Yahoo

Twelve years after they started Yahoo as nothing more than a hobby, Stanford PhD students Jerry Yang and David Filo are now millionaires many times over--having built the dot-com company into the world's largest online network of integrated services.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo is not only on both the Top Tech Index's of top 10 fastest-growing net revenues and net income, it is also the only company to have remained on the fastest-growing net income list for two consecutive years.

When Yahoo went IPO (Initial Public Offering) in April 1996, the opening price of its stock was at US$13 per share. It spiked to US$33 per share after the market closed that same day. At the time of its IPO, it had just 49 employees. Today, that number stands at 10,500.

As of October 2005, Yahoo's extensive online network--available in 15 languages--serves up 3.4 billion page views each month to over 411 million unique visitors worldwide.

When it teamed up with Microsoft to allow both companies' IM (instant messaging) users to connect with each other, a global community of about 350 million user accounts was created.

Yahoo is now thinking big by going mobile, and has plans to beef up its mobile offerings and partnerships. The company has already unveiled Yahoo Go, a client application that integrates its Web services such as e-mail and calendar, with corresponding applications on mobile devices.