The smartest people in tech

Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Mary Meeker's 1995 Internet report heralded the birth of an industry and soon became required reading for investors and entrepreneurs alike. As a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of its global technology research team, Meeker, 50, has made a career of analyzing the prospects of tech companies. She was hailed as the queen of the Net in the late '90s, a title that drew criticism when the dotcom bubble burst and many of the companies she'd praised went belly-up. But Meeker's methodical, numbers-based analysis held up, and over time she's been right far more than she's been wrong. Some of the optimistic calls for which she was dinged a decade ago have turned out to be prescient. Case in point: Amazon.

Now Meeker helps set the tech agenda in her annual state of the Internet address at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. And last December she and her team issued a 424-page report on the mobile Internet. Among its themes: In the future more of us will access the Internet from mobile devices than from personal computers. By 2020, she predicts, various forms of mobile devices will sell 10 billion units -- that's 10 times the number of PCs today. It's a bullish prediction that readers can be sure is based on thorough and thoughtful research. --J.H.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Meeker's age as 52. She is 50.

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