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Ishizuka calls the DSC-T1 camera his personal Project X, referring to the name of a popular TV show that celebrates Japan's industrial and business triumphs of the past five decades. But he realizes that in this fiercely competitive business, the only thing that matters now is Project Y. "Our competitors can introduce similar products almost immediately," he says. Which means he is already planning Project Z, too. — By Jim Frederick/Tokyo. With reporting by Yuki Oda/Tokyo


Mike Lazaridis Research In Motion | Canada
It's a classic new-economy fable: university student starts a tech firm in the U.S., never bothers to graduate, and goes on to make billions. The only difference between that legend and the true story of Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion (RIM), is that it took Lazaridis about a decade to come up with his killer idea and when his epiphany did come, it happened in Canada, not in California.

RIM was a little-known company until five years ago, when it launched its BlackBerry, a handheld gadget for writing and receiving secure e-mail. Before that, Lazaridis tinkered with industrial displays and developed a fast way to read time codes on film, which won him a Scientific and Technical Oscar in 1999. "We've always been innovative," he says. "Whatever we get involved in, we sink our teeth into." Today, the very term BlackBerry is synonymous with wireless e-mail. Over 1 million people use the thumb-operated gizmo, led by a long list of the rich and famous that RIM says includes George W. Bush, George Clooney, Sarah Jessica Parker and the Beckhams. "We got into a market where there was really nothing there," says Lazaridis, 43, an affable teddy bear of a man who founded RIM in 1984 as a student at the University of Waterloo, about 90 km west of Toronto. Last year, the number of people

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) using a BlackBerry doubled to 1.1 million, and in the three months through June alone, RIM shipped over 500,000 devices, or almost three times as many as a year earlier, according to research firm Gartner, Inc. That may not be anywhere near the hundreds of millions of mobile phones sold every year, but the growth has made a huge impression on cell-phone and PDA vendors. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft and PalmSource have all licensed RIM's e-mail software, allowing RIM to grow into a company with $594.6 million in revenue in its fiscal year ended Feb. 28, almost double its size a year earlier. What made the device catch on so fast? Unlike earlier handhelds, the BlackBerry pushed e-mail right to the device, rather than merely alerting users that they had e-mail the device could fetch. It also let employees send and receive using their corporate addresses, just as if they were in the office. RIM's curved layout of button-like keys has also made thumb operation a breeze. "It's very difficult to get someone to use another device," says Gartner vice president Ken Dulaney.

Of course, there are breakdowns on any road to success. RIM faces a possible ban on selling in the U.S. if the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington doesn't overturn a lower court ruling that RIM violated patents held by a rival. And Lazaridis has to worry that his big-name licensees might kill his hardware business — although, even if they do, RIM still has a healthy software and services business, which combined, bring in close to one-third of its revenue. Indeed, BlackBerry's success has made Lazaridis wealthy enough to provide over $100 million in funding to his other passion — quantum computing research — at the University of Waterloo, where the former dropout is now chancellor. One more reason for techies to continue to give him the thumbs-up. — By Mark Halper


N.R. Narayana Murthy Infosys | India
N.R. Narayana Murthy used to think of himself as a committed socialist, but three days in a Yugoslav lockup changed his mind. Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by the police at Nis, a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He'd been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he thinks her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. "There was no going back to communism after that," he says.

Today, sitting in the chairman's office of Infosys, a Bangalore-based software and services company, Murthy's capitalist transformation is complete. The former socialist is one of the people who turned outsourcing into a multibillion-dollar business that has rejuvenated American and European companies by slashing their tech spending. But he has also helped to put the fear of God into software engineers by raising the specter that their jobs could migrate to India, making outsourcing a hot political topic. Murthy and six friends founded Infosys in 1981 with $250 in start-up capital. The company's early years were arduous. In the 1980s, Murthy recalls, it took a year to get a telephone line and a dozen trips to New Delhi to get permission to import a single computer. But the firm quickly established a reputation as a reliable partner for American and European businesses looking to contract out software-programming work. That first-mover advantage has paid off. Infosys earned $1.06 billion in revenue last year, and expects that figure to rise by up to 31% this year.

Although he stepped down as CEO in 2002, Murthy, 57, is still immersed in Infosys as chairman and an adviser to the company's senior management. His biggest challenge: making sure outsourcing continues to thrive in a volatile political environment. As more and more American and European firms send work overseas, some politicians, labor unions and software professionals are demanding that the practice be curtailed. But Murthy thinks he can overcome the anti-outsourcing sentiment. "We can't get angry and shout slogans," Murthy says. "If we focus on delivering value to our clients, ultimately we will win." After building Infosys into an outsourcing behemoth, Murthy is now trying to protect the company from its own success. — By Aravind Adiga/Bangalore


Niklas Zennstrom Skype | Luxembourg
Watching Niklas Zennström's young company Skype grow is like driving past a McDonald's back in the '70s — every time you look, another million have been served. Skype's appeal is even more obvious than a Big Mac's: the firm provides software that lets people make free phone calls over the Internet. Since Skype was launched last August, over 15 million people in 170 countries have downloaded the program; according to Skype, about half of those actually use the software. "We don't think you should pay for making phone calls anymore," says Zennström, a serious, soft-spoken Swede. Trouble is, he's not charging for using Skype, either.

It's not the first time that Zennström has pursued a counter-intuitive business model. In 2000, he and co-founder Janus Friis launched KaZaA, a peer-to-peer exchange that allowed users to swap music and videos. Now Zennström is in the vanguard of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology in which voice traffic travels over the Internet. Stockholm-based Gartner, Inc. analyst Katja Ruud estimates that about 100 million people worldwide will use VoIP by 2008. Even giants like AT&T, BT and Verizon realize they've got to offer VoIP. Zennström practices extreme VoIP: free calls and free software. The catch is that Skype users can only call other Skype users. Zennström admits that "we have almost no revenue" and that, eventually, this will be a problem. So he plans to ask Skype users to pay for connections to non-Skype customers, and to license the software, especially to cell-phone makers. If the tech works well in cell phones, Skype could start serving billions. — By Mark Halper