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　　Another digital gold rush

　　Internet companies are booming again. Does that mean it is time to buy or to sell?

　　PIER 38 is a vast, hangar-like structure, perched on San Francisco’s waterfront. Once a place where Chinese immigrants landed with picks and shovels, ready to build railways during California’s Gold Rush, the pier is now home to a host of entrepreneurs with smartphones and computers engaged in a race for internet riches. From their open-plan offices, the young people running start-ups with fashionably odd names such as NoiseToys, Adility and Trazzler can gaze at the fancy yachts moored nearby when they aren’t furiously tapping out lines of code.

　　“The speed of innovation is unlike anything we’ve seen before,” says Ryan Spoon, who runs Dogpatch Labs, an arm of a venture-capital firm that rents space to young companies at Pier 38. Like many other entrepreneurs, the tenants would love to follow firms such as Facebook and Zynga, a maker of hugely popular online games including Farmville, that have been thrust into the internet limelight in the space of a few short years.

　　Some of the most prominent start-ups are preparing for stockmarket listings or are being bought by big firms with deep pockets. On May 9th LinkedIn, a social network for professionals that took in revenue of $243m last year, set the terms of its imminent initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which value it at up to $3.3 billion. The next day Microsoft said it was buying Skype, an internet calling and video service, for $8.5 billion (see article).

　　Other firms such as Groupon, which provides online coupons to its subscribers, are likely to go public soon. The return of big internet IPOs, rarities since a bubble in telecoms and internet stocks burst in 2000, and the resurgence of large mergers and acquisitions among technology firms is dividing opinion in the industry. Some veterans see a new bubble forming in the valuations of start-ups and a handful of more mature firms such as Twitter, which is still hunting for a satisfactory business model five years after the first tweet. More sanguine voices retort that many young companies have exciting prospects and that there are plenty of corporate buyers, such as Microsoft, with the money and confidence to snap up older internet firms still in private hands.