Social Networking, Ipo | featured news

Investors pile into Internet IPOs and start-ups, making overnight millionaires. House prices and salaries soar. Another dot-com bubble? Maybe, but with differences. As she unloaded groceries in the driveway of her Palo Alto home, Lisen Stromberg was approached by a real estate broker who asked whether she'd be willing to sell her five-bedroom house to a senior Facebook executive.

Compared to Groupon, which has enormous administrative costs and is hemorrhaging a lot of money, Zynga is a ruthlessly-run, well-oiled machine.

Zynga Inc filed paperwork for an initial public offering on Friday, the latest in a series of hot social media companies to seek capital in the U.S. public markets.

LinkedIn shares skyrocketed more than 80% to trade at about $86 a share, and at a high of $92.99 a share, on Thursday as the social networking site launched its initial public offering.

Professional networking site LinkedIn raised its price range for its IPO this week by 30%, valuing the company at $4 billion, a strong indication that demand is running high for the new stock.

Professional networking website LinkedIn Corp. plans to sell shares to investors for $32 to $35 each in an initial public offering, one of the first for a major U.S. social networking site.

Chinese social-networking Web site Renren sold shares in its IPO at $14 apiece.

LinkedIn Corp., the company behind the largest website for professional networking, plans to raise at least $175 million in an initial public offering of stock that could open the IPO floodgates for other widely used online services that connect people with common interests....

With so many investors becoming fans of the company, Facebook will be legally required to begin sharing more information about its finances and strategy by April 2012, according to documents distributed to prospective shareholders....

Most everyone in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street agrees: The eventual IPO of social-networking site Facebook could make its founder the world's richest 25-year-old. Yet CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems intent on deferring that multibillion dollar payday.