Peter Lewis, 47
Columnist
The New York Times, Austin
He's one of the most influential commentators on the national high-tech scene, thanks in large measure to the fact that he writes for the national—some would say international—newspaper of record. And he has been doing it since 1984, when he began writing a personal computer column for the Times. These days he writes the high-profile State of the Art column for Circuits, the weekly personal technology section the paper launched in 1998, a job that puts him in a position to shape perceptions about companies, products, and trends (the fact that he works out of Austin gives the city some exposure as a high-tech capital too). Lewis briefly was an entrepreneur himself—he left the Times in 1997 to help start an Austin Internet company called ideaMarket—but despite glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and other publications, it failed. "I guess we forgot to put 'dot-com' in our name," he jokes. Fortunately for millions of readers, the Times took him back.