Wall St Journal – Daily deals site Groupon Inc. opened at $28 a share on the Nasdaq, up 40% from its initial public offering price of $20.
Shares were recently changing hands at $27.96 a share, up 39.8%.
“This is good. This IPO sends a clear signal to the people at Zynga and Facebook. The signal is that it’s time to move forward,” said Ben Holmes, president of IPO research firm Morningnotes.com.

Groupon begins trading, but only with a small percentage of the company in play. The Reformed Broker’s Josh Brown discusses the highly-anticipated new IPO, and whether the current environment is like the 90’s tech bubble. Photo: Getty Images.

Online games developer Zynga Inc., which registered to go public in July, is expected to price in the weeks ahead. Social media giant Facebook Inc. hasn’t yet filed for an IPO, but is widely expected to go public in 2012.
Though the company’s IPO-price valuation of roughly $12.7 billion is below the $15 billion to $20 billion that it originally projected, the deal is still considered a success for Groupon and its bankers. They were able to bring to market an unprofitable company that was dogged by criticism and negative press during the months leading up to it launch, and they did it during a time of high broader market volatility, which makes accurate pricing difficult.
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Initial public offerings aren’t always good investments. Here’s a look at some of the high-fliers and flame-outs of the Internet era.

“Since LinkedIn came public in May, this is the most-watched IPO to come down the pipeline,” said Lee Simmons, IPO industry specialist with Dun & Bradstreet. “Doing well will get some buzz rolling again in the IPO market.”

Stocks fell after a two-day Group of 20 meeting ended without a euro-zone rescue plan and a range of sovereign-debt worries weighed on sentiment. Paul Vigna has details on Lunch Break.

Groupon’s early trading gains aren’t stratospheric, compared to the 135% pop that Chinese Internet stock Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd. experienced in March, but it is the best showing since tea retailer Teavana Holdings Inc. gained 64% in July.
Demand for Groupon’s offering was strong, with high levels of investor attendance at its marketing road shows. Bankers designed the deal to play on that demand, offering just 5.5% of Groupon’s outstanding shares to the public, excluding an over-allotment option that could add another 4.5 million shares to the deal if it gets exercised. That percentage is a mere sliver that created scarcity in the allocations that buyers received.
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If Groupon can hang on to its gains and major U.S. indices don’t take a prolonged nosedive, the stage is now set for a modest pickup in IPO issuance through the end of the year.
Bankers are gearing up to bring a total of a dozen IPOs public in the U.S. in November before the Thanksgiving holidays, and then aim to price as many as eight to 10 more—if the overall environment holds up—in early to mid-December. Among those expected before the end of the year are local business ratings website Angie’s List Inc. and online games developer Zynga Inc.

WSJ’s Rolfe Winkler joins the News Hub to discuss the Groupon IPO where it shares were priced at $20 each. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Although that level of anticipated IPOs is meager for November and December under normal market conditions—in 2007, there were sometimes 10 to 12 deals in a single week–it represents a leap forward for the current market.

Online daily deals site Groupon priced it’s IPO at $20 a share late Thursday, above the expected $16-$18 range. They added 5 million shares, for an IPO total of 35 million shares to begin trading Friday. MarketWatch Tech Editor Dan Gallagher has the details. (Photo: Getty Images)

Beginning in August, when the broader stock market skidded into a period of deep downturns and high volatility, the IPO market chilled considerably. There were no new stocks launched in September, and only two in each of August and October. Strong stock index gains in October set the stage for bankers to consider rolling out some IPOs, though continued volatility and macroeconomic issues such as the European debt crisis still weigh on their ability to price new deals.
Groupon is the first deal to price above range and trade higher since July, when C&J Energy Services Inc. priced above its expected range and gained 5% during its debut. Since then, no offering has priced within range and then gone on to make a gain, although two deals that cut their prices last month, Ubiquiti Networks Inc. and Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., enjoyed first-day gains of 16.7% and 19.2%, respectively.

