25 Most Influential People in Mobile Technology

#22 Most Influential People in Mobile Technology

John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas

Positions: Cofounders and CTO (Bicket) and CEO (Biswas), Meraki
Ages: 26 and 28
Location: Mountain View, Calif.

Free municipal Wi-Fi consistently tantalizes and frustrates: It’s easy to imagine but hard to do. Meraki’s products, derived from technology developed by Biswas and Bicket during their doctoral research at MIT, may finally spread Wi-Fi coverage across cities in the U.S.—and disconnected villages in the rest of the world. Thanks to novel mesh-networking algorithms and powerful hardware made from cheap, off-the-shelf components, Meraki’s offering can share a single Internet connection across many acres and users. A Meraki deployment is already functioning in San Francisco (where the company picked up the baton dropped by Earthlink), and we expect Biswas and Bicket’s technology to spread in the U.S. and abroad.

Did You Know: At age 15, Biswas was the youngest computer engineer ever hired by Oracle. Bicket co-led the MIT research project that later became Meraki.