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The AO Global 250 represents the best of emerging
innovators and disrupters from all the technology sectors we cover, and
therefore is our most distinguished annual competition.
The innovation community has long
prided itself as being the purveyor of creative destruction. The
ability to package an innovation as “massively disruptive” has become
almost a prerequisite for access to significant investment capital.
In the past year, however, Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”
has reached a rolling boil. Full-blown destruction has toppled
incumbent industries, turning them on their heads and leaving them
reeling from dizzying changes in landscape and opportunity.
This raises a question: In a fully disrupted world, do the
opportunities lay in further destruction? Or has the pendulum swung
back to creative creation? We think it’s the latter.
To that end, as we stand here in the summer of 2009, looking upon a
world economy that appears to have only just regained its footing, with
great anticipation, we present the 2009 AlwaysOn Global 250.
With the 2009 AO 250, we sought to find the companies upon which new
industries, jobs, and economies will be built. Yes, each company in
its own way brings enhanced efficiencies (the gentler form of creative
destruction). But more importantly, the companies represented in this
list bring hope. No industry can produce jobs, wealth, and economic
momentum like the technology industry. Both directly and indirectly
what propels the global economy are new ideas and approaches. The AO
250 is the epicenter of the future.
With this list, we launch the coverage of a new category: Digital
Education. In an economic landscape where industries are constantly
morphing, and where social safety nets are becoming increasingly
porous, we need new and innovative approaches to education. People
will have longer and more eclectic professional lives, and as such,
will need an entirely new mental toolsets. From companies like Knewton
and Grockit, which are developing new models for test preparation, to
Lumos Labs, which is working to keep minds fit, brains must last longer
and do more than ever before.
No category embodies creative creation more than Greentech. The
companies on the AO 250 are building a brighter and cleaner future.
AbTech Industries is providing cleaner water by filtering the toxins
from drains, airports, and development projects. Range Fuels is
turning nothing into something by producing fuels like ethanol from the
stalks of corn and sawdust, which is, in turn, cleaner than its
substitutes.
On the digital end of things, Digger is developing a semantic engine
that can read and interpret online publishers’ Web sites, letting them
create entirely new views of their content, and in some cases, create
entirely new sites and experiences. Jigsaw is building the world’s
first self-updating Rolodex, while Gist is helping you get more out of
the relationships you already have.
Our Cloud and Infrastructure category winner, Cast Iron Systems, is
building an industrial-strength beanstalk between corporate server
rooms and cloud-based systems, letting enterprises get the best of both
worlds. While Mint.com, our Consumer Internet winner, is preventing
more than a million mini-financial meltdowns, while at the same time,
holding a clinic on how to give away a highly valuable core service by
monetizing the edges. Imagine how much easier it is to sell a new
credit card when you know everything about the one the user already has.
Our overall winner, which joins a prestigious fraternity of previous
top picks that includes companies such as Google, Twitter, and
salesforce.com, is rapidly becoming the new standard in online
measurement. Eschewing traditional “panel” based models in favor of a
directly measured approach, Quantcast is taking the guesswork out of
audience analytics. The company has placed itself on the front lines
of digital media monetization and endeared itself to innumerable
smaller publishers who find themselves off the radar of other
measurement approaches and thereby significantly disadvantaged in an
increasingly quantitative advertising industry. Advertisers now want
to know where both halves of their investments are going—and Quantcast
is telling them.
The companies on the 2009 AO 250 represent the next wave of creation
and economic progress. They’re making the pie bigger for us all.
Ezra Roizen is an AlwaysOn contributing
editor and partner with Ackrell Capital, where he advises emerging
digital media and e-commerce companies on financing, M&A, and
strategy.
You can see the full list here.