CNN Money – Alternative investing marketplace SecondMarket has raised $15 million — the latest sign of the healthy demand for private tech companies.
SecondMarket raised the money from The Social+Capital Partnership, a Palo Alto based venture fund created by former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya.
The round values SecondMarket, which allows investors to trade shares in private companies, at $200 million.
The company had previously raised $15 million in February, 2010 from the charity foundation of Li Ka-shing, one of Hong Kong’s richest men and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek. In 2007, the New York Based company raised $3.8 million from FirstMark Capital.
The funding will go towards internal hiring. SecondMarket is looking to hire more engineers and employees on the business side. The company also says it will spend on “strategic growth and potential acquisitions.”
SecondMarket also announced that Palihapitiya, who helped launch the Facebook platform and worked to expand the social network for four years, will join SecondMarket’s board of directors.
“SecondMarket is a clear game-changer. It has become the preeminent platform for private company shares enabling companies to meet their liquidity needs, help retain and reward talent, and provide start-ups with an opportunity to monetize and grow their businesses,” Palihapitiya said in a press release.
“SecondMarket is a compelling alternative to companies that are not ready to navigate the public markets,” Palihapitiya.
13 startup stars on the verge of an IPO
Much of SecondMarket’s success has reflected the fast-growing tech boom – with investors eager to get a hand in companies like Facebook and Zynga before they go public.
The company will be looking to maintain momentum as a host of companies go public. Daily deals site Groupon, for example, is widely expected to make its debut as a public company later this week.

LA Times – Harry Potter went out with a bang.

Time Warner Inc. said Wednesday it had third-quarter profits of $822 million, a 57% increase compared with the same period a year ago, and revenues of $7.07 billion, a jump of 11%.

Much of the gains were a driven by the strong box-office performance of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.” The last chapter of the long-running Warner Bros. franchise took in $1.3 billion around the world. For the quarter, Time Warner’s filmed entertainment unit, which also includes television production, had revenues of $3.3 billion, up 17% from the third quarter of 2010. Operating income went from $209 million to $528 million.

But Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes was quick to tell analysts that Warner Bros. was more than a one-man show.

“It wasn’t all about Harry at Warner Bros.,” Bewkes told analysts during a conference call Wednesday morning. “Contagion” and “Horrible Bosses” were also strong performers for the studio, as was revenue from reruns of its hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

Even though the current television season is not even two months old, Bewkes expressed confidence that Warner Bros.-produced new shows, including the sitcoms “Two Broke Girls” and “Suburgatory” and the drama “Persons of Interest,” would be long-term moneymakers for the studio.

“Our syndication pipeline is built,” Bewkes said, adding that a hit comedy is still the “holy grail” of the television business, with the potential to become “multibillion-dollar annuities.”

Although Warner Bros. is on a roll, Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting is still going through some growing pains. Overall, Time Warner’s networks group, which includes HBO, had revenues of $1.09 billion, an increase of about 6%. However, operating income fell 4% to $1.09 billion.

Although the new TNT original series “Falling Skies” was solid and “The Big Bang Theory” repeats are delivering for TBS, much of the other programming on the two networks is struggling.

“TBS and TNT ratings were softer than anticipated,” said Time Warner Chief Financial Officer John Martin.

Bewkes also hinted that Turner Broadcasting would be willing to kick the tires of the NFL, which has talked about introducing a new eight-game package. However, he stressed that he would only buy NFL rights if the company could make money on it, saying he wasn’t interested in a loss-leader.

Bewkes also took a little shot at Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second-largest cable operator, which was spun off from Time Warner a little over two years ago. During its recent earnings call, Time Warner Cable suggested that growth prospects for the premium channel sector, which includes HBO, was slowing.

That, Bewkes said, was “kind of a backward-looking statement they made.”

Bewkes has been frustrated with Time Warner Cable for not launching a new HBO service that allows subscribers to watch the channel on their iPads. Cablevision, another large cable operator, is also yet to sign a deal for the service, which is called HBO Go.

Although Bewkes did not call out either cable operator by name, he said he was “hopeful for their sake” that HBO Go would be available to their subscribers in the next few months.

– Joe Flint

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) – News Corp., the embattled media empire that has been rocked by recent phone-hacking allegations, has at least managed to keep its finances intact.
And on a conference call with investors, chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said he and the rest of News Corp.’s board believe he should continue to hold both jobs.

