The Top 10 Fastest Growing Tech Companies in the USA

Forbes, the famous list maker that we all love, has put together a list of the top 25 fastest growing tech companies for the year of 2013, of which we are just interested in 10. From what it's showing, Facebook and Apple aren't even at number one, though they are the close runner-ups in the contest. Some other interesting companies were brought to our attention through this and it is definitely cool to see what innovations are being ingeniously brought to fruition in today’s fast-growing tech world.

In first place, it was the professional and social connecting network LinkedIn that led the pack. In the last 12 months, it accumulated sales of 1.1 billion dollars and it's only looking up for them, as their estimated 3 year average sales growth is set at 102%. The company with the young CEO Jeffrey Weiner has more than 90 million members in over 200 countries and territories and it's a great place to engage with others in a professional setting. According to Forbes, the heavy growth is due to LinkedIn's recruiting tools, advertising and subscriptions.
The next runner up is of course Facebook whose revenue is 5x that of LinkedIN. That being said, the company isn't heading uphill quite so easily as the other social network. Their recent Facebook Home flop and HTC First disaster could be a cause for this. Recent reports say that teens, who for the longest time were the FB target audience, are now moving away to other social networking services as too many grown-ups are using FB now. The huge blue giant brought in 5.5 billion in the last 12 months and had a mere 36% growth in sales in the last 12 months. For the next three years, it looks like they will be at a steady 87% sales growth rate, unless Mark Zuckerberg has some new tricks up his sleeve.

That didn't work out as planned!'/ © Facebook/DailyFinance/AndroidPIT

Apple made its way to third place. The computer hardware and software company hit an earth-shattering 169.104 billion in the last 12 months, though their growth is even slower than that of Facebook and their shares are way down. The growth sales rate in the last year was at 19% while there is a predicted 55% growth rate for the next 3 years to come. According the slide-show master Forbes, Apple stands as the N. 1 in the World's most powerful brands and is No. 26 as one of the most innovative companies. This is a huge drop from its 5th place ranking back in 2011.

And the remaining top ten companies are....

3D Systems' niche is based on printing 3D objects from scratch: quite an interesting concept. IPG Phototonics has created some fiber-optic lasers for welding. EPAM Systems is an IT outsourcing and software development shop, while Shutterstock is an online picture library and the the ring-leader in microstock image rentals. InvenSense has created miniscule gyroscopes and accelerometers. These are used to track motion in tablets, smartphones, TV remotes and video game controllers: it's safe to say that they will only see growth in the years to come. Finally in 9th and 10th place, Shutterfly has invented greeting cards, mugs and albums while Opentable is a great app for reserving restaurant tables.

 The top 10 companies are a real mix: social networking, digital imagery, online photos and reservations. © Forbes

It’s interesting to see which companies are doing so well and it gives a clear indication in which direction technology is going. Though we have put a big emphasis on social networking as underlined by Facebook and LinkedIn's success, there's still room for smaller, more innovative companies to grow as well. What’s more, most of these companies are set in California!

Samsung Galaxy S4 Top 10 Tips and Tricks

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is probably the most feature-laden smartphone ever released. In addition to the wow-worthy Smart Stay and Air Gestures features, the Galaxy S4 is packed with helpful tools for increasing battery life, blocking unwanted calls and notifications and helping you stay safe when you're traveling alone. Let's take a look at some of Samsung Galaxy S4's top 10 tips and tricks.

Top Galaxy S4 Tips and Tricks / © AndroidPIT

1. Decrease Lag in Touchwiz

If you don't see yourself using S Voice too often, you'll find that disabling it will lead to a much smoother Touchwiz experience. Have you noticed the slight lag between hitting the home button and the home screen appearing? That's because your Galaxy S4 thinks you might be trying to launch S Voice. To speed up the transition, open S Voice and turn off the "Open via home key" option.
Another way to speed up Touchwiz is to change a few options in the Developer Options menu. Go to Settings –> More –> About Device. Then scroll down to the build number and tap it seven times.
Now go back and you should see the Developer's Option Menu. Turn off "Drawing," "Window animation scale," "Transition animation scale" and "animator duration scale."  There will be less animation now, but Touchwiz should be more responsive.

2. Prolong Your Power

So you've got 10% battery left and the whole night ahead of you. What do you do? It's pretty easy: to increase your Galaxy S4's battery life, all you need to do is turn on Power Saving Mode. You can find this option in the Quick Settings notification pane.
The feature allows you to turn on CPU power saving, screen power saving or turn off haptic feedback. For best results, try disabling all three. If that doesn't work, turn off your data connection.

3. Enable Multiple Window Mode

If you're a multi-tasking fiend like me, chances are you're going to want to enable multiple window mode on your Galaxy S4. This feature allows you to run two applications at once, like email and web browsing for example.
To do so, simply hold down the back button to trigger the multi-window menu, which appears on the left hand side of the screen. Slide it out, select which apps you want to run simultaneously and enjoy!

4. Customize Your Notification Panel

From the notification pane, tap on the icon that looks like a few squares and two arrows in the very top right corner. Now tap the pencil icon that appears on the left.
From here, all you need to do is drag and drop icons around to move your most-accessed settings into the top five.

