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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Sumaya Kazi is the co-founder of The CulturalConnect, a site that publishes six weekly e-magazines for the young, driven and forward-thinking. It has over 600 published interviews of awe-inspiring young professionals, and a fast growing readership in over 100 countries. Each weekly magazine and website delivers accessible, must-read profiles of the professional world’s often overlooked population of driven, innovative, progressive and successful under-35 leaders to an expansive subscriber base of up-and-coming individuals of the same type. Each e-magazine connects young minority professional with each other and to the nonprofit world: The DesiConnect, The MidEastConnect, The LatinConnect, The AsiaConnect and The AfricanaConnect.

The site features the following three sections.

Young & Professional Profile where interviews shed the image of the suit-sporting, Blackberry-toting young professional, who spends the hours of 9am-5pm chained to his/her cubicle. It gives new meaning to what it is to be young and professional. The section spotlights a community of young leaders that are bonded by success digging through unmarked offices and use untraditional methods to find undiscovered young talent across various ethnic communities and across various industries.

Non-Profit Spotlight recognizes that young professionals also channel their passions toward non-profit ventures. These organizations, often glazed over or lumped together in mainstream press, are granted the Spotlight in each of our weekly issues. The Non-Profit Spotlights educate and awaken readers by spotlighting young individuals in the Non-Profit community - bringing issues affecting the young professional community to the forefront.

ConnectionPoint which is a new and highly popular feature of the site encourages and enables you to interface directly with Young Professional and Non Profit young professionals, allowing you to build both professional and informal networks with people you find inspiring.

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Darren Jay Herman’s career has ranged from technology, public relations, entertainment, advertising, television, marketing, and media worlds and he has serviced some of the worlds largest and smallest brands and partners.He has successfully lead large teams and multi-million dollar budgets. He has also had solid record of hiring & recruiting, business development, sales, and strategy.

Herman gets regularly featured in the press and has been frequenting lectures at colleges and universities worldwide in entrepreneurship and marketing. His latest venture is IGA worldwide, which he co-founded with executives from some of the worlds largest advertising agencies, game publishers, and technology companies.

IGA was formed to revolutionize the way brands reach millions of consumers through video games. IGA Worldwide has added technology, research, analysis, processes, and value to video gaming ad industry to grow it substantially. The company has over $32.5 million in venture capital funding from the likes of NBC Universal, Intel Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Easton Capital, KTB Ventures, and DN Capital.

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Noah N. Glass was a former International Expansion Manager at Endeavor Global. He has appeared as a guest speaker at Harvard Business School and the World Bank. Previously, he was a product manager intern at Shutterfly.com. He was Voted “#2 Entrepreneur Under 25″ and “New M-Commerce Baron” in BusinessWeek(2006), featured in CNN’s “Young People Who Rock” and CNBC’s “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch” (2007).

His news-making venture has been GoMobo.com. Tired of waiting in long lines for coffee in his hometown of New York City—and assuming that others felt the same way—Glass invented Mobo, a mobile ordering system where customers order and pay for takeout meals from restaurants on their cell phones. The service, which launched in June, 2005, alerts users with text messages when their meals are ready, and is quickly catching on, neighborhood by Manhattan neighborhood.The service, which launched in June, 2005, alerts users with text messages when their meals are ready, and is quickly catching on, neighborhood by Manhattan neighborhood.

So far, Glass says restaurants that use the service report an upsurge in business, since it saves them time by improving kitchen efficiency and gets people in and out faster, reducing lines. Restaurants pay Mobo 10% of each sale generated through the service. And although the service is easily scalable, Glass says he’s trying to grow relatively slowly—New York this year and into Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London by the end of 2007. But Glass isn’t just interested in food. He says Mobo could extend into movie-ticket ordering and parking-meter payments, for starters. Eventually, Glass visualizes a GPS-aided taxi service that customers can preorder, forgoing waits and rainy-night frustration. Until then, the company is poised for serious growth, with 2007 revenues expected to top $1.8 million.

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Vitaly Feldman and Alexander Koretsky are two Pace University Graduates who launched MetroHorse in June, 2006.

MetroHorse is the Internet’s #1 Marketplace for Business & Personal Services where buyers and sellers of all types of services A-Z can meet to do business without the ordinary hassles involved.

The MetroHorse Online Service Marketplace makes what once used to be considered a difficult and time-consuming process, a quick and easy one by making it possible for providers of services and consumers of services to easily find each other on a single user-friendly platform.

Members of the MetroHorse online community enjoy countless benefits. Service providers on the MetroHorse Marketplace can connect to hundreds of potential service buyers in their local area to expand and grow their business. Selling services on MetroHorse allows service providers to increase their exposure and enables them to create a strong online presence. MetroHorse service providers have their own personal space on the Internets #1 Marketplace for Business & Personal Services to advertise, promote, and list their services for sale.

MetroHorse generates most of its revenue from paid search placement, where businesses pay to have search results on the site list their profiles in front of others.

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Three Brown University graduates, Elliott Breece, Josh Boltuch and Elias Roman, all 22 years old, founded AmieStreet in July 2006. AmieStreet, an online music retail site for independent content, uses a unique rating system where all songs are available for free at first. Then, depending on the popularity in the market, a song’s price is driven up. According to AmieStreet’s website:

Amie Street is the most fun way to discover and buy music online because we have a social network that facilitates music discovery and because we price music right - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. Our dynamic prices allow fans to buy music without breaking the bank and they serve as a useful tool for finding great music.

We know music is social, and finding new music needs to be fun. Music discovery is best served by communication between people, so we reward fans when they recommend songs to their friends by giving them credit to buy more music. Whether you spend two minutes or two hours on Amie Street you are connected to a world of music lovers discovering new music together.

