<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"On the Internet, we often traffic in hyperbole. It may seem extreme to say these founders of tech or tech-based companies have changed or even will change the world, but we live in world-changing times.\r\n\r\nThese 5 women and men aren't the Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobs or Evan Williams of the world but they still took everything we knew about the online world and turned it on its ear.\r\n\r\nWhether it was changing how we shared our lives, how we communicated or how we sought to make a living, these founders took risks and came out on top. And because of that, the world we live in will never be the same.\r\nJessica Mah, inDinero\r\nSome of you might be scratching your heads about now, wondering who Jessica Mah is and why inDinero is so revolutionary.\r\n\r\ninDinero is being called the Mint.com of small business and seems to be very well-received. But that\u2019s not why Mah made this list.\r\n\r\nMah was born in 1990. A mere 21 years old, and she\u2019s already on her fourth successful business since launching an eBay store when she was 13 years old.\r\n\r\nShe graduated high school at age 15 and while she was studying computer science at UC Berkeley, founded InternshipIN, a place for students to find internships with startups.\u00A0While she was still an undergrad she built the prototype for inDinero with a UC Berkeley classmate. She\u2019s the youngest tech founder on this list.\r\n\r\nMah can be held up as a role model for anyone. She proves you\u2019re never too young to start a business - and to really succeed in \u00A0business, not just because you\u2019re a flash in the pan and had one good idea. She\u2019s a female tech founder in a time when many bemoan the lack of female tech founders. And Mah\u2019s just getting started.\r\nCharles Best, DonorsChoose\r\nFor five years, Charles Best was a history teacher in the Bronx.\u00A0His first year on the job, he was frustrated by the fact that his fellow teachers would talk about the things they wished they could procure for their students - art supplies, books, science equipment and resources for field trips.\r\n\r\nThe teachers were spending their own money on basic supplies for the classroom and there was no way they\u2019d ever find money in the budget for these extra expenses. Meanwhile, the parents were in no position to supply them either.\r\n\r\nThe idea for an \u201CeBay for philanthropy\u201D was born out of those teachers\u2019 lounge conversations. He launched\u00A0Donors Choose out his classroom for the first few years. Then a cold call to Jonathan Alter of Newsweek paid off. His article caught the eye of Oprah and things exploded from there.\r\n\r\nBest is quick to point out that teachers aren\u2019t just posting wish lists on his site - they\u2019re posting educational projects they\u2019d like to do with their students, and the list of resources they need to complete them.\r\n\r\nIn a world where education is one of the biggest factors for success later in life, the ability of teachers in poorer school districts across the nation to not be limited by budgets is revolutionary.\r\n\r\nBest probably became a teacher in the Bronx to make a difference.\u00A0He has, but for a lot more students than he probably ever imagined he would reach.\r\nAlexa Hirschfeld, Paperless Post\r\nAlexa Hirschfeld had two years in a comfy job at CBS Evening News (as comfortable a job as any in old-school media can be) before jumping into the entrepreneurial waters with her brother and starting Paperless Post.\r\n\r\nPaperless Post proved you don\u2019t have to be revolutionary to create a revolution. It also proved you can take an online product people are using for free, make it better and then charge people to use it.\r\n\r\nEvite and other free invitation sites had been around for a while before Paperless Post made its debut. But, man, were they ugly. They were free because they were ad-supported. And who would pay for an online invitation business anyhow?\r\n\r\nLots of people, it turns out.\r\n\r\nPeople keep saying that traditional media can\u2019t start charging for its products online or via mobile apps; no one\u2019s going to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free, after all.\r\n\r\nHirschfeld\u2019s company proves that to be a lie. If your product is significantly better than the free alternative, there are people who will happily pay.\r\nGreg Tseng, Tagged\r\nLet\u2019s say you found a social network and your chief competitor turns out to be Facebook. As Facebook grows and grows and knocks MySpace off its perch while smaller networks are shrinking and dying on the vine, what do you do?\r\n\r\nIf you\u2019re Greg Tseng, you pivot.\r\n\r\nTseng had a large user base of people making connections with people they didn\u2019t know. He decided to change his\u00A0focus from social networking to social discovery and was soon on the rise again.\r\n\r\nExperian Hitwise now ranks Tagged.com as the No. 5 social networking site, after Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Yahoo! Answers. It\u2019s debatable whether YouTube and Yahoo! Answers actually are social networks. Nos. 6 through 10 include LinkedIn, MySpace, MyYearbook, Google+ and Pinterest.\r\n\r\nIn the past year, Tagged gobbled up instant messaging client Digsby, information service TopicMarks and former competitor hi5. It started the year with 50 employees and ended with 200.\r\n\r\nNot every company can pivot gracefully. Gowalla tried and ended up a footnote in the history of geolocation, bought out by Facebook for its staff. Tagged showed there was room in the social networking space for one more, and carved out its own niche. Watch our video interview with Tseng here.\r\nEileen Gittins, Blurb\r\nIt\u2019s not every day you get the chance to save an industry.\u00A0While it\u2019s still a bit too soon to be writing a eulogy for book publishing, it\u2019s not too soon to start thinking about it.\r\n\r\nWe\u2019re not talking about the rise of the Kindle, Nook and tablets as being saviors for authors who can still get their tomes out, electronically, to their readers. We\u2019re talking about actual ink on paper, hardcover books.\r\n\r\nGittins worked for Kodak and helped found several companies, including Personify. Her roots were in photography, though, and she set about taking portraits of 40 people she\u2019d built companies with. She wanted to give them an elegant coffee-table-quality book of the images as a keepsake.\r\n\r\nTurns out, you couldn\u2019t do that. Book printers weren\u2019t set up to do small runs and self-publishing online was nowhere near the quality of the coffee table book.\r\n\r\nSo despite many people thinking she must be just a little bit out of her mind, she pressed forward and founded Blurb, where people can order even just one copy of their book if they want.\u00A0Many people have democratized the Web in the past decade, but none has democratized print. Except Gittins, who may have just saved an industry at the same time.\r\n\r\nWho are your favorite founders who are changing the world? Let us know in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2012/01/12/5-tech-founders-you-should-know-who-are-changing-our-world/>