News Corp. (NWS) reported net income of $683 million, or 26 cents a share, in the fourth quarter. Excluding one-time costs, net earnings were $982 million, or 35 cents per share. That beat analysts’ expectations of 30 cents per share.
Revenue also came in higher than expected at $8.96 billion. Analysts were looking for $8.46 billion in sales.
While the company may have fared well financially in the quarter, its reputation took a beating.
Beginning in early July, allegations of phone hacking at British tabloid News of the World — including tampering with the voicemail of a murdered teenage girl — sparked an international uprising and led to investigations of News Corp.’s publishing business in the United States as well.
The fallout of the phone-hacking scandal caused the company to shut down News of the World, and has led to arrests and resignations of top employees. It has also sent the company’s stock plunging, with shares down more than 20% over the past three months.
“We are acting decisively in the matter and will do whatever is necessary to prevent something like this from ever occurring again,” Murdoch said in a statement.
Murdoch claimed in front of a hearing in Parliament last month that he and son James, the head of the division that ran the tabloid, had no knowledge of the hacking.
Time to buy News Corp.?
Though News Corp.’s publishing business — which includes its newspapers and book publisher HarperCollins — has gotten the lion’s share of attention recently, it only accounts for a small chunk of the company’s revenue. In the fourth quarter, publishing made up about a quarter of total revenue and less than 20% of its operating profit. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.
It was a rough quarter overall for the company. News Corp. also offloaded social networking site MySpace. News Corp. sold MySpace for an estimated $35 million, after buying it for $580 million in 2005.
Nonetheless, shares of News Corp. spiked 3.6% in after-hours trading, after closing 6% lower in regular trading Wednesday.
News Corp. joins media giants Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) and Viacom (VIAB, Fortune 500) in reporting fairly strong earnings. (Time Warner is the parent company of CNNMoney.)
Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) posted solid earnings late Tuesday and said it isn’t seeing evidence of a slowdown, but its stock got hammered in Wednesday trading along with the rest of the market.
With the broader stock market in turmoil during recent sessions, many investors worry about the impact a struggling economy may have on big revenue-generators like ad sales and consumer spending.

CNBC – The social networking giant Facebook will likely go public in the first quarter of 2012, with a valuation that could top $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

A factor in the company’s IPO timing is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s requirement that some companies like Facebook must disclose financial information if they have more than 500 private investors.

The social media site will likely report that it has crossed that threshold at the end of year, according to these same people.

Facebook is also facing internal pressure from current employees who, because of internal restrictions, cannot sell their private shares on the secondary market, according to these people.

SharesPost, a private exchange that buys shares of non-public companies, last sold 100,000 shares of Facebook for $3.4 million, which put the company’s valuation at $85 billion.

General Atlantic, a $17 billion investment firm, bought one tenth of one percent in the social networking site, in March, in a deal that valued the company at $65 billion.

This came just weeks after a large investment in Facebook, organized on behalf of its clients by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS – News), was $1.5 billion, which valued Facebook at $50 billion, meaning that in the intervening six weeks the company’s value had apparently grown by another 30 percent.

NEW YORK (AP) – Google Inc. launched its bid to dominate a world where the smartphone has replaced the wallet as the container for credit cards, coupons and receipts.

It’s a vision shared by others. The Internet search and advertising company faces tough competition from cellphone companies and Visa, which all want to play a central role in tying together phones, retailers and banks into a new payment system.

Google said Thursday that it’s launching a trial of its payment system in San Francisco and New York in cooperation with MasterCard and Citibank. It is opening it up to consumers in the summer. It then plans to expand across the country.

There has been talk of smart payment systems for years. Google faces the same hurdles that have stifled previous trials. The new Google Wallet will initially work on only one smartphone, the Google Nexus S 4G carried by Sprint Nextel Corp. It will connect only to MasterCard PayPass terminals. There are more than 135,000 of those in U.S. stores and restaurants, but that’s only a small fraction of the total number.

Google calls it a “single-tap” solution, meaning shoppers should be able to pay with a single tap of their phone on a payment terminal, or a swipe past it. But in a demonstration at Thursday’s New York event, a Google executive had to tap twice, then sign on the screen of the terminal provided by retail partner American Eagle Outfitters Inc. to get a purchase through.

Osama Bedier, Google’s vice president of payments, said it was up to the retailer to decide if the shopper has to sign on the screen. The mobile payments system is more secure than credit and debit cards with magnetic stripes, but Google apparently faces a challenge in convincing retailers and perhaps also consumers of that.

The Wallet will initially work with a MasterCard from Citigroup Inc. and with a prepaid debit card issued by Google.

