Shiny New Toys

If you're in search of big ideas and want to see how others have done it, Technology Review has chosen the top innovators under 35 (see http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/index.aspx). The profiles of each of the nominees reveal that by and large, the winner combined two previously disparate technologies in order to create a single, more dominant one.

The top innovator was Joshua Schachter, who created del.ici.ous, the website that allows individuals to tag their bookmarks and thereby organize them and access them from any computer. But the system also does more than that; the folksonomy of tags that emerged provides a way to organize, understand and link across the entire web.

Other cool innovations range from impossibly devious encryption methods (Apostolos Argyris's work disguising data as white noise) to efficient cookstoves designed to reduce wood burning and keep women in refugee areas close to home, and safety (Christina Galitsky's work).
[summary by: Caroline]