts every day), also make news and inspire hundreds of comments. Take his post on what he sees as the end of third-party developers -- filling holes in Twitter's service. It got picked up by the mainstream media and had plenty of developers worried. For Wilson it's also a business tool. "I'm not sure I could be a VC without the blog," he recently told the New York Times. "You have to be out there in the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurs."


Smartest Academic: Danah Boyd
Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research

When Danah Boyd gave the opening remarks at this year's influential SXSW Interactive Festival, her thoughts on privacy were e-mailed, blogged, and tweeted by and to tech influencers. Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center and a social scientist at Microsoft Research, might be a 32-yearold academic, but when she speaks the whole tech world -- from CEOs to engineers -- takes notice.

Boyd conducts research on social media, and the self-identified geek has made a career of questioning the status quo. She's not afraid to ruffle some feathers in the process. "When I hit raw nerves, I know I need to actually go deeper," she says. Her SXSW address took on two of the Internet's giants, Google and Facebook, accusing the companies of failing to understand consumers' privacy concerns.

She is the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet, and she's writing a book on the subject. Boyd's research is the real deal, a potent blend of theory and ethnographic data. And she has real tech street cred too, courtesy of a degree in computer science from Brown.


Academic runner-up: Joseph Hellerstein
Professor of Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley

Computers have become cheap in recent years, but software is a growing expense for companies. That's where Hellerstein comes in. Not many programmers can write code that brings together multiple computers to solve one problem. But with his Berkeley colleagues, Hellerstein, 42, is collaborating with Yahoo Research on Bloom, a programming language that integrates disparate machines and "harnesses the power of the cloud," he says. The database systems expert serves on the technical advisory boards of EMC and Greenplum and was a co-founder of Cohera Corp., now part of Oracle.


Academic Runner-up: Fiorenzo Omenetto
Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University

Omenetto and a team of scientists at Tufts University's School of Engineering have taken a material that's been around for thousands of years -- silk -- and created optical sensors that are edible, completely biodegradable, and already FDA-approved for use in the human body. Such sensors could be placed in bags of produce to detect harmful bacteria, or they could be implanted in a device that tracks glucose levels in a patient's blood and sends that data to a physician's computer. "There are a lot of cool applications that one can think of for the future when you start bringing in the drug elements, the optical elements, and the protein elements," he says. Put another way, Omenetto's innovations sit at the intersection of information technology and biology.


Academic runner-up: Sebastian Thrun
Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University

Thrun's life changed forever in 2004 at the DARPA Grand Challenge, a contest to develop a car that could drive itself 142 miles from Barstow, Calif., to the Nevada border. The winning team went only seven miles. The disappointment inspired Thrun, 43, who specializes in machine learning and robotics. He dropped everything and took a group of students to the Mojave.Desert to tackle the problem. The next year his team won, and the German-born Thrun has focused on robotic cars -- he's especially interested in car sharing and more efficient highway driving -- ever since. He's also a Google Distinguished Engineer and worked on Google Street View, which provides photos for various streets and addresses.


Academic runner-up: Jonathan Zittrain
Professor of Law at Harvard Law SchoolCo-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

When Zittrain co-founded Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 1997, the web was considered a fad. Since then the web has proved resilient, and Zittrain, 40, has solidified his role as one of the Internet's most spot-on thinkers. Last year he launched Herdict (from 'verdict of the herd'), allowing online users around the world to report website issues to establish patterns and ascertain what sites might be being censored or monitored. "It's also testing the idea that we can use crowd sourcing in a useful way," he says. His book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It came out in 2008. (Naturally he crowd-sourced the cover design.)


Smartest Hybrid: James Cameron
Director, Avatar

When the alien Neytiri speaks in the film Avatar, the muscles ripple beneath the skin in her jaw so convincingly that viewers are hard-pressed to believe she is nothing more than a complicated string of ones and zeros. With the December release of Avatar, which garnered three Academy Awards, director James Cameron, 56, took 3-D imaging -- or stereoscopy -- to a new level, changing what is possible for the filmmaking industry.

Think of Cameron as the ultimate crossover artist: He's a technologist and a filmmaker. Cameron wrote a treatment for Avatar in 1995, but he didn't start working on it full-time for a decade. He needed advances in computer-generated filmmaking, and when the industry didn't move fast enough, Cameron embarked on a lengthy stereoscopy R&D project in which he basically invented a suite of moviemaking technologies.

The film, which cost some $300 million to create, earned more than $2 billion at the box office -- the biggest haul since that of Cameron's last film, Titanic, in 1997. For his next act Cameron is producing Sanctum, a 3-D film with some scenes shot underwater. He may soon enter yet another new realm of expertise: He's reportedly brainstorming with Washington on ways to address the BP oil leak.


Hybrid runner-up: Bob Bowman
CEO, MLB.com

Bowman likes to say his company has been blessed with great content -- namely baseball. But this media executive has been especially savvy about getting the American pastime out to the masses. MLB.com broke ground in 2002 when it streamed a game online for the first time, and had the foresight to get into the wireless space early. Bowman, 55, has carefully avoided the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all device model for content and made sure MLB.com was one of the first on the iPhone and iPad. "If it takes a battery or plug, we'd better be there," he told Fortune. Now the company is using its powerful back-end operations to run live-event streaming for CBS and ESPN. He says we can expect more partnerships like those going forward.


