Fortune selects Indrani Medhi
By Ria Sharma

CNNMoney is one of the most popular financial websites in the world and comprises of CNN, Fortune and Money magazine, and gets about 8 million unique users a month.  Fortune is the key media element in CNNMoney with a total audience of 4.1 million.  The Median Household Income of Fortune readers is $95,000. Fortune has just selected an Indian among its smartest people in tech.

Fortunate, in an article titled ‘The smartest people in tech’, has worked out a list of 50 such key players from around the world.

Not surprisingly, Fortune’s smartest person and leader of the pack is Apple CEO Steve Jobs.  Fortune describes him as: “When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after a 12-year exile, the company was close to bankruptcy. Thirteen years later it has a market cap of $250 billion and is the world's most valuable tech company, transforming whole industries along the way. iTunes reinvented music. Pixar, now part of Disney, elevated animated films. The iPhone changed telecom. And the new iPad has other computer makers scrambling to respond. Rocking one industry could be luck, but upending four? That's smart.”

Steve Jobs is followed in the No. 2 spot by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

While Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer did not make it to the list, a key employee from Microsoft India has been recognized as one of the Smartest Designers in the world. Fortune describes Microsoft India’s Indrani Medhi as

“
While more than 1.8 billion people use PCs, at least 2 billion more can't because of illiteracy. Indrani Medhi has made this underrated global crisis her life's work. Medhi's text-free user interfaces are the result of spending more than 450 hours studying 400 low-income subjects in Indian slums, South African farms, and Filipino fishing villages. The UIs employ hand-drawn graphics with voiced annotations in the local language as well as looped explanatory videos. "Most people were so thrilled that they would ask us when these applications would be available for them to use," she says
“

Microsoft India’s website describes Indrani as

“
Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design. Her current work has been in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. She has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA (2005) and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India (2002). Currently, she is also a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, India.
“

(Photo from Microsoft website)