Feature – Despite the troubled state of the economy, 2008 was a year of great change and successful leadership. Here is TG Daily’s list of the year’s top achievers.

Blaming failure or crediting success to a single person is always a difficult task, especially when we talk about companies whose performance relies on hundreds or thousands of employees. But there is no doubt that this industry has fascinating and inspiring personalities whose vision and drive for change is impacting the way we use technology today and in the future.

There are countless people in this industry who deserve to be recognized, but based on their exposure and leadership, here are those who we believe had the most impact on technology in 2008. Feel free to chime in at the end of this article.



10. Jason Kilar
CEO, Hulu



Operating a video site that is backed by major video and media content providers (NBC Universal, News Corp.) avoids many headaches, but the progress Hulu made in 2008 is impressive. The site has become strong enough to force Google’s YouTube into a new business model and is pioneering an attractive way to watch TV shows online. Kilar joined Hulu from Amazon.com, where he had developed the firm’s entry into the video business and headed up the company’s application software efforts. Comscore estimates that Hulu has about 24 million unique visitors who watch about 235 million videos per month. That translates into a market share of only 1.7% (as compared to 40% of YouTube), but it makes Hulu the sixth largest video site on the web. Will Hulu become the destination Joost wanted to be? Possibly. Keep an eye on Kilar’s site.  


9. Jonathan Ive
Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple



Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. That is the impression we got when Jobs delivered one of his speeches over the past decade. A great new product idea? Steve Jobs had it. Great design? Yes, Jobs designed it. Despite this perception, we all know, of course, that this is not the case. There is a number of amazing people in Apple’s company that contributed to the firm’s success and would deserve much more visibility, but had to remain in the shadow of Jobs. This scenario is likely to change this year as we have first signs that Steve Jobs may be preparing his exit from Apple. It isn’t Phil Schiller, who is generally believed to succeed Jobs, whom we chose for our list, but Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive. We tend to criticize Apple for its overpriced products – and praise the company for being able to sell its products with insane profit margins. This is mainly Ive’s fault: Technology often shows a trend of function being more important than form, but Ive leads the industry with being able to push the frontiers of form and function in every new Apple product. The iPhone, Apple’s increasingly important cash cow, is just one example. The company is often perceived to be design-focused and if that is truly important to the company, then Apple’s next CEO needs to be passionate about design. And we do not know anyone more suited for that job than Jonathan Ive.


8. Evan Williams
Co-founder and CEO, Twitter



Internet success is often based on perception. Williams has been, in our opinion, the master of creating perception in 2008. The reward for the growth of the site especially in 2008 and the perception of an enormous reach was rewarded with a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook, which Williams and co-founder Jack Dorsey rejected. In fact, Twitter may be much smaller than you think: According to Comscore, the site has about 5 million monthly users, which puts it within the top 500 websites globally, or just about into the range of TG Daily’s former mother ship Tom’s Hardware. But Twitter is growing at an astonishing rate: The user base has reportedly been tripling every sixth months. And Twitter may be emerging from a niche into a mainstream product: Basically lightweight mechanism for pushing short 140 character messages, so-called tweets, to the Web and cellphones, Twitter made headlines when evening news anchors relied on tweets from Taj Mahal guests to post first account reports on the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Twitter recently secured $15 million in funding and has grown into a major social networking service in 2008.


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