The 2012 Wired 100

This article was taken from the September 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

<div>Our third annual survey of the UK's digital power-brokers.

From innovators to investors, meet the people our panel and readers see as key figures in 2012.

01: Jonathan Ive

Senior vice-president of industrial design, Apple Inc

▲(07)

For a man who has done more than almost any other industrial designer to change our relationship with technology, Sir Jonathan Ive is remarkably unassuming. Softly spoken and eloquent, Jony (as he is known to his friends) has shaped every curve, switch and icon on Apple products from the candy-coloured iMac introduced in 1998 to the iPad 3 with its retina display.

Read our full interview with <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/07/features/wired-100-jonathan-ive"

title="Wired 100: Jonathan Ive">this year's Wired 100 #1 here</a>.

02: <span class="s2">Michael Lynch

Executive vice president, Hewlett-Packard; founder, Autonomy

New entry

Having pulled off Europe's largest ever sale of a software company -- Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11.7bn (£7.1bn) -- Lynch could be expected to relax. But he's splitting his time between the UK and Palo Alto and continues to work on making computers understand human-friendly data. About £500 million better off, he is looking for new ventures to fund.

03: <span class="s2">Dan Cobley

Managing director, Google UK

New entry

Cobley is Google's sort of marketer: he has a degree in physics.

He worked for Pepsi, Ask Jeeves and Capital One before joining Google in 2006 as director of marketing for northern and central Europe. In October last year he stepped into Matt Brittin's shoes as managing director of Google UK -- responsible for 11 percent of the firm's global $38bn revenue in 2011. Cobley has also spoken at TED.

04: <span class="s2">Joanna Shields

Vice president and managing director, Facebook Europe, Middle east and Africa

▼(01)

A pivotal figure in Europe's internet industry for 12 years -- with former roles at Bebo, AOL and Google -- Shields continues to influence Facebook's mobile strategy and to develop opportunities for startups and social shopping. Last year's number one has forged partnerships with fashion icon Burberry and gaming firms Nordeus and Wooga.

05: <span class="s2">Michael Acton Smith

CEO, creative director and founder, Mind Candy

▲(12<span class="s2">)

Acton Smith, 37, has created a hugely popular online game for children -- 60 million from 150 countries log into Moshi Monsters each month. His firm, Mind Candy, is also a media empire: the Moshi Monsters magazine is the UK's best-selling children's title, and this year the brand released a music album; £62 million of Moshi products were sold in 2011. He has a crack at an ultra-high-value exit.

06: <span class="s2">Index Ventures

Various partners, venture capital firm

▲(31<span class="s2">)

In 2011, Index Ventures came full circle. The venture-capital firm started in Geneva in 1996, to "take the Silicon Valley mindset to Europe", according to partner Saul Klein. Five years later it opened a London office and backed some of the most successful companies in European tech: Skype, MySQL, Betfair, ASOS and LOVEFiLM, to name a few. Last year, it opened a San Francisco office -- to bring a European mindset to the Valley. "We believe in acting as a bridge between the most talented entrepreneurs on our side and connecting them directly into the Bay Area," says Klein.

Index has helped newer companies such as Moo and Playfish to establish a US presence. But it's also backing firms from the Valley and New York: last year it invested in Dropbox, Etsy and Flipboard. In 2011, it raised a €500 million (£408 million) fund and a €150 million life-science vehicle, backed by pharmaceutical giants GSK and Johnson & Johnson, and had 15 exits. London, though, remains the "heartbeat" of Index: current companies include EDITD, Mind Candy, MOO, onefinestay and Songkick.

The secret to the company's productivity (it made 48 new investments in 2011 alone)? Its 29 investors: "You can't do all of that unless you work as a team," Klein says. "That's the core ethos: this is a team game -- this is total football."

07: Daniel Ek

Cofounder and CEO, Spotify

▲(08<span class="s4">)

Last year the unstoppable Ek conquered America -- and then Facebook, for good measure. This year he has set his sights on the entire web, launching a play button that can be embedded into any site. London-based Spotify has already signed up big media brands

Time Out, Tumblr and Vogue (owned by Condé Nast Publications, publisher of Wired) to push the feature. Ek is also seeking additional funding for Spotify that would value the company at $4 billion -- up from the $1.1 billion valuation it achieved last summer, and making it worth more than Warner Music (sold for $3.3 billion in 2011); Ek's personal stake would be worth more than £200 million. The company still hasn't turned a profit, but the latest figures show that 30 percent of Spotify's ten million users are paying for the service, giving hope to the music industry and making Ek the most influential person in it.

08: <span class="s2">Niklas Zennström

Partner, Atomico

▲(19<span class="s3">)

Skype founder Zennström invested $42 million (£26 million) in Rovio in 2011; recently the Angry Birds developer has been valued at $6 billion. In November Atomico led $5.5 million of funding for Wrapp, a social gifting service, and this spring pumped cash into Hailo, a taxi app. Naturally shy Zennström is becoming more visible on the conference circuit at events such as Founders Forum and LeWeb.

09: <span class="s2">Accel Partners

Various partners, venture capital firm

▲(29<span class="s2">)

Accel Partners is looking for the next billion-dollar company -- wherever it may be. The 29-year-old venture capital firm has spilled out of its headquarters in Palo Alto and charged into Europe, India and China. "We want to help businesses regardless of their geographical origin and where they want to expand to," says Sonali De Rycker, a partner at Accel's London office in St James's.

In the last year, the $530 million London fund has made 17 investments in nine countries - including Russia, Israel, France, the UK and Sweden. "We've now proven that tech talent is everywhere," says De Rycker.

Having swooped in early on startups such as Wonga, Rovio, Groupon and Mind Candy, De Rycker says a vast majority of Accel's investments are early-stage, with little or no revenue. "We want to back companies that will eventually be number one in their category," she says.

