William Gates III.

Warren Buffet.

Carlos Slim Helu.

Ingvar Kamprad.

Lakshmi Mittal.

They are just five among the 793 recorded billionaires around the world, and they have a combined net worth of around $2.6 trillion, which is 18 percent up compared to the combined net worth of 476 recorded billionaires around the world in 2005. Their average individual average net worth is around $3.3 billion.

The increasing number of billionaires is due to the excellent performance of different stock markets around the world. In fact, India's BSE SENSEX market was up by about 54 percent in the past 12 months, thus producing 10 more new billionaires for this year, more than any other country besides the United States.

Russia's RTS Stock Exchange also made an enormous performance, posing an impressive 108% increase in circulating capital. Such surge of wealth in the Russian stock market is due to the strong gains in commodities prices. The former member of the dissolved Soviet Union produced 33 billionaires, with 7 of them that are new in the list.

As mentioned earlier, the increasing number of billionaires every year (from 476 to 793) is attributed to the excellent performance of different exchanges around the world. Many market players are throwing their investments to the arena in the hope of huge profits at the end of each deal. Thus, the money is flowing around the market, and every investor has the opportunity to partake of the billions of dollars worth of circulating capital around the market.

Speaking of capital, every investor is very particular about the initial funds that they will use for their investment venture. In finance, it generally refers to the financial wealth that is used in starting or maintaining a certain investment. In other words, capital is very important for every deal that you will make that needs finances.

If you want to form a company, definitely there is a need for you to raise a huge amount of capital in order to finance its daily operations. There are various ways that you can use to raise capital, and one of which is the initial public offering.

An initial public offering (IPO) is the first sale of a company's common share to interested public investors. It is an effective method in raising capital for a company, though there are legal compliances and reporting requirements that must be met. Take note that initial public offering is only applicable to the first issuance of common shares to the public. Later issuance of such shares will now be referred to as secondary market offering and involves a different set of requirements that must be met.

There are various large corporations that make use of initial public offering method, and one of which is Google, one of the major search engines over the World Wide Web.

Google filed the initial public stock offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the hope of raising as much as $2.7 billion that will be used in the expansion and development of their Internet-based services to the public. The conduct of their initial public stock offering involves an unusual format of an online auction to make their shares widely available to the public. Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley were named as the lead underwriters for that particular initial public stock offering.

Aside from the raising of capital for the company, Google was hoping to increase the search business competition over the Internet once they file their initial public stock offering. According to different online market analyst, the competition between Google and other major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon will certainly intensify since they want to get their share within the search business.

So the next time you used Google and found out that they have additional services to offer, probably that is now the products of their initial public stock offering.