25
June
2008
|
06:08 AM
America/Los_Angeles

SDForum Visionary Awards: Levy, Greene, Hastings and Jacobs

I'm off to Heidi Roizen's backyard in Woodside for one of my favorite events of the year: The SDForum Visionary Awards.

This year's winners are writer Steven Levy; Diane Greene from VMware, Reed Hastings of Netflix, and Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm.

More details and bios here:



Steven Levy has been covering technology and the digital revolution since 1982. Since 1996, he has been a senior editor and chief technology writer for Newsweek, where he writes "The Technologist" column. Previously, he has written columns for Popular Computing, Rolling Stone, and Macworld, and has been contributing writer for Wired since its inception. His books include Hackers, Artifical LIfe, Insanely Great, Crypto, and The Perfect Thing.


Diane Greene, President and CEO of VMware


Diane Greene is President, CEO and co-founder of VMware. Under Diane's leadership, VMware created the market for mainstream virtualization and VMware definitively leads what is now a virtualization software industry. Diane has held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Sybase and Tandem and was CEO of VXtreme. Diane's degrees include mechanical engineering, naval architecture and computer science from the University of Vermont, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California Berkeley, respectively. Diane serves on the board of VMware and Intuit.




Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 and launched the subscription service in 1999. Netflix grew to one million subscribers in less than four years, and surpassed 6.3 million subscribers in December 2006. In five consecutive surveys over three years Netflix has been independently ranked number one in customer satisfaction across all of ecommerce by ForeSee Results. In the fall of 2005, Netflix was the winner of Fast Company's national Customers First Award, with Reed appearing on the cover of the October issue. Also in 2005, Time magazine added Reed to its "Time 100" list of the one hundred most influential global citizens.




Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs is chairman of QUALCOMM Incorporated, a company he co-founded in 1985. As CEO through 2005, he led the commercialization of CDMA mobile wireless technology, now adopted for all third-generation cellular communications and used by over five hundred million consumers worldwide for voice and mobile broadband Internet access. He holds thirteen CDMA patents, contributing to QUALCOMM's portfolio of more than 5,700 issued and pending US. patents. QUALCOMM has been named for 10 consecutive years to the Fortune list of The 100 Best Companies to Work For, ranking 8th in 2008.