ipos

Report: Russian search site plans IPO

Yandex, a Russian search engine, plans to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion in an initial public offering this fall, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The funding is based on an overall valuation of about $5 billion, according to an unnamed source. Reuters also cited Russian media reports that Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Renaissance Capital are managing the IPO on Nasdaq.

Yandex has about 8 million unique users per day, the company said. Its co-founders are Chief Executive Arkady Volozh and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Segalovich. The company's technology began as a linguistics project at the Russian Academy of … Read more

Wind power company Noble files for public offering

Wind energy company Noble Environmental Power has filed to raise as much as $375 million in an initial public offering, according to a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that was filed Thursday.

The Connecticut-based company, which plans to list its shares with the Nasdaq under the symbol "NEPI," operates in the booming wind power market. But the company will still have to brave a weak IPO market.

The 4-year-old Noble runs wind parks in New York state that generate about 282 megawatts of electricity; and later this year, it plans to open added parks in New … Read more

Don't be a sucker when it comes to stocks

Updated March 22, 2008. Edits explained at the end of the post. - ST

I was reading a news item about the resignation of Mathstar's chief financial officer. I was surprised to see a publicly traded semiconductor company I'd never heard of, so I checked it out.

Turns out that Mathstar is like a number of companies I've come across over the years: they come in under the radar screen and, as such, investors think they've found something special.

Sure, these companies are special, but not in a good way.

Mathstar markets itself as a development-stage fabless semiconductor company. Its products are called field-programmable object arrays, or FPOAs, and are targeted at high-performance, data-intensive applications like defense, security, medical imaging, and video.

Sounds good, right?… Read more

Thoughts on the ArcSight IPO

Kudos to ArcSight for having the chutzpah to go public rather than wait around to get acquired. What does the company's IPO mean to the market? Three things.

1. The space is on fire. ArcSight revenue was up about 75 percent year over year--from just under $40 million to just under $70 million. A testament to ArcSight? Absolutely, but the whole log management space (along with its security and compliance analysis aspects) are as hot as can be. ArcSight is one of the boats in this rising tide.

2. ArcSight makes the short list. Yes, the competition is steep. … Read more

The top IPOs in 2008? Most will be open source, says Fortune

I found Fortune's article on the top IPOs to watch for in 2008 to be fascinating, but Matthew Aslett's analysis even better. The shocking thing in Fortune's article is that open source or open-source related companies account for four of the five listed.

It's nothing less than shocking.

It means that for all the bluster of open source being inimical to profit, the inverse is true. Giving one's product away to achieve abundance/ubiquity turns out to be a winning business model. For example, my Alfresco sales team is now routinely closing six-figure deals...over email and the phone...with less than five years of sales experience (and often much less). The seven-figure deals still often require a visit. But the cost of sale is still anemic compared to the proprietary world.… Read more

Where's the money?

Entrepreneurs got some answers Thursday from investment bankers and institutional investors during the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

For starters, companies looking to cash in via an IPO, or acquisition, are finding that it's usually through the acquisition route, said Paul Deninger, vice chairman of Jefferies & Co.

Over the past five years, mergers and acquisitions have provided 80 to 90 percent of all equity returned to investors of venture-backed technology companies, compared with 30 to 40 percent in the early 1990s, he noted.

And that trend concerns Deninger, who compared the situation to venture capitalists &… Read more

MySQL inching toward an IPO

Techcrunch notes that the rumor mill is heating up on an imminent IPO from MySQL:

I am hearing chatter from hedge fund circles that the filing may be imminent. Last I checked, nothing has been filed with the SEC yet.

All quiet on the western front, but with growing market share (25% by Evans Data's estimates) and an increasing ability to monetize that usage MySQL may well be ready to put itself in the public eye. This would be a major coup for the company, obviously, but also for open source, generally. Frankly said, we need more monetary proof … Read more

Facebook CEO: IPO 'years out' from now

SAN FRANCISCO--If you listened carefully, Wall Street issued a collective groan late today. That's when Facebook's CEO very publicly doused speculation about an imminent initial public offering.

"I'm not saying it's never going to happen," said Mark Zuckerberg. "But it's definitely years out."

Zuckerberg made his comments while speaking with John Battelle to lead off the Web 2.0. Summit which got underway here today.

What with all the hype and frenzy surrounding Facebook, Zuckerberg not surprisingly attracted a spillover audience crowding into the main ballroom of this city's Palace … Read more

Post-IPO disasters

IPOs (initial public offerings) are a huge event in a company's life and definitely worthy of celebration. That said, they're not the be all and end all that many expect them to be. Just ask the folks at Vonage what they think of their post-IPO fortunes.

Just as many things can go wrong after an IPO as before. And public companies have increased legal and financial scrutiny, plus the Sarbanes-Oxley tax to boot.

Sure, IPOs are a liquidity event, but that doesn't mean you'll necessarily cash out before things fall apart. The following ten companies, which I followed for some reason or other, fizzled after their IPOs:… Read more

Report: Microsoft plans to invest in, not acquire, Facebook

This story has been updated with further commentary pertaining to Microsoft's strategic interest in Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is in talks to acquire a stake of up to 5 percent of social-networking wunderkind Facebook.

Discussions over such an agreement with the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company are still preliminary, the story by Robert A. Guth, Kevin J. Delaney and Vauhini Vara notes, but if such a deal goes through, the much-hyped Facebook could be valued at up to $10 billion as it heads toward a long-rumored initial public offering. Both companies denied requests to comment to … Read more