TOP 7 Tech Companies in 2012

 In 2012 the trend has continued. And many tech companies have been successful.Several companies stood out of the average and marked the 2012. This is my list that is based on exits, valuations by investors and their growth rate.

Instagram

The popular photo sharing app had one of the best exits this year. The company got taken over by Facebook for a bit shy of $1billion in cash and stock. The company set download record when released to the Android market with over 100 million loyal users by September 2012. And all of that with practically no marketing budget.
The company was launched in October 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. By December 2010, Instagram had 1 million registered users and in June 2011. Instagram announced it had 5 million users. It passed ten million in September of the same year.

Airbnb

The website lets people with extra space rent it out to travelers. The company has a simple pricing model where it takes a 6% to 12% fee from the guest and a 3% fee from the host.
The site was founded in August 2008 by Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. In July 2012, the company had over 200,000 listings in more than 26,000 cities and present in 192 countries with over 1,000,000 hosts and travellers on its platform.
In 2012. it has been unofficially evaluated atover $2.5 billion when news of Peter Thiel potentially investing got out.

 Github

GitHub is a social coding startup that lets developers share code and offering hosting for projects. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories, and free accounts for open source projects.
GitHub Inc. was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco. During the first year GitHub was online, it accumulated 46,000 public repositories. At that time, about 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once and 4,600 merged. On 19 December 2012, GitHub announced it had over 2.8 million users hosting over 4.6 million repositories
The company has over 2 million users that have used its service and over $99 million in venture funding.

Fab.com

This online retail site handpicks its merchandise, letting shoppers look for items that are a little more unique than mass-market stores. It is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce site, having grown from 175,000 members at launch in June 2011, to over 10 million as of December 2012.
Fab was founded in February 2010 by CEO Jason Goldberg and Chief Design Officer Bradford Shellhammer.This year the company was able to raise over $100 million in venture funding.

 Square Inc.

Square allows individuals and businesses to accept credit card payments on mobile phones, by using either a plug-in device or entering the card’s details on the phone. Square charges a fee of 2.75% on every credit card transaction.






Uber

 
Uber is a company from San Francisco that made calling a car easy. A luxury town car experience is only a click away on the Uber app. All charges go directly to credit cards without cash or additional paperwork needed.
The company was founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick. Their pricing method is similar to typical taxi pricing - either on a time or distance basis.
 They got almost $50 million in venture funding.




ZocDoc

ZocDoc helps people schedule doctor appointments online and has been expanding quickly, attracting lots of capital to reach $95 million in funding, and adding killer new features like ZocDoc Check-In.

The release to the public was back in 2007 during the TechCrunch40 conference. Initially they provided service only on Manhattan where over 2 million people used it. Now they cover almost 40% of the US population.
In September 2012, the company announced the closing of their Series C round of funding from Goldman Sachs, bringing the total round to $75 million. Before this last round, the company had a valuation of $700 million.