It looks like 2010 will be a strong year for IPOs, especially for tech offerings. Of course, one of the most highly-anticipated deals is Facebook. No doubt, it would give the market a big jolt.

But sadly, it looks like we may have to wait. At a conference in Munich, Facebook's two largest investors -- Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) -- said "no" to an IPO in 2010.

According to his bio, Jim Breyer is "passionate about contemporary art, film, wine, travel, education and environmental initiatives, and music ranging from Bach to Nirvana." Now he has a new passion: Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). That is, Breyer has agreed to join its board of directors.

Breyer, who is a partner at Accel Partners, is one of the top venture capitalists. Some of his investments include game-changing companies like Macromedia, Facebook and RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK).

DealBook reports that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is shoving more chips to the middle of the table in its battle for a stake in Facebook.

Facebook's investors, which include Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, want a deal that values Facebook between $10 billion and $15 billion. That would mean that Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Google would have to fork over $1.5 billion for a 5% to 10% stake.

Who will win this Facebook face-off? Google wants to raise the price so high that Microsoft will walk away. But Microsoft is said to be willing to pay any price to keep Facebook away from Google. We'll know who wins in 24 to 48 hours.

But we won't need to wait that long to find the real winner -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his investors are guaranteed to make big bank on this deal regardless of who wins the Google-Microsoft face-off.

Update: The New York Times reports that Microsoft won the Facebook face-off -- paying $240 million for a 1.6% stake -- valuing Facebook at $15 billion. That's 100 times its expected $150 million in 2007 revenue -- valuing $1 of Facebook's sales at 7.1 times more than a dollar of Google's -- whose Price/Sales (P/S) ratio is 14.1 -- and 17.5 times that of Microsoft's which sports a P/S ratio of 5.7. It looks like the old school Harvard ties paid off (that's where Gates, Ballmer, and Zuckerberg attended college).

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in Google or Microsoft.

In light of Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, investors are hunting for the next cash-out. Maybe it will be BitTorrent, which announced it has snagged $20 million in venture capital. The investors include Accel Partners and Doll Capital.

BitTorrent is super-sophisticated technology platform that allows for efficient transfers of data (this is accomplished with whiz-bang peer-to-peer technology). In other words, it is a great vehicle to deliver video. It also became a great place to file-share copyrighted content.

But, over the past year, BitTorrent has been clamping-down on this. Of course, that makes the site appealing to traditional content players. In fact, this week, BitTorrent signed licensing deals with a variety of Hollywood players, such as Paramount and MTV.

I interviewed Chase Norlin, who is the CEO of Pixsy, which is a search engine for multimedia content. According to him: "Bittorrent's deals with the studios is just another example of content owners requiring multiple avenues for distribution. Bittorrent seems to have a good start in being the platform for this, but I suspect that there will be multiple distribution channels. Actually, the company in this space that I believe will be a big player in a few years is Comcast."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates DealProfiles.com.