The firm's most successful exit was a Swedish startup called QlikTech, which analyses complex datasets in a user-friendly way. Accel made an initial $10m investment in the company in 2004 and returned over $400m, when QlikTech went public in 2010. "We are told it is one of the largest venture returns in European history," De Rycker says. Accel formed a $100m Big Data fund in November last year. "The levels of innovation we are experiencing today are almost unprecedented," says De Rycker. "These tectonic shifts are what make the job of a VC so exciting."

10: <span class="s2">Brent Hoberman Internet investor and serial entrepreneur ▼(06<span class="s2">)

Tech City signed up lastminute.com founder Hoberman to entertain investors during the Olympics -- and persuade them to back businesses here. He invests personally and through PROfounders Capital, with recent investments ranging from onefinestay to Made.com and easyCar. His Founders Forum, an annual tech showcase run with Jonnie Goodwin (27), has launched outposts in Rio and New York.

11: <span class="s2">Rohan Silva

Senior policy adviser to David Cameron

▲(41<span class="s3">)

Placed firmly at the heart of the Conservative Party's digital strategies, Silva, 31, champions projects such as the Tech City development in east London. Silva's 30-place rise reflects his increasing influence on policies such as the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Entrepreneur Visa. His current big idea -- open-source government -- involves crowdsourcing policy initiatives.

12: <span class="s2">Pete Cashmore

Founder and CEO, Mashable

▲(80<span class="s2">)

Mashable, which Cashmore started when he was 19, claims more than 50 million page views a month; the website has contributed to a personal fortune estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List at £60 million for the Scottish entrepreneur. Now his Social Good Summit, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, means Cashmore has a global influence beyond rapid-fire tech blogging.

13: <span class="s2">Mike Bracken

Executive director of digital efficiency and reform group, Cabinet Office

New entry

On Bracken's watch as director of digital development at The Guardian, the paper's website reached 70 million visitors a month and more than 20 digital products were launched -- from subscription-based apps to the MPs' expenses website. "Between 2009 and 2011 we put the platform in place for digital growth," he says. "We effectively created an open platform that allowed people to get involved." He left the paper last July with the aim of transforming the delivery of the government's digital services to become "digital by default".

The December launch of Government Digital Services (GDS) marked the official start of the shift, as conceptualised by Martha Lane Fox in a 2010 report to MPs. It aims to bring together the scattered parts of the "government digital estate" under the gov.uk umbrella; to fix the government's corporate publishing arm; to improve online transactions; and to open up government APIs. "Rather than basing the system on policy, we're basing it on delivery," says Bracken. "We're focusing on user experience."

Bracken, who helped set up e-democracy project MySociety, says the changes won't be completed for several years, with electoral registration reform only ready for the May 2015 general election. Fixing the outdated and highly bureaucratic system will be difficult, but changing the internal ideology has been the hardest. "A major point of friction has been getting [people] out of the mindset of 'we can't do this, that's what private businesses do.'" he says. "But there's no reason the government can't."

14: <span class="s2">Ian Osborne

Partner, Osborne & Partners; partner, DST

New entry

You probably haven't heard of Osborne -- and he wasn't keen on being in this list. But he's a gatekeeper who advises political and business leaders on international affairs through his strategic advisory firm Osborne & Partners. His firm has represented tech founders ranging from Sean Parker to Summly's Nick D'Aloisio, on whose board he sits. He's also partner and director at late-stage investors Digital Sky Technologies.

15: <span class="s2">Martin Clarke

Editor, MailOnline

New entry

Clarke took over MailOnline in 2006, switching the focus to human-interest, celebrity-based stories and emphasising the US.

Under him, the website reached 4.53 million daily users in December 2011, passing the New York Times's 4.48 million. In January 2012, ComScore announced that MailOnline had become the world's most-read news resource. Clarke estimates that MailOnline will take £25 million in revenue this year.

16: <span class="s2">Ian Livingstone

Life president, Eidos

▲(54<span class="s2">)

The most recent budget, which gave tax breaks to video-game developers, was a big win for Livingstone, who had been campaigning on the issue for years. The veteran developer is now doing it for the kids -- he had another political success earlier in the year when he persuaded Michael Gove to include computer science as a GCSE, and is helping develop a new national curriculum for ICT.

17: <span class="s2">Mark Walport

Director and chief executive, Wellcome Trust

New entry

Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, Sir Mark heads the Wellcome Trust, a charity spending £600 million annually on research to improve health. An open-data champion, he aims to change the trust's funding policy to ensure that details of publicly funded research are freely available within six months of first publication.

18: <span class="s2">Stefan Glaenzer

Angel investor, CEO and founder of White Bear Yard

▼(13)

Seed VC firm Passion Capital, cofounded by former last.fm executive chairman Glaenzer, has only been around one year. But it's been busy, using its £37.5 million fund to back 20 companies, including Twilio, Mendeley, Luluvise, Flattr and Smarkets. Glaenzer aims to fund 50 startups by 2016, making it the third most active seed fund globally, behind SV Angels and First Round Capital.

19: <span class="s2">Eileen Burbidge

Cofounder, White Bear Yard; Passion Capitial

New entry

Starting as the product head of a young Skype in 2004, Burbidge has come a long way. She now sits on the boards of Mendeley, social-payment service Flattr and fashion site Stylistpick. In 2009, with Stefan Glaenzer and Robert Dighero, she set up White Bear Yard, a London hub for startups. In 2011, the same team founded Passion Capital, which provides early-stage funding for tech firms.

20: <span class="s2">Robin Klein

Founder, the Accelerator Group

▲(21<span class="s2">)

A serial entrepreneur since the 70s and founder of the Accelerator Group, Klein is an old hand at betting on fast-growing tech businesses. Although a partner at his son Saul's firm Index Ventures (see entry 6), he is on the board of startups Wonga and onefinestay, and incubator Seedcamp. Last year, Klein advised the UK government on how to cultivate innovation in the tech sector.

