Inorganic nanocrystals with well defined shapes are important for understanding basic size-dependent scaling laws, and may be useful in a wide range of applications. Methods for controlling the shapes of inorganic nanocrystals are evolving rapidly. This talk will focus on a strategy that involves pyrolysis of organometallic precursors in mixtures of hot organic surfactants. The surfactant mixtures can be used to control the growth rates of different facets of the nanocrystals, allowing for wide tunability of shape. This will be illustrated with CdSe and Co nanocrystals. Both of these materials show pronounced variation of fundamental properties with aspect ratio. The nanorods can be aligned in a variety of ways. For instance, monolayers of surfacatant coated rod-like nanocrystals of these materials display a very rich phase diagram, analogous to the phases of liquid crystals. Block copolymers can be used to orient the rods. Finally, very special inorganic structures, tetrapods consisting of four rods at the tetrahedral angle, will always spontaneously align perpendicular to a surface. The possible application of these aligned nanorods in biological detection, photovoltaics, and light emitting diodes will be described briefly.