TUTORIAL

Now that the depression is firmly behind us, the dotcom bubble is beginning to grow in size once more, and this time the focus has shifted from Google and is set on a number of new and moderately old online enterprises like Facebook and Groupon. Here is a look at the 4 fastest growing dotcom giants, each of whom are valued in several billions.

Facebook
Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in the first half of the last decade, the social networking site Facebook has steadily gained in popularity and has over 500 million members, who share their thoughts and photos through the website everyday. It is currently worth a whopping $50 billion dollars and is one of the most serious competitors to Google's throne. In fact, if rumors are to be believed, Facebook may soon go into all out competition with Google by introducing search engine and free e-mail services.
Facebook's early gestation period has been turned into an Oscar nominated movie, The Social Network.

The Groupon official logo

Groupon
Founded by Andrew Mason, Groupon is famous for providing its 50 million subscribers with deals of the day e-mails in which local businessmen offer large discounts to attract new customers. Groupon was founded in 2008 and is currently valued at $15 billion dollars.

Twitter
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in 2006, and has since then revolutionized the way of posting on internet, replacing lengthy blog posts with 140 character posts known as tweets. At present Twitter is valued at $10 billion.

Zynga

Zynga founder Mark Pincus with his dog, Zynga

Zynga, the developer of several popular social games like Farmville, has made tremendous progress in the last one year and has roped in a number of big investors and its estimated worth is $7 billion dollars. However, it is popularly believed that the real figure is probably closer to the $10 billion mark. According to analysts, Zynga earned $850 million last year from selling game credits alone!