• Wired, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 1 PM

Technology IPOs, seemingly a long lost relic of the dot-com bust, are coming back. The following new media and technology companies are set to open their doors to the public in 2008: NetSuite, a software maker, Classmates.com, a company that helps former classmates find one another, and Arcsight, a developer of network security software.

None posted a profit in their most recent filings with the SEC. NetSuite is the biggest worry, having lost $35.7 million on revenue of $67.2 million in the most recent quarter. Worse, the company has shown no consistency in its results, according to the filing. Classmates.com recently lost $1.9 million on revenue of $134.9 million. Arcsight's losses were even more modest: $257,000 on $69.8 million, although the company conceded in its filing that it has a history of losses and unpredictability.

We're only in the first year of an active IPO market," says Glen Kacher, a managing director of VC Integral Capital Partners. However, he warned that tech companies cannot go public without first establishing a pattern of predictability. "That's a sin," he says. "The double sin is for a company to hype itself when it doesn't have predictability. The triple sin is for a company that doesn't have predictability to go public and then to blow its quarter."

Read the whole story at Wired »