Jeffrey Preston Bezos is the 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 TIME magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999.

Today, at a press conference in New York, Jeff unveiled Amazon’s latest trick up its sleeve, an electronic book reader, the Kindle. It comes equipped with a 6-inch 800 x 600 display, 256MB internal storage, smallish two-thumb keyboard cursor bar, scroll wheel, standard mini USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, SD slot, and EV-DO data.

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Tim Westergren founded Pandora in January 2000 and now serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. Tim is an award-winning composer, an accomplished musician and a record producer with 20 years of experience in the music industry. He has recorded with independent labels, managed artists, owned a commercial digital recording studio, scored feature films, produced albums, and performed extensively. His main instrument is the piano, but over the years he has played the bassoon, drums and clarinet and his musical background spans such genres as rock, blues, jazz and classical music.

Tim received his B.A. from Stanford University, where he studied computer acoustics and recording technology. A musician’s musician, he is obsessed with helping talented emerging artists connect with the music fans most likely to appreciate their music. In addition to guiding Pandora’s overall strategy and vision, Tim now spends most of his time as Pandora’s chief evangelist - traveling the country to meet with listeners to collect feedback, research local music, and spread the word of the Music Genome Project.

Pandora lets you explore this vast trove of music to your heart’s content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.

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Matt is the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and thousands of other blogs around the world. He also writes a popular blog Photo Matt. After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences. In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet, a spam-filtering service.

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Sarah Meyers streams live from New York City in Justin.tv. Sarah has been running a channel on Justin.TV, where she’s both its cast and crew, together with many other live broadcasters (or lifecasters, as they call it). She holds a Sony camera at arm’s length from her head, streaming live video of herself to the Web over a Verizon Wireless-based connection. Lifecasting her every move, she has amassed a loyal following from fans crazy about her beautiful looks and a charming personality!

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The Brazilian beauty, and the world’s richest model,  Gisele Bündchen recently declared that she won’t get out of bed for US Dollars! She insisted that she be paid in Euros rather than US dollars. With the dollar hitting an all time low against the Euro and British pound, the 27 year old catwalk queen has demanded the currency change. The statuesque blonde is reportedly the richest model in the world - a distinction she is clearly keen to hang onto. Her sister and manager Patricia revealed she was avoiding being paid in dollars because of uncertainty over its strength. When Bündchen signed a contract in August to represent Pantene hair products for Procter & Gamble, she demanded payment in euros, according to Veja, the biggest weekly magazine in Brazil.

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Unlike many people who have been getting attention online, John Chow has amassed loyal followers through his personal blog JohnChow.com by simply talking about anything from how to make money online to how delicious the food was at a restaurant he ate last night. People tend to find his unique perspective on every bits and pieces of things he does and shares very amusing. He himself has claimed that it is his personal blog where he talks about whatever he prefers. For example, as I check his blog right now, he has a post titled “No Sex Allowed on A380 Airborne Double Beds” where he talks about how Singapore Airlines, the first operator of the new Airbus A380 super jumbo jet, does not allow sex in their first-class double-bed suites. However, his blog is titled ”I Make Money Online by Telling People How Much Money I Make Online” and considers himself a Dot Com mogul. His miscellaneous ramblings, sometimes not necessarily grammatically fascinating, combined with interesting pictures and musings, have definitely won his readers hearts.

You can read more about him here.

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Cyan Banister is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Zivity.com, an online social networking community for connoisseurs of pinup photography that offers a secure environment for adults only. Zivity celebrates sexuality and free markets by rewarding models and photographers.

Zivity is Cyan’s brainchild. Her dream to connect the social web with sexy photos is the kernel that became Zivity. Cyan’s idea is a damn good one; that’s why Zivity is the first company in the “adult space” to be backed by Silicon Valley investment.

Cyan brings more than ten years of management experience to Zivity; from scaling operational infrastructure to building teams and championing company culture. Cyan held a senior management role at IronPort where she supervised throngs of employees and oversaw a slew of departments. Her mission for Zivity is putting models first and creating an environment that nurtures artistic freedom. “Freedom of expression without judgment” is her motto.

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Ashley Qualls, 17, of Detroit, runs a Web site called Whateverlife.com from her home. Whateverlife.com, basically a free MySpace layouts website, helps other teenagers decorate their MySpace pages. The site attracts more than 7 million visitors and 60 million page views a month, mostly teen girls, a very niche audience. In just two years it has generated more than $1 million in ad revenue. FastCompany recently published a fascinating feature article titled ‘Girl Power’ on Ashley, which you can read here.

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 Mitch Cohen, an undergraduate studying business at McGill University, started his latest company, ClixConnect, to help online retailers improve customer service on their Web sites. Cohen, who started his first business when he was 16, got the idea after watching his parents become frustrated whenever they shopped online, often turning to a brick-and-mortar shop, where they relished being able to talk to a human and getting questions answered quickly.

ClixConnect enables web-merchants to emulate the personalized service and attention given to customers in traditional brick-and-mortal retail outlets on their websites.

ClixConnect combines an online sales and support team with a proprietary live-chat application. When you sign up for ClixConnect, you will receive both the application and the sales and support team.

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Nathaniel is the founder of Yodle.com which helps “Your Business Get Found Online”. Yodle helps your company generate new business by connecting you with customers searching online for the services you offer. First, Yodle advertises your business online to customers in your local area. Second, Yodle directs these customers to your website so they can learn about your business and view your offers. Third, interested customers call into your business to set an appointment.

Nathaniel was featured on BusinessWeek as one of the best young entrepreneurs under 25. According to the story:

A few years ago, Wharton undergraduate Nathaniel Stevens was home trying to help his parents drum up prospects for their car dealership but became frustrated with the lead generation companies he contacted. He knew plenty of customers ventured online to shop but thought it was too difficult for small businesses to develop a presence there. So Stevens took a leave of absence from Wharton and started Yodle, an advertising services company that serves local businesses that lack the time or expertise to advertise online.

