5. Person: Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia

    Innovation: Hotmail

A huge chunk of the ‘90s saw the ordinary user’s email address being tied to his ISP. This meant that if you changed your service provider, you ended up losing the email address associated with your account. On July 4, 1996 (talk about independence!), Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched HoTMaiL (HTML emphasized by the capitalization), the first web-based email service.

It offered its users free email accounts, with a monstrous 2 MB of storage space which could be accessed from anywhere and through any ISP. The trade-off: A couple of banner ads that were a momentary eyesore at best. Such convenience drove the service to grow at a rapid pace and it reached 40 million users at the end of 1998, which then happened to be the time when Microsoft offered them a check for $400 million. Ever since it was acquired by Microsoft, over 1 billion Hotmail accounts have been created and there are at least a several hundred million active users today.

Shortly after the buy-out, Mr Smith and Mr Bhatia fleetingly worked for Microsoft before founding Akamba Corporation and Arzoo.com. Akamba made accelerator cards for web servers with high traffic and Smith is now the president of Proximex Corporation, a security system software company. After Arzoo.com, Bhatia started up InstaColl, which boasts of Live-Documents.com, an alternative to MS Office. Later on, in November 2011, he launched JaxtrSMS, a free, international text messaging service.