21: <span class="s2">Matt Brittin

Vice-president for northern and central europe, Google

▼(<span class="s5">04)

In October last year, Brittin <span class="s7">stepped up from managing Google's <span class="s6">UK operations to take control of the search giant's interests in northern and central Europe. Still based in London, he opened the Google Campus in Tech City and wants the city "to become a hub for technology in Europe". And yes, he represented Great Britain in rowing at the 1988 Olympics.

22: <span class="s2">Loic le Meur

Founder, LeWeb

New entry

Le Meur is founder and CEO of Seesmic, a social media management company, but it's his role as organiser of the LeWeb conference that has won him praise from the likes of Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker. Each December in Paris, the event brings together entrepreneurs, investors, geeks, press and tech superstars such as Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker in 2011. This June, LeWeb makes a trip to London.

23: <span class="s2">Oliver Schusser

Senior director, iTunes Europe

▼(09<span class="s2">)

iTunes is by far the largest music retailer in the world.

Recent milestones include singer Adele (44) becoming the first artist to have a million-download album and single on the European store. Schusser stays under the radar, but the former Napster staffer can make artists by featuring them on the store, and is overseeing Apple's tentative steps into video-on-demand in Europe.

24: <span class="s2">Tim Berners-Lee

Director, w3c; inventor of the world wide web

New entry

Sir Tim has become more outspoken this year -- urging users to demand their personal data from online firms, and criticising the music industry for impeding the open web. He now runs the W3 consortium, which creates and maintains global web protocol; he also launched data.gov.uk in 2009. He is working on the Semantic Web, an evolved version of the current text-based system.

25: R<span class="s2">eshma Sohoni

Partner, Seedcamp

▼(17<span class="s2">)

Five years after setting up Seedcamp, Sohoni predicts 11 of the first 16 funded companies still standing will generate at least $1m (£600,000) in revenues in 2012. Sohoni has built a 1,200-strong network of mentors for the incubator that reads like a Who's Who of tech, and expanded mini-Seedcamps across Europe. Seedcamp's investments typically focus on gaming, financial services, travel, B2B and fashion startups.

26: Paddy Cosgrave

Founder, Dublin web summit, F.ounders

▲(67)

Dublin-based entrepreneur Cosgrave is a master connector.

Organiser of two big tech conferences -- the Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders -- the 27-year-old manages to convince leaders of the digital world to speak at his events, including founders of Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and YouTube. His Dublin guests have ranged from Bono to then-Irish President Mary McAleese. Cosgrave cofounded the Undergraduate Awards of Ireland in 2009 and was recently selected by the World Economic Forum to join a new group of leaders under 30 from around the world, known as the Global Shapers. In March, Cosgrave curated the London Web Summit with TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher to recreate the same creative, community spirit in the UK. Over 700 attended to hear speakers including Zynga, Google and Mashable.

27: <span class="s2">Jonnie Goodwin

Cofounder, founders forum; profounders capital; lepe partners

New entry

Goodwin's focus this year has been Lepe Partners, a merchant bank dedicated to the media and digital sectors, which he cofounded in September 2011. The bank will invest its own money with the money it helps raise, and will advise digital firms on mergers and buyouts. His influence is boosted by co-hosting the Founders Forum, which gives him access to everyone.

28: <span class="s2">Sherry Coutu

Entrepreneur and angel investor

▼(24<span class="s2">)

With Reid Hoffman, Sherry Coutu brings over some of Silicon Valley's biggest players to the UK every year, earning David Cameron's attention. The angel investor still backs startups, recently funding Brainient, Recurly and Klout competitor PeerIndex, but she also brings her savvy to non-business ventures such as Cambridge University, Cancer Research UK and The Prince's Trust.

29: <span class="s2">Phil Smith

CEO, Cisco UK & Ireland; chair, UK technology strategy board

New entry

Smith heads up Cisco's largest operation outside the US and is the man behind Cisco's British Innovation Gateway, which provides cash, technology and consultancy for UK digital startups. In November 2011 he became chair of the UK Technology Strategy Board, which provides funding and support for tech and science-based businesses.

30: <span class="s2">Ralph Rivera

Director, BBC future media

New entry

Rivera left Major League Gaming in New York to oversee all of the BBC's digital media products across computer, gaming and mobile devices in late 2010. In March 2011 he was promoted to director of Future Media, one level below the director general. He recently launched an innovative paid-download store for publicly funded BBC content, and the BBC iPlayer is accessible on more than 50 different internet-enabled devices.

31: <span class="s2">Charles Dunstone

Chairman, Carphone Warehouse

New entry

Dunstone's joint venture with Best Buy, which brought the US electronics retailer to the UK for the first time, ended with the closure of all 11 stores. But Dunstone is extending his influence outside Carphone Warehouse, and into finance by investing in mobile payment services such as Mobile Money Network and iZettle (the European equivalent of Jack Dorsey's Square), which is due to launch soon in the UK.

32: <span class="s2">Danny Truell

Chief investment officer, Wellcome Trust

▲(34<span class="s2">)

Truell, 48, is a former Goldman Sachs fund manager who now guides the tech investments of the UK's largest charity. Nearly 20 percent of its £14 billion portfolio is now invested as venture capital rather than in lower-return government bonds and commercial property, with the proceeds funding the charity's science grants.

The trust is benefiting from early investments in companies such as Twitter and Facebook.

36: <span class="s2">Martha Lane Fox

UK government digital champion; founder, Race Online 2012; founder, Antigone

▲(43<span class="s2">)

The lastminute.com founder is now a government adviser on digital inclusiveness. She set up Race Online 2012 to reach the eight million Britons who have never used the internet; Go ON UK aims to improve the IT skills of SMEs and charities. She is active in pushing the government's "digital by default" agenda, whereby public services will be delivered online.

37: <span class="s2">Rachel Whetstone

Senior vice-president of communications and policy, Google

New entry

Whetstone is the mouthpiece of Google. Not an easy position, considering the continued allegations about the search giant's over-zealously tracking user data and avoiding paying UK tax. Today the former chief of staff to the Conservative Party's Michael Howard is based in California, but she spent a great deal of 2012 in the UK, hence her inclusion on our list.

