Reuters – Professional networking service LinkedIn posted fourth-quarter revenue that beat estimates thanks to strong product and subscription growth.

LinkedIn, which went public in May, said fourth-quarter revenue was $167.7 million compared with $81.7 million a year earlier, above Wall Street expectations of $159.7 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Net income was $6.9 million, or 6 cents per share. Wall Street had expected earnings of 7 cents per share.

This year, LinkedIn said it aims to reach adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in a range of $155 million to $165 million and revenue of $840 million to $860 million.

Average Street estimates for the full year 2012 were $828.2 million in revenue, EBITDA of $149.8 million and earnings of 57 cents per share.

LinkedIn’s stock was up 2.1 percent in after-hours trade after it closed at $76.39 on Thursday, well above its IPO price of $45.

(Reporting By Nicola Leske; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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.

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)

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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

Bloomberg – LinkedIn Corp., the largest networking website for professionals, has hired banks to advise on an initial public offering this year, according to two people familiar with the IPO plans.

LinkedIn is working with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. to complete an IPO prospectus by the end of the first quarter, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Shannon Stubo, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn, said “an IPO is one of many tactics that we could choose to pursue.”

An IPO would follow a $500 million investment in Facebook Inc., the most popular social network, by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies. Their stake valued Facebook at $50 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter. LinkedIn would be the first major U.S. social- networking website to do an IPO, giving it funds to take on its larger rivals in the industry.

“What the Goldman investment underlined is that there is a huge window of opportunity for other social networkers to make it to the market,” said Josef Schuster, the Chicago-based founder of IPOX Capital Management LLC, which oversees about $3 billion. “There will be much more investor interest, because they don’t have anywhere else to invest” in the publicly traded markets, he said.

Global Growth

LinkedIn, which has more than 1,000 employees, has grown to 90 million users in more than 200 countries, according to the company. Members use the site to search for jobs, recruit employees and find industry experts. The site is dwarfed by Facebook, which has more than 500 million users.

The IPO plans were earlier reported by Reuters.

Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, founded by former PayPal Inc. executive Reid Hoffman in 2003, allows users to create and maintain profiles for free and charges for premium service. In 2005, LinkedIn introduced a subscription product to help recruiters find job candidates and communicate with them directly. Stubo, the spokeswoman, declined to say whether Hoffman is the controlling shareholder.

Jeff Weiner, a former executive vice president at Yahoo! Inc., joined LinkedIn in December 2008 and became chief executive officer in June 2009. LinkedIn is generating positive operating cash flow, which typically means a company has high enough sales to cover operating expenses and capital-spending needs, Weiner said in an interview last June.

Acquisition Plan

The company is seeking acquisitions to make its online networking tools more accessible on mobile phones and increase ways professionals can use the site, Weiner said at the time. He said the company was seeing rapid growth in Brazil, India, China, Italy and Spain.

In 2008, LinkedIn raised $76 million in financing from investors, including Bain Capital Ventures. The company’s other backers include Sequoia Capital, which funded Google Inc. and Yahoo, and Greylock Partners, which backed DoubleClick, the online advertising company.

LinkedIn and its bankers may beat Facebook to the public markets by a year or more. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to put off an IPO until 2012 so he can focus on expanding the company, three people familiar with the matter said last year. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are based in New York, while Bank of America is located in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Tiger Investment

In July 2010, Tiger Global Management LLC, a hedge fund founded by Chase Coleman, paid $20 million for a stake in LinkedIn, valuing the company at more than $2 billion, two people familiar with the matter said at the time.

Venture capital-backed companies have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise a total of $2.86 billion in IPOs, 79 percent less than private-equity-owned companies, data compiled by Bloomberg show. While companies such as Palo Alto, California-based Facebook have increased in value by 50 percent or more in private trading on speculation they will go public, they have also shown they can raise capital without seeking an IPO.

Groupon Inc., the daily-deal coupon site based in Chicago, raised $500 million in financing, according to a filing with the SEC last week. It was part of a funding round that could raise $950 million.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lee Spears in New York at lspears3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Hauck at dhauck1@bloomberg.net.

Bloomberg – Groupon Inc., the Chicago-based online-coupon site that spurned a $6 billion offer from Google Inc. this month, has filed to raise as much as $950 million from the sale of preferred shares.

The company amended its certificate of incorporation, allowing it to issue about 30.1 million shares of Series G preferred stock at a price of $31.59 a share, according to a Dec. 17 filing with the state of Delaware. The financing would value Groupon at as much as $7.8 billion, exceeding Google’s offer, according to VCExperts, a website that offers data and analysis for venture capitalists and private equity investors.

Groupon Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mason is raising money as he studies an initial public offering in the new year. Last week, Groupon hired Jason Child, Amazon.com Inc.’s former vice president of finance, to be its chief financial officer. The company, which offers deals in more than 300 cities, will have sales that top $500 million this year, people familiar with the matter said this month.

Mason said in a Twitter message yesterday that Groupon was in the process of completing a new round of financing. Julie Mossler, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment when reached by telephone today.

The last time that Groupon amended its certificate was on April 16, when the company gave itself the right to issue $135 million in Series F preferred stock. Three days later, Groupon announced that it raised the same amount from an investment group led by Digital Sky Technologies.

Google Rejection

Founded in 2008, Groupon offers daily group discounts on restaurants, theme parks, clothes, manicures and other consumer items. The company has amassed more than 35 million registered users and a staff of 3,000 people, most of them in sales.

Mason turned down the sale to Google because he was concerned it would sap employee morale and alienate business clients, said the people with knowledge of the matter. They asked not to be identified because the talks, which involved Google CEO Eric Schmidt, were private.

Groupon will make a decision next year on whether and how soon to proceed with an IPO, a person familiar with the company said earlier this month. Groupon is trying to get a bigger piece of the U.S. local-advertising market, which may reach $133 billion this year, according to consulting firm BIA/Kelsey in Chantilly, Virginia.

The Digital Sky investment in April gave Groupon a valuation of about $1.3 billion. LivingSocial, Groupon’s biggest rival, announced a $175 million investment from Seattle-based Amazon this month.

To contact the reporters on this story: Adam Satariano in San Francisco at asatariano1@bloomberg.net; Michael Tsang in New York at mtsang1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net.