Carol Bartz, president and chief executive officer, Yahoo

As president and CEO of internet services outfit Yahoo, Carol Bartz would have made the list anyway but the recent announcement of a tie-up between Yahoo and Nokia has given her infl uence on the mobile sector a significant boost.

The global deal will see the two firms offering one another’s services, with Nokia providing Yahoo with mapping and navigation services and Yahoo providing Nokia with email and instant messaging capabilities. A collaboration designed to more effectively compete with Google on all fronts, the deal was described by Bartz as particularly important in emerging markets where Yahoo is looking to grow a new wave of users.

Meanwhile analysts have suggested that Yahoo’s local search capabilities should help Nokia drive revenues from its mapping service, which it began offering for free earlier this year.

Bartz has been Yahoo CEO since January 2009, prior to which she was executive chairman of CAD software outfit Autodesk, where she had been since 1992. Before this she worked for Sun Microsystems (which was recently swallowed up by Oracle), where she was vice president of Worldwide Field Operations.