38: <span class="s2">Bruno Giussani

European director, TED

▼(22<span class="s2">)

Bruno Giussani can make you a star: the European director of TED curates the line-up for TEDGlobal, held every summer. An appearance on stage there can lead to hundreds of thousands of video views, media coverage and book deals. Giussani is also tending to TED globally, co-hosting the first TEDx summit this April, which brought together 700 TEDx organisers from around the world for the first time.

39: <span class="s2">Errol Damelin

Founder & CEO, Wonga

▲(27<span class="s2">)

So far this year, Damelin's money-lending service, Wonga, has completed 3.5 million loans, maintained its single-digit default rate (thanks to a proprietary algorithm) and has expanded to Canada and South Africa. In the UK, it now offers business loans of up to £10,000, repayable over a year. Damelin's next goal is establishing reputation-based micro-loans for borrowers in developing economies.

40: <span class="s2">Nick Robertson

CEO, Asos

▲(42<span class="s2">)

The online-only fashion retailer posted a 46 percent rise in sales to £495m in the year up to March 31 -- impressive, but still below expectations. Pre-tax profit for this period is estimated to be around £40m -- the UK accounts for 40 percent of Asos's sales. The company's web presence is evolving, with the Asos Fashion Finder, a Facebook store and new sites for Spain, Italy and Australia, as well as iPhone and iPad apps.

41: F<span class="s3">rank Meehan

VC consultant, Horizon Ventures

New entry

In September 2011, Meehan stepped down as CEO of INQ Mobile, the "Facebook phone" company he founded in 2008 with backing from Hutchison Whampoa's Li Ka-Shing, to work at Li's company Horizons Ventures. A former Siri and Spotify director, he now sits on the boards of several Horizons-backed companies including Fixmo, Tout, Trap.it, Summly, Tripboard and Magisto.

42: <span class="s2">Thomas Heatherwick

Designer, founder, Heatherwick Studio

New entry

If you've travelled on the new Routemaster bus you've experienced a Heatherwick design first-hand. Billions worldwide will see the cauldron he created for the Olympic flame. The V&A is holding the first retrospective of Heatherwick's work, but the designer is looking forward: he's creating a biomass-fuelled power station for Teesside and several projects in Asia.

43: <span class="s2">Gerry Pennell

CIO, London Olympics

New entry

Pennell manages a team of around 450 IT engineers -- both in-house and from suppliers including BT, Cisco, Acer and Samsung -- who will control the Olympics' network infrastructure. Come July, they will be supporting critical applications such as the Commentator Information System and the results services, as well as monitoring thousands of servers, PCs and online security devices -- all on a budget of £2.1 million.

44: Adele

Singer/songwriter

New entry

The 24-year-old artist has 27m Facebook "likes" and six million Twitter followers, making her by our reckoning the most influential UK musician on social media. In the US, her track "Rolling in the Deep" is currently the biggest-selling digital single by a female artist -- 6.68 million downloads (compared to Lady Gaga's 6.62m for "Poker Face"). She was also the first artist to go double platinum on iTunes, selling two million copies of her album 21 there.

According to data from the Official Charts Company, she sold an album (19 or 21) every seven seconds in 2011. Her iPhone and Android apps have been downloaded two million times -- fans vie with each other to rack up in-app activity such as posting comments. And she went toe-to-toe with Spotify, refusing to include her albums on the service unless they were available only to paying subscribers; Spotify refused -- so she went to rival Rhapsody.

45: <span class="s2">Tony Wang

General manager, Twitter UK

New entry

Since arriving in May 2011, Tony Wang has increased Twitter's London staff to around 30 people, moved it from Shoreditch to Marylebone, and expanded the business operation, going from five advertising partners last year to more than 100 now. The UK is "one of the most critical markets for Twitter": there are ten million accounts registered here, a higher penetration than any other country.

46: <span class="s2">Hermann Hauser

Director, Amadeus Capital

▼(10<span class="s3">)

Thirty years after the company he founded created the BBC Micro computer, Hauser continues to influence British tech as director of Amadeus Capital, recently joining the boards of Tobii and Intune Networks. He is the patron of the Centre for Computing History in Haverhill, Suffolk. His next challenge: convincing Cambridge University to give away its intellectual property to catalyse the creation of more tech businesses.

47: <span class="s2">Ajaz Ahmed

Chairman and founder, Akqa

▲(49<span class="s3">)

Enjoying another year of growth, Ahmed's digital agency now has more than 1,000 employees spread across the US, Europe, Shanghai, San Salvador and -- of course -- London. Ahmed recently wrote in Wired (06.12) that old-fashioned advertising was "redundant", and he has coauthored Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital with Nike's Stefan Olander to prove his theory.

48: <span class="s2">Mike Butcher

Editor, Techcrunch Europe; cofounder, Techhub

▼(25<span class="s3">)

The veteran tech writer wears many hats: networker, startup commentator, lobbyist and entrepreneur. As well as his duties as a founder of London's TechHub, he is on the steering committee for the digital legislation group Coadec. He also organised the London Web Summit - a version of his GeeknRolla conference -- along with F.ounders curator Paddy Cosgrave, as a hub for startups and investors.

49: <span class="s2">Mark Read

Strategy director, WPP and CEO, WPP Digital

▲(48<span class="s2">)

Aiming to boost WPP's digital business from its 30 percent share to 40 percent in the next two years, Martin Sorrell's digital brain takes the future very seriously. Having overseen the folding of WPP's 18 digital brands into one giant agency, Possible Worldwide, last year, Read sums up the world's largest ad agency's strategy as being "China and the internet" with more focus on interactive film, mobile platforms and apps.

