Above are the Top 5 companies on the Wall Street Journal's Billion-Dollar Club, published as of January 2014.

Both the Journal itself and Dow Jones Venture Source are tracking companies that are valued at $1bn or more by venture-capital firms. If you head to the website, you can interact with the graph of over 30 companies, looking at what each does, when it was founded, and where it is based in a profile breakdown. Some high profile names are in there - Dropbox, Spotify and Pinterest, to name a few - whilst one of the youngest on the list is SnapChat, valued at $2bn.

Only three of these companies are European; which shows us that the money is largely invested in the East and the US. And over a third having been founded in the last five years, it'll be interesting to see where technology will take us - and investors' money - over the next five.