Jayhawk soars on Top 100 Innovators list

Lou Montulli

Lou Montulli, whose work as a KU student led him to fame and fortune as an Internet entrepreneur, is among Technology Review's list of top 100 innovators under age 35. The magazine, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled its choices in June, hailing the "brilliant young innovators" whose ideas "will have a deep impact on how we live, work and think in the century to come."

Montulli's ideas—and those of other KU technical whizzes— resulted in the creation of Lynx, a cursor-based Web browser in the early 1990s. As a student working in the KU Office of Academic Computing, Montulli, '94, worked with assistant director Michael Grobe and colleagues Charles Rezac and Wes Hubert on the landmark browser.

In 1994 Montulli left KU to become one of the original 13 founding engineers of Netscape, where he continued his work in the development of HTML script. He also created an Internet cult hit, The Amazing Fishcam, the second live camera on the Web, which still shares up-close-and-personal views of Montulli's office aquarium.
But his most lasting—and controversial—innovation was the cookie, which captures and stores demographic information about users who participate in Internet shopping or other transactions.
After his Netscape career, Montulli launched Epinions.com Inc. where he continues to work as director of server engineering.

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