50: <span class="s2">Tom Hulme

Design director, Ideo

▲(55<span class="s2">)

A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, Hulme helps others to build and develop innovative businesses and enterprises. OpenIDEO, the open innovation platform he launched in 2011, now has more than 30,000 users in more than 170 countries.

Hulme speaks at conferences around the globe, including Wired 2011, where he highlighted the need for "flexible systems" in businesses.

He is an angel investor in Wonga and Fantasy Shopper.

51: <span class="s2">Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Co-director of exhibitions and programmes, Serpentine Gallery

▲(78<span class="s5">)

Also in charge of international projects at the Serpentine, Obrist sits at the centre of the art world, connecting household names like Ai Weiwei and Zaha Hadid with a new generation of talent including Ed Fornieles and LuckyPDF. Obrist is expanding to a new gallery, due to open this summer in Kensington Gardens; Hadid is renovating the existing building there.

52: <span class="s2">JK Rowling

Author

New entry

In March this year she launched Pottermore.com, a website that augments the Harry Potter experience with additional stories, online games, e-book readings and a social network for fans to talk magic. More importantly, the site is the sole source for buying Potter e- and audio books -- they can be "bought" via Amazon, but at the checkout, shoppers are redirected to pay at Pottermore, further driving traffic to the site. Magic.

53: <span class="s2">Simon Patterson

Managing director, Silver Lake

New entry

Patterson helps manage Silver Lake's private-equity investments in well-established tech firms such as Groupon, Zynga and Smart Storage Systems, which develops solid-state memory. In September 2009, Silverlake bought 70 percent of Skype from eBay for $1.9bn.

Fast-forward 18 months, and this value had tripled. Then in May 2011, Microsoft paid Silverlake $8.5bn for Skype. Not a bad profit.

54: <span class="s2">Natalie Massenet

Founder, Net-a-porter

▼(20<span class="s2">)

Massenet had a busy 2011: she sold her remaining stake in the luxury e-tailer to Richemont for £50 million, and still found time to launch high-end menswear portal Mr Porter. She says that 20 percent of Net-a-Porter sales are now done by mobile device, with this predicted to rise to 50 percent next year. The big challenge for 2012: making inroads into the vastly lucrative £32 billion Chinese luxury-goods market.

55: <span class="s2">Alastair Lukies

Founder, Monitise

New entry

The UK's mobile money pioneer continues to enjoy success.

Currently, the nine-year-old Monitise has six million global users -- a number growing at the rate of 150,000 per month -- and a £14 million turnover in 2011. Expanding into new domains, Monitise launched a pilot scheme in Nigeria last year and a retail app with Charles Dunstone in the UK. Good thing he didn't stick with pro rugby.

56: Andre Geim

Physicist

New entry

Newly-knighted Sir Andre discovered (with colleagues) graphene -- an ultra-strong nanosheet of carbon, which, at 200 times the strength of steel, could be used to make anything from solar panels to aircraft wings. In 2010 Geim and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics with reference to their "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material". Last October a so-called "graphene hub" -- based around Manchester University, where Geim works -- received £50 million worth of fundingfrom the UK government. The collection of facilities focusing on graphene research aims to bring the 0.142 nanometre-thick material closer to commercial production and build an economy around it. Recent research has shown that graphene can make solar cells more efficient.

57: <span class="s2">Christian Hernandez Gallardo

Director, Platform Partnerships, Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa

▼(16<span class="s2">)

The London-based Salvadorean is tasked with driving Facebook's use by expanding its open graph to third parties and developing partnerships. As of September 2011, the former Microsoft and Google man has also been busy on Seedcamp's board of advisers.

58: <span class="s2">Charlie McDonnell

Youtube vlogger

New entry

McDonnell, 21, is Britain's biggest YouTube sensation: in June 2011 his channel Charlieissocoollike!!! was the first in the UK to reach a million subscribers, and has had 240m video views. It started with the video "How to get featured on YouTube", in 2007. By April this year, McDonnell had 1.4 million subscribers and was gaining 5,000 signups per week. His video, "Duet with Myself", has been viewed more than seven million times.

59: <span class="s2">Charlie McMurdie

Head of police central e-crime unit

New entry

A veteran of the Metropolitan Police, McMurdie heads up Scotland Yard's cyber-crime unit, which she set up in 2008. Her role has never been more central to crimefighting: last year, the government said cyber crime cost the UK economy £27bn.

McMurdie's 30-year career as a specialist crime detective spans covert operations to murder investigations, the Flying <span class="s2">Squad and founding the Stolen Vehicles Unit. "In all the places I worked, I realised no one was taking on cyber crime," says McMurdie, 50. "E-crime is borderless, so in 2008, I put a case together calling for a new national unit."

With initial funding from the Home Office, she assembled a small task force and set about busting online crime with the help of major banks. In September 2011, McMurdie's 85-strong team reported that they prevented £140 million worth of cyber crime in the UK in the preceding six months, using just £30 million of government funds. "The target set for us by Home Office last April was to prevent £504 million worth of harm in four years," McMurdie says. "We will probably deliver that within year one."

In July, she will be managing a team of approximately 5,000 staff monitoring potential cyber attacks on the London Olympics, while conducting about 30 ongoing investigations into data crimes. According to McMurdie, she has found her calling. "I've never been as hands-on as I am with cyber," she says. "There are constant new challenges."

60: <span class="s2">Christopher Bailey

Chief creative officer, Burberry

▼(32<span class="s2">)

Bailey maintains Burberry's position as the luxury brand that best understands digital. It has recently launched Burberry Bespoke, an online store offering customisation of fashion through 12 million variations of trench coats. Bailey sees Burberry as a media-content company as much as a design house: the new London Regent Street flagship store opening this summer owes more to Apple than the catwalk.

61: <span class="s2">Eric van der Kleij

CEO, Tech City investment organisation

New entry

The man behind the UK government's blueprint for Tech City, van der Kleij founded the web-callback service RealCall before pivoting it into Adeptra, whose technology alerts users to potential credit-card fraud. He has been working on both sides of the Atlantic to bring entrepreneurs and investors to London, and also helped convince Loic Le Meur (22) to bring LeWeb to London this year.