Hybrid runner-up: Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist turned policy wonk, Chu has enormous clout when it comes to shaping the future of technology. His department received almost $37 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, part of which will go toward efforts like developing clean coal technologies and renewable energy. (An example of a project: a $25 million wind turbine blade test facility.) It might just help kick-start the second industrial revolution he says we need to meet the world's energy demands in a way that's environmentally sustainable.

Hybrid runner-up: Monte Ford
CIO, American Airlines

Since American Airlines spun off its technology arm, Sabre, in 2000, CIO Ford has had to rebuild. "We lost the technological edge," says Ford, 50, who had worked in IT but had zero experience in the airline industry. "We needed to build it back into the company." He's spent the past decade dismantling the airline's mainframe architecture and replacing it with modular systems. In August the company announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard to build a new passenger service system that takes advantage of the efficiencies of cloud computing. Ford also introduced YADA (Your Assistance Delivered Anywhere), a handheld device that lets employees assist customers anywhere in the airport.


Hybrid runner-up: Nathan Myhrvold
Co-founder, Intellectual Ventures

Microsoft's first chief technology officer is a man of many passions (he's a serious foodie, and his nature photography has been featured in books), but his true love is innovation. At Intellectual Ventures, which funds inventors, Myhrvold, 50, is setting out to prove that funding inventions -- as opposed to business ideas -- can be as lucrative as conventional venture capital. IV today has more than 30,000 intellectual-property assets, acquired and developed internally, many of which seem years away from commercialization, much less an IPO. (Example: an invention to halt global warming that involves creating a thin film of sulfur dioxide around the planet.) But Myhrvold has assembled such impressive mind power that Bill Gates (no slouch in the IQ department) regularly stops by to brainstorm.


Smartest investor: Jim Breyer
Accel Partners

Long before Facebook became the juggernaut it is today -- Wall Street and Main Street alike are salivating over the prospect of a public offering -- Jim Breyer saw potential in the Sprite-drinking college dropout who founded it, Mark Zuckerberg. In 2005, Breyer led Accel's $12 million investment in the company, gearing up for the most anticipated initial public offering since Google -- and he threw in a million of his own.

Breyer has been on a roll lately. In one 24-hour period last fall, he led the sale of tech company BBN to defense company Raytheon, and then sold Marvel Entertainment (another company he backed with his own cash) to Disney. Since he landed in Silicon Valley shortly after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1987, Breyer has
invested in 30 companies that have gone public or completed mergers. To place his bets, Breyer draws on the experience he gains as a Wal-Mart and Dell board member. (He also sits on small boards, like that of startup Etsy.) These days he's paying a lot of attention to companies that provide support to social networks. Never heard of gaming company Booyah? Breyer just invested in it, so chances are you soon will.


Investor runner-up: Marc Andreesse
Founder, Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen has come a long way since selling Netscape to AOL for $4.2 billion, a move that established him as the web's first wunderkind. He subsequently co-founded two companies and invested his own money in dozens more. Last year, along with Ben Horowitz, he launched a $300 million fund so that he could make larger bets. Among them: He made a $50 million contribution to Skype, and most recently he led a $20 million round in Foursquare.


Investor runner-up: Reid Hoffman
Partner, Greylock

Hoffman's investing portfolio reads like a directory of the most notable consumer Internet companies of the past decade: Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Zynga. The 42-year-old Hoffman, who has a philosophy degree, emanates a certain type of brilliance that makes him a go-to adviser for entrepreneurs. Put simply, he gets how to grow a viral business. (Exhibit A: LinkedIn, which he founded in 2003, is flourishing.) With investments in 80 companies, Hoffman officially turned pro last year, joining Greylock Partners.


Investor runner-up: Vinod Khosla
Founder, Khosla Ventures

Longtime green investor Khosla this year has focused on investing in solutions to climate change. He recently backed nuclear tech company TerraPower, as well as a company making ultra-low-cost fuel cells and another developing combustion engines. Before forming his own firm in 2004, Khosla, 55, was general partner at Kleiner Perkins. This year he took a page from KP's playbook (Al Gore is a partner) and announced that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will act as an adviser to Khosla's clean-tech companies.


Investor runner-up: Yuri Milner
CEO and founding partner, DST

Ever since Russian investor Milner sank $200 million into Facebook in May 2009, entrepreneurs have started asking about 'DST-style deals.' As CEO of Digital Sky Technologies, Milner, 51, has so far invested more than $1 billion in American consumer Internet companies, introducing an innovative deal structure in the process. He asks for no preferred shares when he makes his supersize investments, and he doesn't want a board seat. "It's not risky because I know these companies will be very big," he says. DST has the majority share of every Russian Internet business except search engine Yandex. In the U.S., Milner has led investments in Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon. With billions more to invest, Milner is just getting started.