Ready. Steady. Go! LinkedIn, a social network site, to go for IPO

There some rumors in the air that business network LinkedIn is warming up for a possible IPO. According to the sources, that would make one of the first social networks to go public.

Equipped with the horde of new managers from top Silicon Valley firms and explosively growing revenues, business networking site LinkedIn Corp. will be one of the first big post-dotcom Internet IPOs.

LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. As of May 2007, it had more than 11 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service).

The main purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection.

LinkedIn wouldn't be the first social network to list - European rival Xing, which has also experienced rapid user growth, raised €35.7m (£24m) in an IPO last year.

"What we are seeing is revenue accelerate and we expect that to continue next year," said Dan Nye (pictured left)

"We are projecting somewhere in the $100 million range next year," he added.

Four-year-old LinkedIn of Mountain View, California turned profitable last year. But, as a privately held company, it declines to disclose more specific figures. The company, which has $30 million in backing from venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Greylock and Bessemer.

There are several competitor sites to LinkedIn offering online business networking, including Ecademy, XING, MyNetdex, and, increasingly Facebook.

According to the sources, the move could happen as early as next year.

A few References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn
http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/363666/linkedin-preparing-for-ipo.html
http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=company_info