62: <span class="s2">Kristian Segerstråle

Executive vice president, digital, Electronic Arts

▼(26<span class="s3">)

Since Electronic Arts's $400million acquisition of Playfish in 2009, the social-gaming platform's cofounder has been put in charge of launching some of EA's big-hitting franchises on Facebook, such as The Sims Social, which went live in August 2011, and now attracts over 17 million players a month. Not bad for a man who was told by his mum that if he didn't stop playing games, he'd never get a job.

63: <span class="s2">William Reeve

Angel investor

▲(100<span class="s5">)

The founder of Fletcher Research and LOVEFiLM now manages Oxalyst, a new venture in the hedge-fund industry. Ex McKinsey man Reeve also sits on the boards of numerous online companies, including Graze.com, Paddy Power, Secret Escapes, True Knowledge and Zoopla. As well as investing, he helps students develop ideas for startups and advises established companies on VC, growth funding and exits.

64: <span class="s2">Brian Cox

TV presenter; professor of physics, University of Manchester

New entry

Prof Cox's ability to simplify science on mainstream television -- his Stargazing LIVE had 3.62m viewers -- and his radio show, The Infinite Monkey Cage, science books and even a film, have made him Britain's best known scientist. In March, he released Wonders of the Universe -- a £4.99 app with 3D models of stars and galaxies, infographics and commentary.

65: <span class="s2">Alex Hoye

CEO, Latitude Group

▲(71<span class="s3">)

Hoye has been championing London's "Silicon Roundabout", which he describes as London, LA, New York and Washington "all in one place". As an angel investor, he has funded about 20 startups including Skimlinks, MyBuilder, UserVoice, RentMineOnline, Seedcamp and Brave New Talent. His influence comes from his ICE entrepreneurs email list, which has evolved into ski and summer trips for networking. The last ski trip had more than 60 attending.

66: Ian Hogarth

CEO of Songkick; organiser, Silicon Milkroundabout

New entry

Hogarth studied machine learning at Cambridge University and worked as a DJ in China -- now he's combining the two to predict which music concerts you'd like with Songkick, the gig-listing site he cofounded in 2007. In 2011, the site's monthly visitors grew 1,000 percent; the east London startup's new app on Spotify delivered 100,000 new users. The site now receives five million monthly visitors and its iPhone app was downloaded 100,000 times in ten days last summer. Songkick makes money by linking to ticket vendors, then taking between two and ten percent of any transaction. The numbers convinced Sequioa Capital -- the Silicon Valley VC firm whose other investments have included Apple, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn and Square -- to invest $10 million this March (its first UK investment), on top of the existing backing from Index Ventures.

Hogarth is also taking the lessons he learnt at American incubator Y Combinator (which backed the company with $15,000) and applying them to London by organising Silicon Milkroundabout, a recruitment fair for startups. The two events last year attracted 1,786 tech job seekers and filled 168 posts at 113 startups. This year it's expanding to Cambridge.

67: <span class="s2">Jack Schulze, Matt Jones & Matt Webb

Principals, Berg

▲(70<span class="s2">)

The interactive design innovators continue to domesticate tech with human-friendly interfaces. They recently created Little Printer, a household gadget that prints a customised bite-size daily newspaper, with content sourced from across the web. Add that to iPad magazines, receipts redesigned as infographics and a graphic novel that reveals itself under UV light, and it's no surprise that Steve Jobs was a fan.

68: <span class="s2">Jamal Edwards

Founder, SB.TV

New entry

Jamal Edwards launched SB.TV (smokeybarz), an online music channel on YouTube, dedicated at the time to grime artists in his native west London, when he was 15. It has since had 100 million YouTube views and claims to be its leading UK youth channel. Edwards, 21, is based in London and now also runs his own music label, Just Jam Records (an imprint of Sony RCA). He has featured on adverts for Google Chrome. Next up: New York.

69: <span class="s2">Rory Cellan-Jones

BBC News technology correspondent

▼(40<span class="s2">)

As the main technology writer and reporter on BBC News, Cellan-Jones is the face of tech to many of the Beeb's 14 million monthly website visitors and is frequently on TV news and radio. He tends to follow trends rather than break stories, yet as "the non-geek's geek" he commands two popular accounts on Twitter -- his official BBC handle with 26,000 followers and his personal account with more than 42,000.

70: Sam & Dan Houser

Cofounders, Rockstar Games

New entry

Rockstar, set up by the Houser brothers, made its name with the tabloid newspaper-baiting Grand Theft Auto series, but more recent releases such as Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire have confirmed it as one of the most creative and commercially successful video-game studios around. The publicity-shy brothers return to the fray, co-writing the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto V.

71: <span class="s2">Warren East

CEO, Arm Holdings

▼(15)

Chief of the Cambridge-based microprocessor company, whose chips are now in about 99 percent of all smartphones, East says he is just getting started. In 2011, 7.9bn ARM chips were shipped, nearly twice as many as the previous year. The company's revenue last quarter jumped 21 percent from a year earlier and the soon-to-be-released Windows 8 OS will run on ARM chips for the first time.

72: <span class="s2">Alex van Someren

Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners

▲(93<span class="s2">)

The entrepreneur and VC runs a £10 million seed-capital fund for Amadeus Capital. In April, as non-executive chairman of oneDrum -- a startup providing tools for workers to collaborate in real time on Microsoft Office applications -- he helped to negotiate the six-month-old company's acquisition by US-based social network Yammer. He also helped to draft the UK's entrepreneur-visa legislation.

73: <span class="s2">Daniel Waterhouse

Partner, Wellington Partners

▼(62<span class="s2">)

An alumnus of Yahoo!, Waterhouse specialises in digital media, and has a track record of investing in smart startups and services including Qype (local reviews), Spotify (music), Artfinder (art identification and sales) and GameDuell (gaming communities).

