Facebook generation: 10 tech revolutionaries

VIRTUAL REALITY: Ailin Graef
Ailin Graef is a provocative, 34-year-old Chinese business entrepreneur whose famous digital self, avatar Anshe Chung, is the first real estate tycoon in Second Life — and its first virtual philanthropist.

More than a year ago, Graef parlayed $10 into a virtual real estate empire now worth more than $1 million in real money, an accomplishment that landed her virtual doppelganger on the cover of BusinessWeek in 2006. Graef’s Second Life holdings are the equivalent of 40 square kilometers of land, supported by 550 servers or land “simulators”. Graef also owns a handful of shopping malls, store chains, and brands — all of them virtual — along with significant virtual stock market investments in Second Life companies.

Graef buys “land” wholesale from Second Life’s operator, San Francisco-based Linden Lab, and then sells or rents it to real-world companies and organizations who want to establish a virtual toehold.

Earlier this year, Anshe Chung donated 16 acres of “land” to support the creation of a nonprofit office park in Second Life. The Nonprofit Commons, officially announced in August, provides a virtual meeting space to 32 charities, along with a courtyard where advocates meet every Friday morning.

“I hope businesses will get more involved in helping NGOs and nonprofits to collaborate in the metaverse,” Graef says. She has a reason to be optimistic: Graef runs Anshe Chung Studios in Hubei, China, which stands to profit even further when China unveils its own version of Second Life later this year.

— MARCIA STEPANEK

VIDEO GAMES: Susan Seggerman

Suzanne Seggerman, 44, has made a game of controversies such as genocide in Darfur and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

As cofounder of Games For Change, a partnership that helps create video games to educate people about serious issues, Seggerman hopes to deepen the public’s understanding of social need — beyond and behind the day’s headlines.

A former PBS documentarian, Seggerman was inspired when a colleague gave her a copy of Hidden Agenda, a 1990s video game about the challenges of governing an unstable Central American country in the wake of a revolution. Intrigued, she began attending developer conferences to find others interested in creating games to enable people to “play” in simulated environments to help boost comprehension of the complexities feeding various social ills.

Today, G4C brings together charities with for-profits, then partners them with media behemoths like MTV and Microsoft to create cause games such as Darfur is Dying, which was played more than 2 million times after its April 2006 debut. New games, like A Force More Powerful, teach people how to fight tyranny — Gandhi-style, using passive resistance — in oppressive countries like Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar.

“G4C does what the Sundance Festival did for independent film,” Seggerman says.

— MATTHEW MCCANN FENTON

BRIDGE BLOGS: Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman, 34, runs GlobalVoicesOnline. With 1.2 million visitors a month, it stands as one of the Web’s hottest sites — and the only one among them to function as a “bridge blog,” a daily, edited, and often translated scan of developing-world blogs aiming to bring long-hidden stories — and social problems — into mainstream social consciousness.

Founded by Zuckerman in 2004 with former CNN journalist Rebecca McKinnon, the site is “glocal” — it’s global coverage of local events — and it highlights the day’s best blog postings from around the world in nine languages, from the Japanese launch of YouTube to child sex abuse in the Maldives.

“It covers news overlooked by the mainstream media,” says Jan Schaeffer of J-Lab, a news group that awarded GV a prestigious Knight-Batten Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism in 2006.

It also finds itself a powerful advocate for free speech: When GV editor Hao Wu was detained by Chinese authorities in early 2006, the site ran coverage for seven months and organized a letter-writing campaign and online petition seeking his release. The ruckus led The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to run stories that coincided with a U.S. visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao. Wu was released the following week.

“Initially, we meant GV as a resource for journalists,” says Zuckerman, who is also a research fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “We had no idea we’d end up being a vast community project.”

— TRACIE MCMILLAN

DYNAMIC DATA: Hans Rosling

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain once wrote. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

But if Twain had lived to see Swedish global health professor Hans Rosling demonstrate Trendalyzer, his software program that brings dry-as-dirt statistics to life, he might have reconsidered.

Rosling’s goal: to give today’s policymakers — and tomorrow’s — the power to “see” the real triggers behind global problems.

Trendalyzed data dances with caffeinated animations that resemble nothing so much as a lava lamp on steroids — and leave PowerPoint looking like yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

In the 59-year-old Rosling’s presentations, figures like national income, infant mortality, carbon emissions, and Internet usage (often represented by colored bubbles) soar and float, quiver and vibrate, bulge and shrink, with all of those movements representing changes in policy, time, climate, birth rates, and poverty levels — to name just a few.

Best of all, time is not represented by a line, but acts like time itself, with passing seconds ticking off years and decades. Trendalyzer can plot dozens of variables simultaneously, and what’s more, the dynamic movement of the data can often reveal hidden relationships — between, say, overfishing of local waters in coastal Africa and a regional decline in human life expectancy, or the lowering of trade barriers in a developing nation and a spike in educational achievement.

The technology is so powerful that Google bought it last year from Rosling and will distribute it for free.

— MATTHEW MCCANN FENTON

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