Working all but alone from his hardware-strewn office, Jeff Han is about to change the face of computing. Not even the big boys are likely to catch him.

Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan black, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference in Monterey, California. The 30-year-old was little more than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its ad copy goes, “the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration.” And on that day, the thinkers and doers included Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) gazillionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, e-tail amazon Jeff Bezos, and Bill Joy, who helped code Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW) from scratch. Titans of technology. It was enough to make anyone feel a bit small.

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