He recently joined the board of Hailo, a cab-calling app for smartphones. Backed by Accel, the service is expanding to the US.

74: <span class="s2">Christopher North

Managing director, Amazon UK

New entry

Under North's guidance, Amazon.co.uk set a record of three million transactions on a single day in December 2011 (up from 2.3 million the year before). The Kindle Fire and the expansion of LOVEFiLM will further extend North's reach. North is also part of Business for New Europe, a coalition of business leaders who seek to promote the benefits of UK membership of the European Union.

75: <span class="s2">Joe Cohen

Founder and CEO, Seatwave

New entry

Despite losses of several million in 2010, Cohen has bounced back in 2011. The Seatwave CEO and founder handled a minor television scandal well, set up a real-time ticketing shop in London and released a software developers' kit for Apple's iOS. With a bunch of new APIs, Seatwave is gradually integrating its ticketing services into the global e-marketplace.

76: <span class="s2">Imran Amed

Founder and editor, the business of fashion

New entry

Amed has a knack for spotting fashion's creative and commercial possibilities. His expertise is sought by labels keen to learn how to develop digital strategies. An associate lecturer at Central St Martin's College, he sits on the British Fashion Council's Digital and Fashion 2012 Menswear Committees and on the board of Dasra, India's strategic philanthropy foundation.

77: <span class="s2">David Bott

Director, innovation programmes, Technology Strategy Board

▼(47<span class="s2">)

Bott has overseen the £200 million series of "Catapult" virtual innovation and technology centres, that link government, business and academia. High-value manufacturing centres opened in 2011; cell therapy and satellite are expected this year; transport systems, offshore renewables and future cities are slated for 2013.

78: <span class="s2">Tom Watson

MP; deputy chair, Labour Party

New entry

Deputy chair of the Labour Party, Watson made more effective use of social media than other politicians during the unfurling Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. He recently released a book on the topic, Dial M for Murdoch, co-authored with Martin Hickman. Watson tweets frequently to 80,000 followers and has been a vocal campaigner on digital issues and opening up government data.

79: <span class="s2">Justin Cooke

CEO, Fortune Cookie

New entry

The founder of digital marketing and design agency Fortune Cookie, Cooke has been chairman of the British Interactive Media Association, the industry body for digital Britain, since 2009.

Fortune Cookie -- which has clients that include American Express and BP -- developed a real-time mobile web platform for National Rail Enquiries to keep users up to date. It has offices in London, New York, Melbourne and Chorzów in Poland.

80: <span class="s2">Andrew Blake

Managing director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

▲(<span class="s4">82)

Leading a team of four, computer engineer Blake solved some of the mathematical challenges that made real-time motion tracking possible; it helped Kinect become the fastest selling consumer device in history. The ex-academic and fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering also worked on KinectFusion, a technology that could benefit the medical, defence and gaming industries.

81: <span class="s2">Bindi Karia

VC and emerging business lead, Microsoft UK Group

▼(39<span class="s2">)

A well-connected and friendly adviser to early-stage startups, Karia is a hugely influential figure for early-stage tech companies. More than 45,000 startups around the world have joined Microsoft's BizSpark programme for support and networking. Karia is also the UK member of the Silicon Valley Emerging Business Team and sits on several tech advisory boards, including that of Seedcamp.

82: <span class="s2">Judith Clegg

Founder, The Glasshouse

▲(77<span class="s2">)

Clegg founded The Glasshouse, which runs networking events for entrepreneurs, during the first dotcom boom. Now, she's taking on McKinsey by setting up Takeout -- a boutique consultancy that taps the experience of entrepreneurs instead of MBAs, with offices in London and New York. Clients include Barclaycard, Microsoft and YO Sushi! But a planned investment fund with Anil Hansjee was recently dropped.

83: <span class="s2">TBG Digital

Online advertising agency

New entry

One of the first agencies to jump on Facebook's Ads API in August 2011, award-winning TBG Digital has been busy this past year. The London-based agency specialises in Facebook ad campaigns in 40 countries, and has built its own Facebook-specific ad optimisation software for the likes of Vodafone, Dell and Heineken. TBG is reportedly responsible for just under ten percent of all advertising bought on Facebook.

84: <span class="s2">Clare Reddington

Director, iShed and the pervasive media studio

▼(73<span class="s2">)

Reddington's Bristol design studio iShed connects creative disciplines: it recently funded six companies to create radical new apps for historic sites and museums. Next, it will encourage another six companies to work with academics to create "something better than an ebook". Reddington is also curating programmes in Guimarães, the European Capital of Culture in 2012, and organising artist swaps with Japan and Brazil.

85: <span class="s2">Andy Nelson

Chief information officer, UK government

New entry

Since taking on the role of government CIO alongside his existing job of Ministry of Justice CIO in March, Nelson has been tasked with leading the government's ICT strategy. With 30 years' experience in IT at Royal Sun Alliance and as director of computer services at Asda, Nelson left the private sector and joined the MoJ in 2009. He has been involved in the Coalition's G-Cloud plans since early 2011.

86: <span class="s2">Shakil Khan

Head of special projects, Path

New entry

Khan has moved on from four years as Spotify's head of special projects to do the same job at Path -- the fast-growing social networking startup based in San Francisco. At Spotify Khan played a significant role in the company's entry and fast expansion in the US market in 2011, and was a key adviser to CEO Daniel Ek. For Path, he will manage international growth from London, remaining an investor in and adviser to Spotify.

87: Chris Lintott

Astrophysicist, University of Oxford

New entry

Astrophysicist Lintott joins Brian Cox as a scientist who has crossed the pop-cultural divide. He discovered the power of crowdsourced science in 2007, when he asked online for help to classify a million galaxies into distinct shapes. Galaxy Zoo got 100,000 responses on the first day, prompting other UK scientists to contact Lintott for help. The result was an expanded hosting platform for citizen scientists to deal with data overflow. Called Zooniverse, it allows people to classify galaxies, hunt for planets, ascertain whether whales have accents, and transcribe ancient papyri. In January, Lintott, asked BBC viewers to analyse live images from Nasa's Kepler telescope -- they found three new planets, including one where liquid water could exist. In April, Zooniverse had 600,000 users.