Stevens says the 55-employee company, which uses the tagline “Clicks Are Great, Calls Are Better,” makes money from clients who pay Yodle when their advertising results in customer phone calls. He says the company, which launched in August, 2005, expects to have approximately 1,000 customers by end of the year. Stevens received venture funding in November, 2006, and plans to open six to eight additional offices around the country within the next 12 months.

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Following is the list of top 10 most influential people who have proven themselves as trend-setters of the web. The list was compiled based on the information available online.

1. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark has redefined what MySpace started a few years ago and has taken social networking to a whole another level. With over 41 million registered users, Facebook has become a different world where people just ‘hang-out’ boycotting the rest of the web.

2 . Michael Arrington

Mike is the founder and editor of TechCrunch.com, one of the most popular blogs devoted to startups and new web technologies. Since Mike started TechCrunch in June of 2005, it has become a must read must-read in the fast-growing Web 2.0 world. His posts are so influential that they have been rumored to easily make or break a start-up’s success.

3. Kevin Rose

Kevin founded the famous Digg.com, a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. Digg revolutionized the way news was read by empowering site-visitors to choose and vote on news they deemed read-worthy.

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Google. Period.

5. Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs innovative thought process led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. Apple’s latest release, Leopard, has been ranked by many critics as a far better performing OS than Vista. iPod, iTunes, iPhone…need I say more?

6. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim

Chad, Steve and Jawed, who were all early employees of founded YouTube in 2005. By making the video-sharing process much easier and simple, YouTube revolutionized the way users uploaded, viewed and shared video clips.

7. Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson

Chris and Tom founded MySpace in August 2003. MySpace is currently the largest social-networking website and is credited for beginning the wild-social-networking-craze even though Facebook has been gaining popularity at a much faster pace recently.

8. Jason Calacanis

Jason is CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc., a network of widely read blogs. He generated a lot of buzz in the blogosphere when he sold his network of blogs to AOL for $25 million in 2005.

9. Markus Frind

Markus is widely known for single-handedly running the dating-site Plenty Of Fish. He often gets quoted when people talk about adsense earnings. According to this article, his site is on track to bring in over $10 million in revenue next year - that is over $30,000 per day.

10. Alex Tew

The Million Dollar Homepage was founded by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from England, to help raise money for his university education. The website is said to have generated a gross income of $1,037,100 USD by selling one million pixels on the homepage of the site for $1 each. His success sparked a number of other similar sites selling words, links, wiki pages and anything else you can think of.

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Morgan Ailis Webb is a host for the WebbAlert podcast, a co-host and senior segment producer of the G4 show X-Play, and was a monthly columnist for FHM, where she contributed a monthly video game column called “The Gaming Goddess”.

Webb developed computer skills in her free time at Berkeley, and after graduating from college, worked for a dot-com company as a website administrator. After the company went under during the dot-com bubble burst of 2000, her friend Catherine Schwartz hired her at TechTV in 2001 and Morgan became employed as the associate producer and web researcher for The Screen Savers. Webb is one of only six TechTV personalities, including Adam Sessler, Sarah Lane, Chi-Lan Lieu, Kevin Rose, and Brendan Moran, to survive the massive layoffs resulting from the May 2004 merger of G4 and TechTV. However, since G4’s change of format, only Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb remain on the network.

In August 2005, Webb became a contributing game columnist for FHM, alongside her regular hosting duties on X-Play. Her monthly column was titled “Tips From The Gaming Goddess”. Readers were encouraged to email Morgan their video game-related inquiries; she would then answer one question each month. In February 2007, Webb wrote her final column for the magazine, as FHM discontinued its US publication later that March.

Webb started a daily [Mon - Thur] video blogging initiative, called WebbAlert, on August 2, 2007. These daily videos are approximately 5 minutes in length and consist of a recap of popular technical news of the day.

She is married to Rob Reid who founded listen.com, and was involved in the creation of the RealNetworks music service Rhapsody.

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Leah Culver is the 24-year-old lead developer of Pownce from San Francisco. She earned her Computer Science degree from the University of Minnesota and has worked as a software developer for IBM, iLoop Mobile, and Instructables. She has also contributed to Chipmark.

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast. The Pownce Blog and Techcrunch recently announced that Pownce has launched a Public API allowing developers to create all sorts of Hacks, mashups, and widgets!

Pownce began as my hobby project, playing around with sending messages and media to my friends. I was also learning Django, a new web framework for Python. I really wanted to learn a new language and develop a web application from scratch. My friends Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose were thinking of their own ideas for a new website and after chatting we decided that together we could make something pretty cool.

She got a lot of attention online when she raised money to buy a new Macbook Pro by selling surface real estate on the front of her new machine to friends and advertisers. This is the video of Leah laser etching the logos onto her new Mac at Squid Labs where she works.

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Caterina Fake is best known as the co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing service developed by Ludicorp in Vancouver and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Flickr ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 integrating features such as social networking, community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the best, or more interesting content. Prior to founding Ludicorp she was Art Director at Salon.com and heavily involved in the development of online community, social software and personal publishing.

Caterina graduated from Vasser College with honours in English Literature.

She has won many awards, including BusinessWeek’s Best Leaders of 2005, Forbes 2005 eGang, Fast Company’s Fast 50, and Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs under 35. In 2006, She was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. She sits on the board of Etsy, and advises many startups and new businesses. At Yahoo! she runs the Technology Development group, known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products.

She lives in San Francisco, California with her husband Stewart Butterfield and their daughter Sonnet Beatrice Butterfield. You can visit her at Caterina.net.

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