Partner Sprint is the country’s third-largest cellphone company. The other three of the four national carriers have formed their own consortium, called ISIS, to create a wallet that will compete with Google’s. Visa Inc. has also announced plans for its own wallet

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Inc. moved up to the top spot in a global ranking of brand value this year, replacing Google Inc., which has become Apple’s arch-rival in the market for mobile operating systems.

In a study released Monday by Millward Brown, a market-research arm of London advertising giant WPP, Apple AAPL +0.44% was listed as the world’s most valuable brand, with an estimated value of more than $153 billion. Millward Brown said its calculations are based on an analysis of financial data combined with “consumer measures of brand equity.”

The dollar value of Apple’s brand surged 84% from last year, helping the company vault to the top of the global rankings from its No. 3 spot last year, the study said.

Google’s GOOG +0.33% brand value, meanwhile, slipped 2% to $111.5 billion. It’s now No 2. on the list.

Apple’s growth may have added some luster to the two wireless carriers that sell its popular iPhone in the U.S. AT&T Inc. T +0.11% jumped to the 7th most valuable brand from last year’s ranking of 22, while Verizon Wireless VZ -0.20% rose to 13th from 20th in the rankings.

Other tech-sector names on the list included Facebook, which debuted in 35th place with a brand value of $19.1 billion. Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +2.16% saw its brand value jump 37% to $37.6 billion, placing it 14th in the global rankings.

Some other big tech companies saw the value of their brands diminish during the year, according to the study. Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ +0.78% saw its brand value slip 11% to $35.4 billion, sending it to 18th place, down from 12th.

Videogame maker Nintendo saw its brand value tumble 37% to $11.1 billion, according to the study.

The brand value of BlackBerry, the smartphone brand owned by Research In Motion Ltd. slid 20% to $24.6 billion, pushing it to 25th place from 14th.

Dan Gallagher is MarketWatch’s technology editor, based in San Francisco.

Reuters – Salesforce.com’s $326 million purchase of privately held Radian6 will allow the cloud-based software maker help its clients track customer trends on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Salesforce.com has been jostling with rivals such as IBM and Dell Inc to differentiate itself in the highly competitive cloud computing market, by picking up small companies with promising technologies.

In December, Salesforce.com, the world’s biggest provider of software delivered via the Web bought Heroku, another cloud-platform company, for $212 million.

Radian6 is its third buy this year, after web-conferencing service Dimdim and ManyMoon, which makes productivity and collaboration tools to Web apps.

Last year, IBM bought privately held Cast Iron Systems and Dell Inc picked up Boomi to boost their cloud offerings.

Radian6’s products will allow Salesforce.com integrate feeds from sites such as Facebook, which boasts more than 500 million users, into its own social media offering for companies — Chatter — launched last year.

“We really believe the explosive growth of social media is just beginning and the ability to bring that deeply into our application and platform will be a critical next step,” Chief Executive Marc Benioff said on a conference call.

Radian6, based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, was founded in 2006 and had over 120 employees as of June last, according to the firm’s website. It counts Dell, Kodak, PepsiCo, and UPS among its customers.

“The acquisition fits in very nicely with their strategy to go ahead in social media,” Gleacher and Company analyst Brad Whitt told Reuters.

Salesforce.com, with a market value of $17 billion, expects the deal to add about $45-$50 million in revenue for the full year but sees a fall in adjusted earnings of 11 cents per share.

The company now expects full-year earnings of about $1.24-$1.27 per share, on revenue of $2.08-$2.1 billion.

Shares of the company were rose about 2 percent to $129.56 in early trade on the New York Stock Exchange. (Reporting by Siddharth Cavale and Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Unnikrishnan Nair)

TECHNOLOGYMEDIAFACEBOOK

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) and Cablevision Systems Corp. (CVC) reported higher fourth-quarter profits and boosted their capital returns to shareholders, but the two cable giants sent mixed signals about the strength of the pay-television market–a crucial source of revenue for the broader media and entertainment industry.

Comcast, which recently closed its landmark acquisition of a majority stake in media giant NBC Universal, reported a 6.6% profit gain and increased its annual dividend by 19%. It also accelerated its plans to repurchase the $2.1 billion worth of its shares remaining under its existing buyback plan.

Cablevision, boosted by its own acquisition of Bresnan Communications, posted a 45% increase in profit and said it will set aside an additional $500 million to repurchase its shares. The company still expects to complete the spin-off of its Rainbow cable networks division by midyear.

