TechBiz

By Howard Gold

Facebook's (FB) much-hyped initial public offering started out with lots of hope, but it ended with a thud. The stock barely closed above the offering price of $38 a share -- and only after the underwriters reportedly bought up enough stock to keep it in the plus column.

Why? There were four reasons.

By Eric Markowitz

On Friday, Facebook (FB) raised a record-setting $18 billion in its IPO, placing its value at a staggering $104 billion. Not bad for a start-up founded just eight years ago in a 19-year-old's dorm room. While the company's IPO has helped plenty of its investors get very rich very fast, it has also set the scene for several other companies to go public.

In the last year, there have been several Silicon Valley darlings to go public; Yelp (YELP), Zillow (Z), Pandora (P), and LinkedIn (LNKD), just to name a few. Facebook's IPO will certainly cast a long shadow against the next wave of tech companies waiting to hit the markets. The question, of course, is whether the IPOs will live up to their hype.

Pinterest, the popular social-media site that allows users to "pin" images from the web on a virtual billboard, has secured $100 million in new financing, a deal that values the company at a cool $1.5 billion. While that's well short of Facebook's (FB) $100 billion value, Pinterest's new investors apparently believe that the site, which has never turned a profit, can transform itself into a money-making machine. Revenue often seems like an afterthought in the tech world these days -- just think of Facebook's $1 billion purchase of the business-model-less photo app Instagram. 

Does Pinterest actually have the potential to be a cash cow?

By Jonnelle Marte

While Facebook (FB) nabbed the lion’s share of media attention heading into its record-setting IPO on Friday, an older Internet giant’s stock was quietly rising.

Google (GOOG) shares have jumped more than 7% since Facebook filed for its initial public offering on Feb. 2, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is down about 1%. How to explain this market-beating performance? Some analysts say Google is likely benefiting from the hype surrounding Facebook -- and the inability for most regular investors to get in on the IPO at a decent price. It’s also seen as an attractive option for tech investors who can’t stomach the risks of investing in newly public companies, says Devin Pope, a wealth adviser for Albion Financial Group in Salt Lake City. "Google is a way to get exposure to social media without the risks and some of the potential unknowns from a company like Facebook," he says.

By Merrill Goozner

Everybody is ogling the fortunes being made from the investors and owners cashing out at Facebook (FB) -- Mark Zuckerberg taking $1.1 billion, Goldman Sachs (GS) taking out nearly the same, and Peter Thiel of PayPal collecting nearly $600 million.

Their good fortune raises an obvious question. Who’s buying? Who is plunking down the estimated $6.5 billion for the 180 million public shares that hit the market today? (The rest of the 421 million publicly registered shares will be conversions from the private stock held by insiders, venture capital firms and institutional investors -- the private parties who owned Facebook before the initial public offering.)

If you are looking to join huddled masses yearning to enrich the real friends of Facebook, there’s no need to make a frenzied call to your broker. You probably already own shares. And whether you want to or not, you are about to own a lot more.