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AlwaysOn: The insider's network

July 23, 2009

The 2009 AO Global 250 Winners

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.

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Digital Education

Category Winner

Company Name: Knewton
URL: www.knewton.com
Headquarters: New York, NY
CEO: Jose Ferreira
Year Founded: 2008
Employees: ca. 30
Investors Include: Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners

8D World
busuu
Catura Systems
Education.com
Eduventures
GeoLearning
GoingOn
Graspr
Grockit
Koofers
Lumos Labs
Magic Studio Network
Shmoop
SimpleTuition
Tabula Digita