#4 Stephen Wolfram: A new kind of search

Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. Wolfram Alpha is a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface, launched in May 2009 and a Pro version launched on February 2012.

The engine is based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and answers queries using the approach described in A New Kind of Science. It is one of the answer engines behind Microsoft's Bing and Apple's Siri (along with Google and Yelp!) answering factual questions.

The site created buzz this year at the SXSW (South by Southwest) conference as one great example of the big data trend.

#3 Gabe Newell, cofounder, Valve

Gabe Logan Newell is the co-founder and managing director of video game development and online distribution company Valve Corporation.

The company says it has "no bosses, no middle management, no bureaucracy, just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool stuff."

Valve became famous for its video games like Half-Life and Portal. Then Newell launched Steam, an online social gaming site that serves nearly 2,000 titles to over 50 million gamers.

Valve’s Source engine is also a wildly popular game development tool.

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