Will the IPO Market Spring with Handspring?

Investors are always looking for good “bad” news. Last week they found some
in the unemployment rate for May, which was up slightly from the 30-year low
of 3.9 percent in April. If the economy is slowing down, maybe the Federal
Reserve will stop raising the interest rate. There is always hope.

Here are some of the new IPOs coming up.

August Technology finds tiny bugs. They
design and sell automated inspection equipment for the semiconductor industry.
Their NSX micro defect inspection system accounts for about 85% of their business.

August Technology has sales and service representatives around the world.
This includes the US, Europe, and in Asia. They can be found in
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

The lead underwriter is Needham & Co. The proposed ticker symbol is AUGT
and the proposed price range is $12 to $14.

Corio is an application service provider
company that provides resource software and IT support. Renting software saves
businesses the cost of purchasing, integrating, and upgrading software in the
human resources, sales and marketing, and e-commerce areas.

Following their May 1999 merger, @Home Corporation and Excite decided to
integrate their applications. They chose Corio.

The lead underwriter is Goldman Sachs. The proposed market symbol is CRIO
and the proposed price is yet to be set.

Rediff.com is a portal focusing on India and
the global Indian community. It also offers a version of its site for the US
Indian community. Rediff.com provides such services as news, weather, airline
and train schedules, and e-mail. It also offers local language news editions
written in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati.

The lead underwriter is Montgomery. The proposed market symbol is REDF and
the price range is $10 to $12.

Handspring makes hand-held computers.
Their first product was the Visor, a personal organizer. This handheld is
less expensive than Palm’s low-end model and is able to run many programs
created for the Palm.

Handspring has just announced that it will begin selling its Visor
expandable handheld computers across Central Europe later this summer.
These countries include Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Turkey.

Credit Suisse First Boston is the lead underwriter. The proposed market
symbol is HAND and the price range is $17 to $19.