5. Enhance The Quality of Your Photos

You'd think the Galaxy S4 would take 13MP shots out of the box, but you'd be mistaken. To enable the highest quality shots, you're going to have to set the size for 13MP by opening the camera and hitting the settings button.

6. Get 50GB of Free Cloud Storage for 24 Months

This one's easy: to enable free cloud storage, just download Dropbox and log in. Voila! You have 50GB of free cloud storage for two years! You can enable Dropbox to upload any photo you take yo cloud storage, which means you won't lose those photos if your phone gets lost or stolen. Yes, Google+'s photo upload feature works well, too, but Dropbox will save your photos in the highest quality.

7. Enable Air Gestures

To answer your phone simply by moving your hand above the sensor, enable Air Gestures. You can easily do this via Quick Settings.

8. Take a Screenshot

You can take a screenshot using two methods. Either hold down the power and home buttons together or swipe your palm across the screen. The latter method requires you to first enable it by going to Settings –> My Device –> Motion and gestures –>Palm Motion and switch on "Capture Screen."

9. Block Unwanted Calls

To ensure you're not bothered by unwanted callers, turn on "Blocking Mode" via My Device. With this enabled, you can block all incoming calls, notifications, alarms and even your LED indicator. You can either turn it on manually or set it to disable communication between specified hours of the day.
If you want to reject specific numbers, go to Settings -> My Device and under "Call" menu, go to "Auto Reject" enter a specific number, check the box next to it and you'll never have to hear from that person again. You can even have the Galaxy S4 send a personalized meson to the person explaining why their call was rejected.

10. Enable Safety Assistance Mode

This is a great feature if you're traveling somewhere alone and concerned something might happen to you while you're away. By holding the volume up and the volume down keys, you can send an emergency message to predetermined contacts, as well as two photos taken by the front and rear cameras. Your phone will also send your location to your contacts. To turn it goon, go to Settings –> My Device –> Safety Assistance

Top 5 News of the Week

This week, we had a whole range of news, ranging from porn on Google Glass, Rumor about HTC being a phablet, Samsung Galaxy S3 combusting into flames, HTC One edition, running Google Glass on your phone and our video on using the Samsung Galaxy S4 and its camera modes in real life.

© AndroidPIT

Porn Apps for Google Glass Coming As Soon As "this week"

This might delight some and disgust others, but you can't deny this blog post's popularity this week. The adult app emporium MiKandi confirmed that they're working on a pornographic app for Google Glass that will be available as early as this week. It remains to be seen what kind of freedom the company will allow developers in the future. In any case, I'm sure there's a huge market for Google Glass porn apps.

© Mikandi

Rumor: HTC Building Phablet to Compete with Galaxy Note

Is HTC building a phablet to compete with Samsung's Galaxy Note? It's still a stretch to give an unequivocal yes to that question, but there's mounting evidence HTC is building a larger phone. I, for one, would love to own a larger HTC device. Would you be interested in buying an HTC phablet?

© Samsung

Samsung Galaxy S3 Takes After The Human Torch

"Flame on!" was most probably the phrase that a certain Samsung Galaxy S3 owned by a Reddit user exclaimed at approximately 3.15am EST. It burst into flames approximately one hour after it was plugged in to recharge its drained battery in order to have it be ready for a brand new day's worth of emails, phone calls, social networking and text messages.

 © AndroidPIT

HTC One Google Edition Is Likely Coming This Summer

According to multiple sources, HTC is working on a Google Edition of the HTC One that will launch this Summer. The update to the HTC One has been confirmed by both Russell Holly at Geek (who successfully predicted the Galaxy S4's Google Edition) as well as CNET's Roger Cheng.

 © HTC

Wanna Run Google Glass on Your Phone? Here's How.

Thanks to Zhouwei Zhang, Android users can now install different parts of the Google Glass software and user interface on their phones through an .apk file. Did you have a chance to try this out?

 © Google

The Samsung Galaxy S4 & its Camera Modes Tested for Real Life

I took AndroidPIT's Samsung Galaxy S4 on a day trip to one of Berlin's hottest places called Cassiopeia and tested it out. This YouTube video will show you how many of its modes work and some of the cool things you can do with them. What do you think?

Canalys: BlackBerry and Windows Phone lacking top apps

This something Windows Phone and BlackBerry users don’t want to admit – their beloved platforms are lacking some important apps (and few awesome games). The sheer number of apps doesn’t matter much if you can’t have what’s popular out there (presuming that popularity also includes some quality).

According to Canalys‘ report, of the top 50 free and top 50 paid apps in Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store in the US, just 34% are available in either the Windows Phone store or BlackBerry World. This is despite “substantial efforts” from Microsoft and BlackBerry to improve their positions.

The picture can be made “a little more optimistic” by taking into account apps that are specific to a particular ecosystem, or where similar alternatives are available (think – utility apps).

However, the conclusion is that the “presence of clear gaps in their inventories cannot and should not be masked.” Canalys’ Tim Shepherd goes on to add that the availability of key apps is a “factor in motivating consumers’ initial mobile device purchasing decisions, and it will only become more so.”

As a reminder, the Windows Phone Marketplace has recently surpasses 145,000 apps, while BlackBerry has managed to pass the 120,000 mark. But does it matter?