Top 10 technology heroes of 2012
People who helped to shape the year
The year is nearly at an end, and as 2012 winds down we look back at the big events which helped to shape the industry. When looking at those events, we are also reminded of individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty to accomplish amazing feats and make life better for all of us.
This week, we reognise 10 of those technology heroes.
10. Judges Alsup and Koh
Being a US District Judge is a tough job. It requires a person who can listen to two sides of a complex argument and find a way to bring justice to an issue. It gets even harder when the case involves two multi-billion dollar corporations who hate each other.
Judges Alsup and Koh have overseen two of the biggest court cases of 2012. Alsup handled judging duties in the Oracle vs Google case. The lengthy trial saw two technology superpowers battling it out in one of the most highly publicised cases of the year.
Judge Koh, meanwhile, had to make sense of the incessant feuding of smartphone heavyweights Samsung and Apple. Her charge focused on patents owned by the two most successful smartphone-makers in the world.
Together both judges had to deal with press leaks, public back-talking and inane patent battles. No matter how you felt about the rulings in their cases, you have to give it to the judges for doing a job that few would relish.
9. Julia O'Dwyer
UK University student Richard O'Dwyer and his mother Julia O'Dwyer have had a harrowing year.
O'Dwyer started the year as a Sheffield University student who ran a website called TVShack.net. The site offered links that sent users to other URLs where they could watch copyrighted content like movies and TV programmes.
The site and O'Dwyer received the ire of the US government in January. US officials began calling on the UK to extradite the student to the states where he would be tried for copyright infringement.
O'Dwyer's case made worldwide headlines, with many arguing that he should not be extradited for his involvement with the site. Big-name tech figures like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales even lobbied for the UK citizen.
Despite the widespread calls against extradition, US authorities still pushed. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) even began cooking up ways to discredit the people fighting on behalf of O'Dwyer.
Julia O'Dwyer called out the MPAA for "vindictive" tactics against her son. She accused the association of purposefully smearing O'Dwyer in an attempt to further their extradition goals.
Eventually the calls for extradition subsided with a plea bargain. However, the whole ordeal still remained a trying experience for O'Dwyer and his mother. Through it all, the two showed poise and courage in the face of mounting pressure from regulatory officials.
Top 10 technology heroes of 2012
People who helped to shape the year
8. Sir Jony Ive
While everyone on this list can be called a hero, only one can say he's a knight. Jony Ive is Apple's design guru. Ive is known as the brains behind that beautiful iPhone 5 and the revolutionary iPod.
UK-born Ive joined Apple in the 1990s and by the time Steve Jobs took over for the second time became the go-to for all Apple's design projects. While at Apple, Ive has played key roles in all the company's product designs. From the iPod to the iPhone, Ive has played a huge part in how we consume digital content.
2012 saw Ive take even more responsibility at Apple. With the ousting of former Apple executive Scott Forstall, he has been tapped to be a singular voice on Apple's design team.
Few have been as important, and as recognised, for what they've done in the technology sector as Ive. His achievements have been so widespread that he was knighted for his work earlier this year.
7. Elon Musk
Elon Musk served as inspiration for the Marvel superhero Iron Man aka Tony Stark, according to the film's director Jon Favreau.
From SpaceX to Tesla Motors, Musk has been behind some of the most interesting science and technology projects conceived in the past 20 years. SpaceX is looking to send citizens into space and then possibly colonise Mars.
He's doing all this because he wants to wean the world off of fossil fuels and make the people of earth a space-faring civilization. They're noble goals, if not lofty in nature, and if anyone may be able to pull it off, it's Musk.
So far, he's been able to get Tesla off the ground when many were saying it wouldn't work. SpaceX was a lofty goal that slowly but surely is moving its way upto the stratosphere.
Even if Musk never meets his goals, you at least need to give him credit for trying what few others even dare.
6. Kaspersky Lab research team
In late May, a strange new piece of malware was uncovered in the Middle East. Authorities in Iran called on the aid of researchers with Kaspersky Lab, and before long the Flame malware was uncovered.