We support our artists by giving them 70% of song sales and never taking ownership of their creative work. We want all artists on Amie Street to be successful and we believe that our unique marketplace will accomplish this goal to a degree never achieved before.

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PrepMe was founded by three college students. Karan Goel, CEO, is a University of Chicago MBA grad. Avichal Garg, the chief technical officer, holds degrees from Stanford in computer science and management and is also a product manager at Google. Joe Jewell, who heads up curriculum development and content creation, got his degree in Aeronautical Engineering at Caltech with an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Michigan and is finishing a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. The three also won the University of Chicago New Venture Challenge, a business plan contest, in May, 2005.

PrepMe uses adaptive learning technology to provide students with a customized test preparation course specifically targeting individual strengths and weaknesses. Students are also provided with one-on-one online tutoring and essay coaching from current students at Stanford and the University of Chicago.

On February 1, 2007, Maine governor John Baldacci announced that for three years PrepMe planned to let every junior in Maine use its online SAT preparation program without cost to themselves, their school or the state.

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Garrett Camp is the co-founder of StumbleUpon, a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user, or a Stumbler, clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles. There is also one-click blogging built in as well. Users can rate, or choose not to rate, any webpage with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and clicking the Stumble button resembles “channel-surfing” the web.

In the same way that it matches users with like-minded websites, StumbleUpon’s technology also pairs online ads with targeted demographics and interests.Toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite and Internet Explorer.

Camp came up with the idea as he was working on a master’s in software engineering. Frustrated while trying to find the best photo sites online, he created an early version of StumbleUpon with coding help from Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith. Soon, they realized that the service could be used with all sorts of media, and not just the photos.

eBay acquired StumbleUpon in May of 2007 for $75,000,000 USD.

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Kevin Rose was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek for the August 14, 2006 issue (see above). The cover text was “How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months”. The story mainly covered his success as a young entrepreneur and explained how he risked it all to make Digg.com a reality. It also says he lost his girlfriend during the launch and that money meant for a house deposit payment was instead used to fund his idea.

Since Digg.com was launched on November 1, 2004, it has made him an internet celebrity. Digg combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. According to a recent article from TechCrunch, Digg will soon be adding an Images category on top of the existing News, Video and Podcasts. Here is an overview of Digg from Crunchbase:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see.

In the fall of 2004, Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg. He found programmer Owen Bryne through eLance.com and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99 per month for hosting and $1,200 for the Digg.com domain. In December of 2004, Kevin launched his creation to the world through a post on his blog.

In February of 2005, Paris Hilton’s cell phone was hacked. Images and phone numbers from the phone were posted online and it didn’t take long for a user to post the link on Digg. The site started to receive an enormous amount of traffic and it was then, Rose says, he saw “the power of breaking stories before anyone else.”

Digg has been a force ever since. Acquisition offers have been made, Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek and according to Alexa, Digg is in the top 100 most trafficked sites on the internet. The success hasn’t come without its share of problems though. The site has had to face services aimed at gaming the way stories hit the front page, as well as a user revolt. Digg has however been able to get over these hurdles as it continues to be one of the social news leaders.

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Jason McCabe Calacanis is an Greek-American internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL.

According to Forbes, which ranked it 23rd on the list of most popular web celebrities:

If there’s a Joe Pulitzer if the blogging world, it may well be Jason Calacanis, the media entrepreneur who’s created some of the Web’s hottest sites. As the co-founder of Weblogs Inc, Calacanis oversaw the creation of top sites like Engadget, Joystiq and Slashfood; in October 2005, the company was sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Following a short stint where he redesigned and relaunched AOL’s Netscape.com, Calacanis recently moved on to become an “entrepreneur in action” at Sequoia Capital. But Calacanis isn’t just a businessman–his personal blog is one of the most popular on the Web.

Calacanis’ latest venture is Mahalo.com, a “human-powered search engine”, which launched in May 2007.

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Update: Yesterday, Microsoft agreed to pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, a deal that places a $15 billion valuation on the start-up. Facebook has received a total of $278.20M in funding.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is one of the youngest web celebrities, who, as a Harvard College student, founded the online social networking website Facebook with the help of fellow Harvard student and computer science major Andrew McCollum as well as roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He now serves as Facebook’s CEO.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. He was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his projects. An early project, Coursematch, allowed students to view lists of other students enrolled in the same classes. A later project, Facemash.com, was a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Hot or Not. A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg’s Internet access was revoked by administration officials. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board, where he was charged with breaching computer security and violating rules on Internet privacy and intellectual property.

The school alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard house websites to harvest images of students without their permission, for profit. Zuckerberg stated that he thought that information should be free and publicly available. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public. In 2004, Zuckerberg created Facebook and took a leave of absence from the college. A year later he dropped out.

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Jack Ma is the founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba Group.

Born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, founded Alibaba.com, a business to business operator in 1999, a China-based business to business marketplace site which serves 25 million members from 200 countries.

Ma remains as chief executive officer and chairman of board after Yahoo! acquired a 40% economic stake (35% voting rights) in Alibaba. Alibaba.com Corp. is raising as much as US$1.33 billion in what is set to be the largest initial public offering by a Chinese technology operator, the company said in a preliminary prospectus for the Hong Kong listing. TechCrunch reports that it will be the second biggest internet IPO ever.

Alibaba is selling 858.9 million shares, or 17% of its enlarged share capital, at an indicative price range of 10 Hong Kong dollars to HK$12 (US$1.29 to US$1.55) each, according to the listing document.

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