Getaway Star
Sam Houser says he founded Rockstar Games (www.rockstargames.com) in 1999 because he'd grown tired of predictable games "where a guy with a big sword wanders about a fantasy space." So the 29-year-old son of British actress Geraldine Moffat (star of the 1971 film Get Carter) and his colleagues came up with gritty titles like Smuggler's Run and Grand Theft Auto, for which players assume the identities of criminals. Apparently, crime pays: Smuggler's Run quickly emerged as a best-selling title for the PS2. And the Grand Theft series has sold more than 4.4 million copies and spawned dozens of Web sites where fans create their own vehicles and maps. Look for Grand Theft Auto 3 to steal into stores by fall.
Pentium Practitioner
Thomas Pabst was trained as a doctor, but he's known to the world as the editor in chief of Tom's Hardware Guide (www.tomshardware.com), the definitive source for benchmarks and bug reports. Pabst started the site as a hobby in 1996, but his exhaustive critiques and lab data have sent more than one manufacturer back to the drawing board. Many have credited Pabst's reports with forcing Intel to halt shipping the 1-GHz Pentium III last year; this month, Intel will try again. The site's 33 million-plus monthly pageviews now bring in enough revenue to support a small staff - and to pull Pabst away from his career as an MD. Next up: Expanding the site's six languages to eight with Italian and Spanish versions.
Free Agent
When physics professor Stephen Hsu launched SafeWeb (www.safeweb.com) last fall, his aim was to help surfers in Iran and China skirt their government's restrictive Internet access policies. The site - which lends users its IP address and scrambles the data retrieved - gets more than 2 million hits per day, and the service is so effective that Saudi Arabia has cut off access. To overcome this latest obstacle, Hsu has taken SafeWeb's encryption technology a step further. In March, SafeWeb debuted Triangle Boy, an open source app that lets any censored user reach the site undetected through an unrestricted third party's PC. Says Hsu: "We think it can have socially transformative effects."
Technicolorist
In the world of color consulting, Beatrice Santiccioli is red hot. The Florence-born, San Francisco-based expert - who helped develop the iMac rainbow - is a serious student of color science, from raw materials through manufacturing, but she's always looking to "experiment and play." Santiccioli has collaborated with Swatch on more than 100 eye-popping watches, and with Herman Miller on its new RED line of small-office furniture, which will be on display in June when the flagship RED store opens in New York City. These days, Santiccioli's mixing dyes for a high-end European bicycle company. Her dream assignment? The International Space Station.
MUST READ
alt.recovery
Molecular Matchmaker
Piggybacking P2P
Ask Dr. Bob
Lights, Camera, Capital
Neocontrarian.com
People
Jargon Watch
Porno for Pockets
Getting Toxics Out of Your System
Public Life 2.0
The Switch to Holography
Raw Data
