WIRED’S 10TH ANNUAL LIST OF THE 40 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

INCLUDES GOOGLE, APPLE, GE, AND NINTENDO

PLUS: RADICAL TRANSPARENCY—WHY EXPOSING YOUR COMPANY

IS THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS

San Francisco, March 26, 2007—The April issue of WIRED includes the magazine’s
10th annual list of the 40 most innovative companies in the world, including Google,
Apple, GE, and Nintendo. The issue explores the notion of “radical transparency”—the
idea that smart companies, including Microsoft, are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging
about products in their development pipeline, and even owning up to their failures. The
issue also has a clear plastic cover – a first for a national monthly magazine.

“The 2007 WIRED 40,” (p. 118) includes companies that are masters of innovation and
technology, global thinkers that dominate their industries and point the way to the future.
The top 10 most WIRED companies, in order are:

1 GOOGLE 6 NINTENDO (New to list)

2 APPLE 7 SALESFORCE.COM
3 GENENTECH 8 CISCO
4 SAMSUNG 9 GE
5 NEWS CORP 10 NVIDIA

The list of WIRED 40 newcomers isn’t limited to Nintendo. Others are Baidu; Level 3;
Garmin; NTT DoCoMo; Intercontinental Exchange; Disney; Boeing; and Corning.
Several high-profile companies slid off the list, including Citi, Costco, DuPont, JetBlue,
Pfizer, and SAP. Also notable, this year Yahoo fell from the No. 5 position in 2006 to No.
30. The entire list, plus six key 2007 business trends, from universal broadband to cloud
computing, is available online at wired.com (http://www.wired.com).

Also in the April issue: “Radical Transparency,” (p. 134). Fire the publicist. Go off
message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency,
the path to business success is clear. Contributing Editor Clive Thompson reports that for
the new see-through CEOs, transparency is a “judo move” that turns customers into
working partners and allows companies to manage their images as never before. “The
very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing—from musing
about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the
global smartmob for a little help.” Thompson, who blogged about this story before he sat
down to write, includes his online readers’ input in the story, which looks at several
executives, including Glenn Kelman, CEO of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who
says he saved his company by stripping it “absolutely bare” on his blog.

Plus: Case Study: Microsoft,” (p. 140). When five Microsoft guys started posting
internal videos for the world to see, many at the famously secretive company freaked.
And that was before thousands of in-house bloggers took to their keyboards. Contributing
Editor Fred Vogelstein reports on the transparency revolution that Channel 9 ignited
inside Microsoft. “While the rest of corporate America is scrambling to figure out
whether it wants to allow blogging at all, famously guarded, control-freak Microsoft has
embraced the idea of transparency with messianic fervor,” writes Vogelstein. Marketers
say it has become the model for how corporations can use the Internet to manage their
image. “The messages coming out of Microsoft used to be so one-dimensional and
managed,” says John McKinley, former CTO and head of digital services for AOL. “Now
you can get four clicks into the organization and see engineers talking about products. It
gives Microsoft a human face.”

Contact:
Alex Constantinople
415-276-4962
alexandra@wired.com