m in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.
10) Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - YouTube
Chad Hurley (aged 28) and Steve Chen (aged 27) became the founders of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet.
Chad Hurley used to work for eBay’s PayPal in the designing department where he designed their logo. Together with PayPal colleagues, Jared Karim and Steve Chen, Chad founded YouTube in 2005.
Google later acquired YouTube at $1.65 billion dollars.
11) Jeff Preston Bezos - Amazon
Jeff Bezos is the founder, chairman of board, president and the chief executive officer of Amazon.com, a major e-commerce company that sells goods through the Internet. His net worth is currently at $8.2 billion dollars.
He was named Time magazine Person of the Year in 1999.
12) Shawn Fanning - Napster, Rupture
Inventor of Napster, the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platform, Shawn Fanning is a computer programmer who developed Napster when he was still pursuing his studies in Northeastern University, Boston.
Soon after, however, Napster was the target of several music industry-backed lawsuits, which ultimately ended up causing the cessation of the service.
In December 2006, Fanning developed Rupture, a social networking tool that facilitates profiles and communications of online gamers in World of Warcraft.
13) Pierre Omidyar - eBay
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay, an online auctioning marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. With a net worth of about $7.7 billion dollars, Omidyar and his wife Pam, are one of those entrepreneurs that go beyond doing profits, which is by contributing to non-profits organizations and aiding start-ups.
He wrote the source code of eBay when he was 28 years old in 1995. Initially, he decided to name his auction site after his consulting firm, Echo Bay but unfortunately, echobay.com was already taken. To save up his Internet service provider cost, he registered eBay.com.
14) Jack Ma - Alibaba
A similar site like ebay, was founded by Jack Ma, in 1999. It is basically a China-based business marketplace site that serves international businesses.
Alibaba Group then founded TaoBao.com, which is an online auction website that is pretty much similar to eBay and instead of paying through PayPal, TaoBao’s currency is AliPay. Yahoo Inc. then acquires 40% stocks worth over $1 billion dollars.
15) Craig Newmark - Craigslist
Craig Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur that invented the Craigslist, with over 14.1 million page-views a month, Craigslist.org is one of the most visited website on the Internet.
Craigslist is a centralized network of communities, featuring free advertisements and forums on various topics.
16) Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress, I would not have been here writing at this blog and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article.
At the age of 19, he invented the core of Wordpress, and later on when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing WordPress - a blogging platform.
He is also the founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.
17) Sir Tim Berners-Lee - World Wide Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee; the father of World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is also the founder of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology which comprises of companies that are willing to create standards and improvements of the Web.
From my point of view, if it wasn’t for him, none of the above mentioned personalities existed.
18) Thomas Anderson - MySpace
Since newly created MySpace accounts include Tom as a default “friend,” he has become known as the face of MySpace. As of November 20, 2008, Tom has over 250 million “friends”, a number which is constantly increasing due to new MySpace accounts being c