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 |  Not many undergrads write world-changing code, appear on the covers of Time, Fortune and BusinessWeek. Or testify in front of U.S.Senate committees before they can legally buy beer. Shawn Fanning has done all three since founding the cultural Juggernaut Napster in a North-eastern University dorm in 1999. Fanning transformed a software script he wrote to help a roommate retrieve digital music files from the Internet into a full-featured online swap service millions of users strong. The free program enabled users to post MP3 digital music files they had on their computers to an online index supported by Napster, and to access files from any other person's computer. That way, users could swap music files directly. The application became so popular that the Recording Industry Association of America effectively shut it down
in 2001 through lawsuits alleging copyright infringement. Fanning is busy relaunching his company as a paid subscription service. His concept, though, continues to challenge the status quo. Music industry giants are scrambling to mimic Napster's success on a pay-per-use basis—but to no avail, as free copycat sites constantly spring up.
| | FANNING | | SHAWN | | AGE 21 | | INTERNET AND WEB | | NAPSTER |
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| | |  Train buff Alexander Fay jumped at his PhD advi-sor's suggestion to design knowledge-based software to help human railway-traffic controllers in their struggle to keep trains running on time. When train breakdowns occur, some controllers tinker with track signals to reroute trains; others call for backup trains. Their decisions ripple through the rail system.Studies estimate $200 in lost economic opportunities for each minute a passenger train islate.Given Europe's congested rail networks,the potential
savings from better management is huge.After interviewing dozens of controllers. Fay used fuzzy-logic principles to integrate 150 when-this-occurs-do-that rules into his software. German Railways is now implementing his computer program, which standardizes the most efficient responses to service disruptions, in one of its regional control centers. Fay's methods also apply to other systems. At Zurich, Switzerland, construction giant Asea Brown Boveri, he is developing software that captures the know-how of process and control engineers to reduce problems in designing and running pharmaceutical, chemical and energy plants.
| | FAY | | ALEXANDER | | AGE 31 | | TRANSPORTATION | | ASEA BROWN BOVERI |
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| | |  JustinFrankel has brought music to desktops in numerous ways. After dropping out of collegein 1997 and returning home to Arizona, he wrote Winamp, a program that let people play downloaded MP3 music files on their PCs. It was much easier to use than existing MP3 players. He and partner Tom Pepper also devised Shoutcast, which enables computers to broadcast like radio stations over the Intemet-To vastly expand music's availability online, Frankel then created Gnutella,a system that lets Internet users swap MP3sand other files. Unlike Napster,Gnutella does not pass files through a central distribution point—and recording companies can't track them. By the time Prankel released Gnutella in 2000, he had sold Nullsoft,the company under which he developed Winamp and Gnutella, to America Online. AOL paid $400 million for Winamp and online-radio pioneer Spinner Networks and merged them under AOL Music in San Francisco-But AOL became wary of Gnutella because it let people acquire music they hadn't paid for and pulled the program. What's next from Frankel? "Just stuff that hopefully will make a difference/the rebel says. That's a tune he's played before.
| | FRANKEL | | JUSTIN | | AGE 22 | | INTERNET AND WEB | | AOL TIME WARMER |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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