Well, it's now official: we're in the midst of dot-com boom 2.0 so get ready for another wild ride. The market finally turned the corner when YouTube CEO Chad Hurley was asked about an IPO by MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco. His response: "If we have an opportunity to go public in the future, that would be very exciting for us"
   I have no doubt that if YouTube went public today, investors would be chomping at the bit to get a piece of the action. The sky's limit if you're serving up 100 million videos a day, right? While Hurley's answer to the IPO question was reasonable, the fact he was asked the question even though YouTube has little revenue and a yet to be determined business model (sponsorships, banner ads, subscriptions?) makes it clear the Web 2.0 environment is getting frothy. It's not unlike the dot-com boom 1.0 when companies with lots of eyeballs and lots of red ink did IPOs.
  What has keep the market today relative even-keeled is most of the excitement has been focused on new, cool services and the occasional deal by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Other than Vonage, IPOs have few and far between, which has kept enthusiastic retail investors from jumping into the fray and getting burnt. As for YouTube's potential IPO, it's highly unlikely the company will ever go that route. Why go through the hassle of an offering and the scrutiny that goes along with filing quarterly results when you can attract a nice, clean acquisition for $1-billion or so?

Amid the doom and gloom of the telecom landscape, the CRTC issued a report yesterday Canada's telecom market grew 3.5% to C$34.5-billion last year while operating profits rose a healthy 8% to C$12.4-billion. That's that bad considering competition, particularly, within the enterprise market, is brutal. Most of growth came from the high-speed Internet and wireless markets where prices hikes can be passed along to consumers without too much of a hassle. Rogers, for example, is apparently going to introduce a $5 a month increase for its Extreme high-speed service soon, which would generate another $60 million a year in revenue.

In the latest installment of the ongoing Rocketboom soap opera, the site is being upgraded and a new version will be unveiled July 31 with a "consistent format, timely news stories of Internet culture (editor's note: what's that?) and many new features along with additional content on a regular basis." Sounds like a case of out with the old and in with the new.