47-year old Jim Fruchterman, a 2006 MacArthur "Genius" is a rocket scientist turned social entrepreneur. His idea: Take existing technology and transform it into products for those with disabilities or other disadvantages. Fructerman’s early work involved the production of a reading machine for the blind using optical character recognition. His non-profit, Benentech, created Bookshare.org -- the world’s largest online library of books (more than 30,000 in all) for people with disabilities; they’ve also developed gear to find land mines in war-torn areas and invented a better way for human rights organizations to store and document abuse investigations. Fruchterman’s own motivation? His initial feeling of being the only guy in Silicon Valley not trying to make a billion dollars, "I'd like to help people not be as lonely as I was the first few years," he says.