88: <span class="s2">Christopher Grew

Partner, Orrick

▼(75<span class="s2">)

Qualified barrister Grew holds a key role in Orrick's Emerging Companies group, which advises startups and VC firms. He consults tech companies on international operations and investments, remains an active participant in Seedcamp -- both as a mentor and a judge -- and represents many of Seedcamp's companies including EDITD, Smarkets and Wishdate. Recently, he has become interested in the startup talent in Russia.

89: <span class="s2">Emma Mulqueeny

Director and cofounder, Rewired State and Young Rewired State

New entry

Mulqueeny is behind Rewired State and Young Rewired State -- independent developers who rapidly code innovative software using open data. The UK government and industry use the developers' work to improve services such as UCAS and lobbying. The non-profit has 600 adults and 500 under-18 coders in the UK, with plans for Australia, Europe and the US.

90: <span class="s2">Ed Vaizey

MP, minister for culture, communications and creative industries

▼(18<span class="s2">)

Vaizey is overseeing the Digital Economy Act, likely to come in later this year. In February he announced a £180 million investment in Freeview -- from cash raised by auctioning 4G bandwidth -- and stopped Everything Everywhere getting an early start on the other UK telcos. He wants coding classes to be compulsory in UK schools.

91: <span class="s2">Jeremy Myerson

Director and chair, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art

▼(81<span class="s2">)

An influential thinker and consultant, Myerson's remit at the RCA is to encourage "design that improves the quality of life", a virtue he extols at speaking engagements. He is on the selection panel of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design -- its designated World Design Capital 2014 is Cape Town.

92: <span class="s2">Tom Standage

Digital editor, the Economist ▼(72<span class="s2">)

Standage -- managing iOS and Android editions -- has helped the weekly to hit record global circulation: more than 1.5 million subscribers and 127,000 readers on iPad. At that rate of growth, it will probably surpass The New Yorker's 1.6 million global audience in 2012. He also edits The Economist Technology Quarterly. Standage has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and Wired.

93: <span class="s2">Rene Rechtman

Senior vice president advertising, AOL, Europe, Middle East and Africa

▼(45<span class="s2">)

Rechtman joined AOL in 2011 when it bought his online video-distribution agency GoViral. He steered the European growth of the AOL Advertising group, and in Q3 of 2011, AOL's global ad sales rose eight percent, partly thanks to a 28 percent rise in ads sold through advertising.com. Rechtman is also an active angel investor.

94: <span class="s2">Andrew Fisher

CEO, Shazam

▼(59<span class="s2">)

Since 2005, Fisher has detemined Shazam's strategic focus.

In 2011, the hit audio-recognition app focused on the US, expanding into enabling deeper engagement for viewers of adverts and television programmes -- viewers can now "Shazam" for extra content. In the US, half of all Super Bowl XLVI adverts were Shazam-enabled; in the UK, the firm has partnered with ITV to offer the service to advertisers keen to reach Britain's ten million Shazam users.

<span class="s1">95: C<span class="s2">ollette Ballou

Founder, Ballou PR

■ (<span class="s4">95)

Last November, Ballou sold the US operations of her eponymous tech PR firm to MWW Group for an undisclosed amount. The company still has offices in London and Paris, and Ballou herself is a mentor at Dave McClure's 500 Startups. She forms one half of a London tech power couple currently flush with cash: partner Max Niederhofer recently sold his own company, social-search engine Qwerly, to Fliptop, a competitor service based in San Francisco.

96: A<span class="s3">ndrew Miller

CEO, Guardian Media Group

▼(87<span class="s3">)

Recent Audit Bureau of Circulation figures put The Guardian's website at almost 70m unique browsers during February 2012; The Guardian Facebook app, launched last September, has been downloaded more than eight million times. It's a huge reach, but the paper is weakened by its long-running losses, and a strong web and social presence hasn't yet paid the bills. Miller has his work cut out to turn these clicks into cash.

97: <span class="s2">Lee Child

Kindle King

New entry

After falling foul of corporate TV restructuring in the 90s, Coventry-born Lee Child (real name Jim Grant) dusted himself down and got to work writing his first novel. Killing Floor, the first in his Jack Reacher series, was a hit, and 16 books later he has become the Kindle's most successful British author, outselling even Jane Austen. Tom Cruise is playing Reacher in a Hollywood film adaptation of One Shot, directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

98: <span class="s2">Milo Yiannopoulos

Provocateur, the Kernel ▼(84<span class="s3">)

Tech's gadfly continues to provoke and irritate, often for its own sake. His influence has waned since losing his Telegraph column, but his latest venture, The Kernel, has given him new power to torment. It's a low-budget project, but its weekly Nutshell, a gossipy, legally uncautious newsletter, picks publicly on targets such as the government's Tech City initiative. Unlikely to be a sustainable model, but he's much talked about.

99: Ed Yong

Writer and science journalist

New entry

Yong's list of awards -- one of his stories was published in Best American Science Writing 2011 -- shows what the 300,000 people who read his blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, already know: Yong is one of the sharpest science writers out there. Daily tweets to his 19,000 followers demonstrate that this occasional Wired writer is building a serious credibility as a science communicator.

100: <span class="s2">Michael Birch

Investor

▼(53<span class="s3">)

Birch's San Francisco mansion is a home-from-home for British web entrepreneurs; it even has a replica pub. To support his favoured non-profit, charity: water, his latest scheme is to raise millions of dollars using social media and viral online networks. The Bebo cofounder and CEO of Monkey Inferno continues to invest the proceeds of the $850 million sale to AOL. He recently backed ResearchGate, a professional network for scientists.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK