Mika Salmi, Ceo, Atom Films

As a student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s, Mika Salmi wore his hair spiked, and he rocked to such hard-core rock bands as Hüsker Dü. He was an anti-establishment rebel: "Screw the Man" was his philosophy.

These days, Salmi is dangerously close to becoming the Man. Through his AtomFilms, a two-year-old company that shows short films on its Web site, Salmi has put himself at the nexus of the convergence of technology and show business. More than a million visitors check out Atom's site each month, making it by far the largest purveyor of short films on the Web. DreamWorks, the Hollywood studio set up by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, is linking up with filmmaker Ron Howard and tech billionaire Paul Allen to launch their own copycat short-film site, Pop.com, this spring. But more important, Atom is positioned to be the most important Web distributor of indie films as the number of high-speed Internet connections swells and the ability to compress full-length feature films into small data files improves.