A few people in tech had amazing 2011s and they've started the new year with a bang.
Some are working on incredibly innovative ideas and we expect their companies will continue to grow leaps and bounds this year.
Others are preparing to go public by the end of 2012.
We compiled a list of 11 sure-fire people to follow who will undoubtedly make headlines in up coming months.
Ben Milne, founder of Dwolla
Dwolla is an alternative payment network to credit cards. Milne, who is just 28 years old, founded the startup in 2008 out of a frustration with credit card fees.
Before Dwolla, Milne ran an e-commerce business for speakers. He says he lost about $55,000 per year to Visa and MasterCard and it made him feel robbed.
Milne set out to side-step credit cards completely. Now Dwolla links directly to bank accounts and makes sending money as easy as selecting a Facebook friend. Just type how much money you want to send, write in the name and email address of the person you're sending it to, and they'll be able to receive your transaction.
You can only send as much money as you have on hand. Dwolla doesn't take a percentage of your transaction, like PayPal or a credit card. It just asks for 25 cents for any transaction over $10.
Milne has received a lot of interest for Dwolla from both users and investors. Milne will likely be announcing a fresh round of financing soon (he's only raised $1.3 million to date and Betabeat reports a rumored new round of $10 million). He's had so many investors contact him that he has to keep a 700-name spreadsheet to manage the process.
Users love the product too. In July, Dwolla was processing $1 million per day. It moves between $30 and $50 million on month at a rate of more than $350 million per year.
With momentum like that, you can expect Milne to continue doing great things in 2012.
Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, co-founders of Pinterest
"I haven't seen growth like Pinterest's since Facebook's early days," investor Jeff Jordan told us when he wrote the startup a $27 million check in October.
Pinterst which was founded in 2010, experienced explosive growth last year. "What Tumblr was to 2011, Twitter was to 2007, and Facebook was to 2006, a site called Pinterest is to 2012," Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson wrote.
That's because in one week alone, Pinterest scored 11 million visits. Monthly pageviews are rumored at more than 1 billion.
Pinterest is doing all that with a relatively small team too. With the fresh infusion of $27 million, it should be a fun year to watch founders Silbermann, Sciarra and Sharp.
Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, co-founders of Codecademy
Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski were classmates at Columbia before they were accepted to startup accelerator, Y Combinator.
They pair came up with the idea for Codecademy, a crash course in JavaScript for the tech novice, when Sims grew frustrated with his lack of coding skills. "Paul Graham (of Y Combinator) always says to build something for yourself so that's what we did," Sims tells us.
The founders are in their early 20's and this is their first real company but they're making a big splash. They raised a $2.5 seed round and already have about 1 million people using the product. Even New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged to learn to code using Codecademy this year.
Sims and Bubinski will also be working with the White House on an initiative to get more children and adults to learn to code.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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