Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Co-founders of Google, the world's most popular search engine and one which has arguably been the most significant tool of the past decade. Although Google took off in 1998, Page and Brin have continued to dominate the web and their company, Googleplex is often named " Best Place to Work" in America. One of their most recent endeavours, Google.org was launched in 2004 and focused on solving worldwide problems relating to poverty, energy and the environment.
Sam Morgan: Trade Me, the largest internet-auction website in New Zealand was founded by Morgan in 1999 and was sold for over $700 million to Fairfax in 2006.
Built single handedly by Morgan, it was the first website of its kind that catered to kiwis and was easy to use. Trade Me has grown to hold over 70 per cent of market share and with nearly 2.5 million registered users.
Steve Jobs: CEO and Co-founder of Apple, a company that continues to astound with product innovation, Jobs has led the IT industry with Macintosh computers, OS X operating system and consumer and professional application software. In more recent years, he has revolutionised the music industry with the iPod in 2003 and digital jukebox, iTunes. Jobs was also the CEO for Pixar Animation Studios, which has produced eight of the most successful animated films of all time.
Mark Shuttleworth: Founder of Canonical LTD, Shuttleworth has taken on Microsoft's domination of the operating system market through the development of Ubuntu Linux. Committed to free and open source software, with Ubuntu he has shown that Open Source is especially beneficial to schools and colleges across the world and in developed and developing countries.
Mike Zuckerberg: Thanks to Zuckerberg, we've become even more successful procrastinators with the most popular social networking site, Facebook. With over 300 million users worldwide, Facebook has overtaken its older rival, MySpace. Zuckerberg has re-imagined the web as a connected community.
Meg Whitman: As CEO of eBay for most of the decade, Whitman was a key leader of the societal shift to online auctions. Under her guidance the company placed heavy emphasis on customer input and involvement, and eBay flourished.
Jimmy Wales: Founder of Wikipedia, Wales made life a whole lot easier when the free online encyclopaedia hit the web in 2001. Wikipedia now boasts more than 3.1 million articles in English and is one of the top five visited sites in the world.
Biz Stone: Co-founder of Twitter, one of the world's fastest growing social networking companies, Stone has created a new and original form of communication. Adopted worldwide, the microblogging service restricts each entry - called "tweets" - to 140 characters and is a new way for people to express themselves, and access opinions and information.
Rod Drury: Founder and CEO of online accounting software provider Xero, Drury is focusing on the world market, and his software has so far made life easier for small businesses in 25 countries. He is a New Zealand pioneer of the "Software as a Service" movement which is rapidly replacing software installed on computers and changing the way people work.
Drury also founded AfterMail, which was bought by Quest Software in January 2006 and won Best Exchange Product at TechEd 2006.
He was named as a Kea World Class New Zealander in 2008 and was New Zealand Hi-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006 and 2007.
Mitchell Baker: Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation that launched the Firefox browser in 2004, Baker aimed to keep the web open and loosen the strangle hold Internet Explorer had over other browsers. Now Firefox's market share has reached 25 per cent while the world's most popular browser, Internet Explorer has slipped to 64 per cent.
Technology
