Founded: YouTube

Met: Working at PayPal

Knew it was the real thing when: Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" video clip went viral in May 2006 and racked up 50 million plus views

Consummation: Selling their company to Larry and Sergey (see above)

Dream date: Fending off lawsuits from every media company on the planet

Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe

Founded: MySpace

Met: At an LA dotcom

Knew it was the real thing when: They demolished Friendster

Consummation: Selling out to the man (named Murdoch)

Dream date: Egging Mark Zuckerberg's house

Niklas Zennstrom & Janus Friis

Founded: Kazaa, Skype, Joost

Met: At a Danish ISP

Knew it was the real thing when: They discovered their shared affection for five-letter company names

Consummation: Getting bought out by eBay

Dream date: Planning five more companies

Jay Adelson & Kevin Rose

Founded: Digg

Met: When Rose, a former TechTV host, interviewed Adelson, a tech company CEO, on camera

Knew it was the real thing when: Venture capitalists fell over themselves to fund Digg

Consummation: Starting their second company, Revision3, which produces Internet videos

Dream date: Posting DRM-beating code to Digg over and over and over and...

Photos: Anderson & Dewolfe: Getty; Zennstrom & Friis: Morad Bouchakour; Adelson & Rose: Penni Gladstone/SF Chronicle; Chen & Hurley: Jill Greenberg

UAV

Two thousand unmanned aerial vehicles ply the skies over Afghanistan, Iraq, and other trouble spots, letting US troops spy on insurgents without risking life and limb. Most are less than 3 feet long and dumb as rocks, their every move controlled by joysticks or preprogrammed GPS waypoints. But they're getting smarter — and more dangerous. Advanced models take off and land without human intervention. Others, equipped with Hellfire missiles, can incinerate enemy combatants; one recent target was an al Qaeda operative who allegedly plotted the 2000 USS Cole bombing. But with the tech becoming ever cheaper and easier to build, the US advantage can't hold for long. Already, terrorist groups like Hezbollah are flying drones of their own.

Ubuntu

Named for a Zulu word meaning "selfhood through community and sharing," Ubuntu isn't just the first version of the Linux operating system that's user-friendly and easy to install — it's the first distro designed to save the world. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of the London-based philanthropic open source shop Canonical, spearheaded the code to spread free software to developing nations. But the OS has attracted well-heeled geeks, too. Michael Dell runs it on his personal laptop, Google has adapted its own version (Goobuntu), and the French parliament recently switched over from Windows. Sometimes the world you save is your own.

Ultrahigh-throughput gene sequencing

It took a decade to decode the first human genome. Now the job takes a few months. The difference? Superfast sequencing machines from 454 Life Sciences. Traditional sequencers read roughly 70,000 DNA base pairs in a four-hour run; 454's latest can rifle through 50 million in nearly the same time. But 454's $500,000 system may soon look like a Mac Classic. Rival Illumina is working on technology that will catalog a billion bases per three-day run — a genome every few weeks. It won't be long before a stall at the local shopping center will work up your genome "while u wait."

Uncanny Valley

Robots can be cute (Aibo), cool (Mars Rover), or scary (Predator UAV). Dress them up like people, though, and they're just plain creepy. This is the uncanny valley, the point at which an automaton looks too human for comfort. The yuck factor arises from subverted expectations, says roboticist Masahiro Mori, who coined the phrase in the 1970s. If you reach out to shake a flesh-and-blood hand but instead grasp a lifeless, rubber-coated facsimile, you're in for a stomach-turning moment of existential gobsmackery. Maybe your brother-in-law is an android after all.

Unix

Think your iPhone is the latest in technological sophistication? Guess again: Its operating system dates from 1969. In fact, everyone who uses a Mac, TiVo, Linux box, or any one of dozens of PDAs and smartphones is running a nearly 40-year-old OS. What gives? Like an especially hardy biological species, the various derivatives of Unix — known collectively as Un*x — evolved out of ultra-efficient code tuned for machines without a byte of spare memory. And the platform only gets better and more adaptable with each new environment it conquers. Think of Unix as a crocodile — a dinosaur, yes, but one with plenty of snap left in its jaws.

Utility Computing

What if you could buy computing power the way you do electricity? You can, thanks to the growing field of utility computing. Rather than invest in hardware, cash-strapped businesses and individuals rent processing power from the likes of Sun and Amazon, paying by the hour to perform CPU-intensive tasks like simulating heavy Web traffic. It may not represent the future — plummeting costs will eventually make even supercomputing easily affordable — but for now, it's a cheap and simple way to turn up the juice.

Venture capital

So you finally scored a lunch meeting with a bona fide Sand Hill Road VC. Before you pitch your new business, you'd better know what they want to hear. Here's a handy script and table to help you hit the talking points that count.