Ipo | featured news

Zynga is poised to harvest some cold hard cash in its initial public offering. Who knew that selling virtual cows and digital corn on Facebook would create a $7 billion company?

The most anticipated stock market debut of 2012 is expected to value Facebook at as much as $100 billion and mint at least a thousand new millionaires.

Zynga is expected to price its shares on December 15 in one of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year. The IPO is expected to value the fast growing social gaming company at around $10bn, below some earlier estimates of as much as $20bn.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus wants some of the online game company's early employees to give back stock they own ahead of the company's initial public offering of stock, according to a published report Thursday. The Wall Street Journal said that Pincus, who gave out stock freely to keep top talent early on, developed "giver's remorse."

YelpInc., the online review website, has picked Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to lead an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $2 billion, according to people familiar with the plans. Yelp intends to file its IPO plans publicly within the next few weeks, said one person familiar with the matter. It's aiming to complete the sale in the first quarter, though timing may change with market conditions, the person said.

When Groupon Inc filed its plan to go public with U.S. regulators in June, Chief Executive Andrew Mason proclaimed in a letter to prospective shareholders that "life is too short to be a boring company."

Two companies with quirky names, Ubiquiti Networks and Zeltiq Aesthetics, made their public debuts earlier this month with listings on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Each company's stock went up modestly on the first day of trading.

The news is surprising because for a long while now this has been a lousy economic climate to do any initial public offering.

I wrote here at Forbes in May about the dangerous trend of unaudited numbers being used by companies, media, and investors to evaluate the potential of these IPOs... As long as they get their return before the gig is up, who cares what the real story is?

Groupon is going to wait at least a couple of weeks before launching the final phase of its initial public offering because regulators still have questions for the daily deals website and the stock market is too volatile, a person familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.