2012

Marissa Mayer's ascent to the top chair at Yahoo this summer made journalists everywhere giddy. The celeb CEO's many faces--geek, business shark, mother, savant, debutante--make her a fascinating subject for profiles and speculation.

After a seemingly endless parade of Yahoo CEOs proved unable to paste together the crumbling Web giant, the tech world responded to Mayer's appointment with largely pleasant surprise. The 20th engineer at Google and Stanford grad maintains a reputation for extreme intelligence blended with canny people skills, both welcome at the fading Yahoo, which has long struggled to decide whether it wants to be … Read more

Windows 8 was the crowning achievement in a distinguished career of shipping quality products for Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky. That's why his exit from Microsoft just weeks after the Windows 8 launch seemed so surprising.

But Sinofsky, a strong-willed executive with a reputation for butting heads with those in other divisions, had even been battling with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The company's senior leaders were increasingly concerned about Sinofsky's ability to collaborate with other groups at a time when Microsoft needs more cross-product synergy to better compete against Apple and Google. So once Windows 8 shipped, Sinofsky … Read more

2012 was a year Mark Zuckerberg will remember vividly -- and not just because he turned 28 and married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The year will go down as the one in which Zuckerberg came out from under his hoodie and began to prove his talents as a leader of one of the titans of consumer tech. His rock-star persona helped as he wooed Wall Street and pulled off the biggest Internet IPO in history, raising $16 billion. But we all know what happened next: The stock cratered and Zuckerberg quickly went from idol to villain -- at least … Read more

Over the last 18 years Amazon's Jeff Bezos has built an empire that redefined commerce in the digital age, and in 2012 his mastery of e-commerce continued. The company is expected to generate $62 billion in revenue this year, up from $48 billion in 2011. Fortune crowned Bezos the 2012 businessperson of the year, characterizing him as the "ultimate disruptor."

His disruptiveness first destroyed the traditional retail book industry, and now he is competing with Apple, Netflix, Google, and others to dominate digital music, movie, TV show, and app sales. In 2012, Bezos got more serious about … Read more

Most entrepreneurs are lucky to see a single business succeeding. Jack Dorsey is watching two companies he co-founded succeed -- simultaneously. Twitter became ubiquitous in 2012, with hashtags slapped on seemingly every movie, television show, and sporting event. They became integrated into Apple software at the system level, set new records for the most tweets about a single event, and notched its 500 millionth registered account. Also: the Pope joined up. Meanwhile, payment processor Square signed an important deal with Starbucks that brings Square's seamless payment technology to more than 7,000 stores. Along the way, the three-year-old company … Read more

Facebook's Chief Operating Officer doesn't shy away from ongoing industry chatter about the role of women in technology and business. She fuels it.

Now famous for her success at Facebook and her ultimate ascent to the Facebook board (previously a dudes-only affair) in June, Sandberg's past successes are many, including stints as an economist with the World Bank, chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, and as a top ad sales executive for Google.

Sandberg is not only one of the world's wealthiest women, her 2010 TED talk urging women … Read more

He's heard it before and he'll hear it again, so we might as well come out and say it: Elon Musk is real life's Tony Stark. With his high-end electric car company, Tesla, and its mainstream Model S sedan rolling out of its domestic manufacturing base in Fremont, Calif., Musk could take a long nap on his laurels. After all, Tesla could herald a new era for clean car manufacturing in the US.

But Musk's entrepreneurial zeal knows no bounds, driving him to found space-exploration company SpaceX, which sent its first operational flight of the Falcon 9 rocket … Read more

President Obama may have won the 2012 election, but it was FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver who won the hearts of geeks everywhere -- at least those on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Even as most pundits predicted that the race between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be a photo-finish, Silver's algorithm-driven system of interpreting polls correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states, and narrowly missed being perfect in at the Senate level, not to mention having Obama comfortably ahead the whole way. Other poll aggregators correctly foresaw Obama's path to victory, but no … Read more

Hackers had a busy year. People identifying themselves with Anonymous launched a massive hacking campaign against Israel in protest of attacks against Gaza; conducted a DDoS attack against the U.K. Department of Justice in apparent protest over charges against Julian Assange; claimed to have stolen 1.7GB of data from the U.S. Justice Department; defaced hundreds of government and commercial Web sites in China; and targeted Syrian government Web sites -- just to name a few. AntiSec claimed to have stolen millions of Apple device IDs from the FBI, a claim the FBI disputed. And a group named … Read more