Both companies, which are controlled by the families of their chief executives, are facing pressure from investors to return more of their strong cash flows to shareholders amid heightened uncertainty about the future of the communications business because of the rapid rise of digital media. Both took measures to allay those concerns after making major acquisitions, but they also continued to lose subscribers in a sign of increased competition and persistent weakness in the U.S. market.

The overall pay-TV business showed unprecedented subscriber declines in the second and third quarters of last year, fueling concerns that consumers may be starting to drop their traditional TV subscription in favor of a broadband-only subscription, but cable executives have said they see no signs of such a trend taking hold. While cable companies are expected to continue losing video subscribers to new competition, many analysts believe the pay-TV market stabilized in the fourth quarter.

Comcast lost fewer video subscribers than expected, beating earnings forecasts, while Cablevision’s losses were worse than expected and its bottom line was a disappointment. Shares of Comcast recently rose 3.1% to $24.91, while Cablevision shares dropped 2.4% to $36.51.

Cable executives have attributed last year’s slump primarily to consumers who were dropping service after one-year promotions tied to the government-mandated transition to a digital broadcast spectrum expired–a trend that largely took place in the second and third quarters of last year. On a conference call following the release, Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis said the company’s fourth-quarter subscriber numbers are a sign that “the impact of digital transition is now behind us.”

On Cablevision’s earnings call, Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge called the company’s fourth-quarter declines an “anomaly,” resulting from customers dropping service during Cablevision’s stand-off with News Corp.’s (NWS, NWSA) Fox broadcast network over programming fees. News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newswire and The Wall Street Journal.

Cablevision’s battle with Fox led to channel blackouts in the New York area, depriving Cablevision subscribers of access to popular Fox programming, like World Series baseball games and National Football League games. Rutledge said the company’s subscriber metrics have improved since the dispute ended, and he said Cablevision’s aggressive stand against Fox resulted in lower programming fees than Fox was demanding in the negotiation.

Both companies continued to add broadband and phone subscribers. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett said Comcast’s performance was strong across the board, while “virtually all [Cablevision's] forward-looking subscriber metrics were weak.” He suggested Cablevision may be running up against a wall, preventing it from continuing to raise prices in “an already-overpriced industry.”

Comcast’s earnings won’t reflect the addition of NBCU until it reports results from the first quarter of this year in May, but its efforts to consolidate its new portfolio of media assets after a year-long regulatory approval process are under way. Angelakis said cash flows from the company’s cable business won’t be used for investing in NBCU and the company’s content assets, and he said Comcast plans to be transparent in disclosing operating results from the media side of the company this spring.

-By Nat Worden, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2472;

nat.worden@dowjones.com

Bloomberg – Amazon.com Inc., the largest online retailer, agreed to buy the remaining shares of Lovefilm International Ltd., a U.K.-based DVD and Internet film-rental service, to compete with rivals such as Netflix Inc.

Amazon paid $320 million for the stake it didn’t already own, according to three people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because the terms are private. The purchase is expected to close this quarter, the companies said in a joint statement today.

Amazon’s existing relationships with film studios may help Lovefilm sign more deals to stream content online. The Seattle- based e-commerce company is expanding its selection of digital music, movies and games, and in November introduced Amazon Studios, a project that gives filmmakers and writers a platform for their movie ideas.

“Lovefilm will continue with the management as is,” Chief Executive Officer Simon Calver said in a phone interview today. “The benefit is we will have the support of Amazon to expand the business.” He declined to comment on terms of the deal.

Lovefilm rents movies and television shows by mail and also streams content to Internet-enabled TV sets and game consoles. Amazon.com took a minority stake in Lovefilm after selling its DVD rental business in the U.K. and Germany to the private company in 2008.

Netflix, which has a market value of about $10 billion, expanded into Canada last year with a streaming-only service. It may expand internationally beyond Canada as early as this year, former Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy said in December.

Lovefilm’s investors include venture-capital firms Index Ventures and Balderton Capital. It operates in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

In 2009, Lovefilm’s revenue rose to 97.2 million pounds ($154.4 million) from 73.1 million pounds a year earlier, according to accounts filed at Companies House.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Browning in London jbrowning9@bloomberg.net; To contact the reporter on this story: Kristen Schweizer in London at kschweizer1@bloomberg.net