Potentially hot IPOs include trendy services such as AirBnB, Square, Spotify, Dropbox, Uber, Snapchat, Pinterest, Box, Scribd, Flipboard and King.com. Most of their services are tailor made for smartphones and tablets, a crucial characteristic that helped feed the rabid demand for Twitter's stock in its successful initial public offering.
Even before Twitter's IPO, good vibes were rippling through the stock market as the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes repeatedly set new highs. The fertile conditions have produced 199 IPOs in the U.S. this year, according to the research firm Renaissance Capital. At the current pace, 2013 is on track to be the biggest year for IPOs in a decade.
Sentiment among venture capitalists is also strong _ the highest since 2007 according to a survey by Mark Cannice, a University of San Francisco professor of entrepreneurship who polls Silicon Valley financiers every three months.
The companies generating the most interest from venture capitalists include Uber, the provider of on-demand car services that received $258 million so far this year and Pinterest, which nabbed $425 million. Pinterest's latest round of financing, for $225 million, valued the popular online pinboard service at nearly $4 billion. The San Francisco company just recently began trying to generate revenue, which means it could be several years before it becomes profitable. Snapchat, meanwhile, recently turned down a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing anonymous people briefed on the matter. The report also said China's Tencent Holdings had offered to invest in the company at a $4 billion valuation.
A string of IPOs that began with the May 2011 debut of professional network LinkedIn Corp. helped fuel investors' interest in rapidly growing Internet companies. Other online services with large audiences followed LinkedIn into the public stock market, including online review site Yelp Inc., Internet radio station Pandora Media Inc., daily deal maker Groupon Inc., online game maker Zynga Inc. and social networking Relevant Products/Services leader Facebook Inc.
Groupon and Zynga have been duds so far, largely because they didn't adjust quickly enough to shifting conditions in their respective markets, but all the others are trading above their IPO prices. LinkedIn and Yelp have more than quadrupled from their IPO prices, making the stocks star performers among the group.
Facebook's May 2012 IPO spooked many investors because of trading glitches and questions about the company's ability to grow mobile Relevant Products/Services revenue. But the company has since soothed critics by proving it can make money from mobile advertisements. The stock is now trading well above its $38 IPO price after losing more than half of its value in the first four months of trading.
The next batch of startups expected to test their fate on the public market doesn't include names as well known as Twitter or Facebook, so splashy IPOs of either's caliber are unlikely. Twitter's $1.82 billion market debut made it the second largest Internet IPO in the world, relegating Google Inc.'s stock market debut in 2004 to third place.
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