Like the Stuxnet and Duqu attacks before, Flame is a sophisticated attack designed to infect systems in a specific region. The data-harvesting malware was later determined to be a state-sponsored attack designed for espionage.
While the discovery and analysis of Flame may not have won Kaspersky any favours with the government who sponsored the attack, it certainly made them heroes within the security world, leading to chief executive and founder Eugene Kaspersky being chosen as the Technology Hero of the Year at the V3 Technology Awards 2012.
Top 10 technology heroes of 2012
People who helped to shape the year
5. Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee has long been a hero within the IT space, but it was in 2012 that he was finally given the recognition he deserves.
The father of the web was among the handful of Britains to be showcased in front of the entire planet during the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. The spectacle included Berners-Lee raised triumphantly in front of a sign reading "This is For Everyone".
Not one to rest on his laurels, Sir Tim also stepped up this year to protect his brainchild when overzealous legislators threatened its freedom. Berners-Lee was among the most prominent critics of the SOPA and PIPA bills, and helped rally the troops to pressure legislators to shelve the efforts.
4. Marissa Mayer In recent years Yahoo has seen a parade of CEOs attempt to turn the company around and fail miserably. After the departure of Carol Bartz, many had all but given up on the one-time search king.
Then, the company scored a major coup when it was able to lure Marissa Mayer away from Google. While the hiring was impressive, many wondered if Mayer was simply there to sell off the company and close the doors.
In 2012, however, Yahoo's new boss threw everyone for a loop when she was able to not only breathe new life into Yahoo, but also translate the company's new found energy into the first promising financial returns investors have seen in years.
While Mayer was already seen as a well-respected executive in Silicon Valley before her move to Yahoo, this year she embarked on a path to become one of the most revered and powerful people in the business.
3. Eben Upton
Education is a big deal in the tech industry. The industry is in drastic need of stronger educational options for programmers. Eben Upton, the founder of Raspberry Pi, understands that.
Upton created Raspberry Pi in an attempt to bring low-cost computing options to students who may have an interest in programming. His company is currently attempting to bring the minuscule Raspberry Pi computers to schools so students have a shot at learning how to code.
The Raspberry Pi team is currently getting closer to bringing the computer to an even wider audience. With the firm shelling out 4,000 units a day, it's only a matter of time before students all over the world get their shot at programming.
As the world becomes more and more tech savvy, it's important that young people have a chance to get a computer in their hands. It's even more important that schools have cost-efficient technologies to teach their students the craft.
Upton's goals are admirable in their own right, but that fact that he's actually succeeding at putting his plan into action is an even bigger accomplishment.
Top 10 technology heroes of 2012
People who helped to shape the year
2. Gerry Pennell
The London Olympics were a tremendous undertaking which tested every part of the city's infrastructure.
But few systems were tested like the city's IT infrastructure. Administrators and technicians worked around the clock to make sure that the wave of tourists and the flood of media had all of the coverage and bandwidth they needed.
With more video, text and photo data being generated than at any other Olympics in history, Gerry Pennell and his team had their work cut out for them, and they all came through in a big way.
As a result, London also has a formidable IT infrastructure left over for everyday use and the city is well equipped to handle the data explosion in the coming years.
1. Cern LHC team
The development of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was hardly a harmonious affair. Critics slammed the project on everything from its costs to its power consumption to concerns that it would create a black hole that would swallow the entire planet.
Those concerns proved to be ill-founded, and in July researchers unveiled a scientific breakthrough which could well prove to make the LHC worth its cost hundreds of times over.
That discovery was the Higgs Boson particle, an elusive sub-atomic particle which helps to fill out the picture of particle physics and revolutionise our understanding of the way the universe works.
It was also a heroic achievement for Cern's IT department. Gathering and processing the data generated by the LHC is an unprecedented technological challenge, and the discovery of the Higgs Boson would not have been possible without the massive computing facilities.