This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Smule, the creators of iPhone applications like Ocarina, has a cool “Feel the Love” contest running. Users who have Leaf Trombone can register to win $500 at http://www.smule.com/. You just need to sign-up, and get as much love from your friends as possible. They can listen to your registered performance, and send you love using Leaf Trombone or Leaf Trombone Lite- which is free! Whoever gets the most love wins!
It is time to start being optimistic. Bill Gurley, venture capitalist at Benchmark has declared the IPO market officially open.
On his blog, Gurley writes, “For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the press is so feverishly pessimistic about the IPO market.” Umm, Bill, maybe it’s because it has been pretty dead?
Nonetheless, Gurley points out that Ancestry.com just filed its S-1 to go public and that no major company IPO filings have been pulled this year. Furthermore, 2009 IPOS, such as Opentable and Rosetta Stone have done OK. But Gurley, who has invested in Twitter and Opentable, is not the only upbeat one about IPOs.
According to Reuters, venture capitalists predict four hot startups will make their debut on the public markets soon. They include Solyndra, Silver Spring, LinkedIn, and Zynga. Zynga, the popular social gaming site grew as one of the most popular applications on Facebook.
But not all applications leveraging Facebook make it big. So don’t get too excited. Remember iLike? The company was just bought by MySpace for $20 million. It is a decent price but not when you factor in the $17 million in funding that iLike raised.
Those advertisements of his teenagers buying PCs instead of Macs must be working. A recent survey found that there are more student laptop buyers in the market for a Netbook over Apple’s Mac. Since almost anything can be done through the Web, Netbooks are the way to go. They only weigh about four pounds, cost about $300, and can easily be carried around.
See: Kids want Netbooks, not Macs
