Photo of Tim Tuttle

Computer & electronics hardware

Tim Tuttle


Year Honored
2002

Organization
Bang Networks

Region
Global

"When Tim Tuttle was 30,he quit his job at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, moved into a dilapidated apartment in Cambridge, MA, and began to reinvent the Web. It had a freshness problem. If the information on a Web page changes while you’re reading it, you don’t know—unless you hit the “refresh” button. Tuttle saw a different possibility: a virtual network, overlaying the Web, that lets sites send you live updates on information that changes, the moment it changes. And he was sure he could get it to function on ordinary Web browsers using ordinary Internet protocols—no extra software needed. Working with no funding or source of income, he built the first node of such a network: the prototype of the “Bang object router.” After securing $10 million in July 2000,Tuttle,an active ultimate Frisbee player, moved to San Francisco to become an Internet entrepreneur. Six months later, his network was up and running, used chiefly by financial-services companies that need continually updated information from dozens of sources. Tuttle’s company, Bang Networks, has thrived through the dot-com collapse: it raised almost half of its $32 million in November 2001."