While it might be fun to discuss a toy with which kids should never be allowed to play, we’re instead going to talk about a company that deals with online advertising. Eyeblaster, as it’s called, has filed for an IPO.
Eyeblaster.com
The company will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EYEB. In the course of the IPO, it hopes to raise $115 million. A number like that, and particularly one in an economy like ours, is bound to raise some eyebrows, but on the whole, it doesn’t seem out of line.
Eyeblaster was founded in 1999, making it a bit older than many of the businesses we write about. It is headquartered in New York, and has locations in 20 other cities worldwide. Furthermore, the company boasts of ties to entities like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Or, to turn to the “real world,” Sony, Toyota, and Vodafone.
Impressive, eh? The one major problem in all of this (from Eyeblaster’s point of view) is that the EU just approved the Google-DoubleClick merger. As an AFX article notes, Eyeblaster has admitted, “We expect that Google and Microsoft will use their substantial financial and engineering resources to expand the DoubleClick and Atlas businesses and increase their ability to compete with us.”
Meanwhile, the stock market is actually doing well so far today – the Dow is up 1.72 percent, the Nasdaq is up 1.90 percent, and Google has gone up by 4.01 percent.
