Two years after the tech bubble burst, tech entrepreneurs are born again with renewed zeal and money to burn. Trying to build their own comebacks, a slew of overnight millionaires are coming out of premature retirement and going back for more.

Of course, these entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to create more wealth, but they also want to complete the Internet's unfinished revolution, atone for excesses of the bubble and fulfill promises left over from the boom. No more throwing around buzzwords, closing rapid-fire deals and embracing long-term losses. Back is the traditional approach of asking customers what they want, and then designing something to serve them.

Some of the applications discussed include:

• online games designed to accommodate thousands of players at once
• software that could predict demand
• wireless equipment maker
• autonomic computing (the ability of networks to "heal" themselves)
• operating system that link household gadgets to the Internet
• Enterprise wide anti-spam e-mail filter