#2 Doug Cutting, chief architect, Cloudera

Douglass Read Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He originated Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, Nutch, both open-source search technology projects which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. He is also best known for creating Hadoop, the mega important "big data" technology used by thousands of companies.

All of that work lead him to role of chairman of the Apache Foundation, the keeper of some of the most important open source projects in the world.

#1 Alex Kipman, Microsoft, developed Kinect

He’s responsible for bringing full motion gaming to the consumer market – a task many thought to be impossible.

Alex Kipman led the development team that spent several years building Kinect, which is arguably the coolest product Microsoft has ever produced.

Kinect is a gesture-based game controller for Microsoft's Xbox game. But it has also lead to truckloads of "Kinect hacks" where people find creative uses for the controller.

Also Read: Unknown Facts About 15 Richest Tech Titans and  15 Richest Internet Entrepreneurs Of All Time