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Matt Mullenweg - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Matt Mullenweg

Title: Founder of Automattic

Position: 17 �� Last year: Not ranked

Why? Leading the open source charge

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Closest Rivals

Christian Engstr�m Deputy chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party
Lord Stephen Carter Former Communications, Technology and Broadcasting Minister
Dave Girouard President, Google Enterprise
Vivek Kundra US federal CIO
John Suffolk Government CIO
Matt Mullenweg Founder of Automattic
Nicholas Negroponte Founder of One Laptop Per Child
John Chambers CEO of Cisco
Linus Torvalds Father of Linux
Shai Agassi Better Place founder
Daniel Ek Co-founder, Spotify

Matt Mullenweg is the 25-year-old founder of technology start-up Automattic, which among other things makes the free blogging platform WordPress and automated moderating tool Akismet.

Texas-born Mullenweg founded Automattic in 2005 and is seen by some as one of the most influential people on the web due to the work his company has done to produce highly regarded open source blogging applications, many of which are available through licences such as GPL. And it seems there is a lot more in Automattic's product pipeline that could prove equally useful.

As well as building its own web services, Mullenweg and Automattic also contribute to a number of open source projects and not-for-profit organisations.

One Agenda Setter panellist said he voted for Mullenweg for "setting the pace with kick-ass authoring platform and tools. Redefining open source, developer eco-system".

Automattic describes WordPress, which has been around since 2003, as the "largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world" and the platform now has 14 million users worldwide. Another panellist said: "WordPress is jaw-droppingly good."