Think you're having a productive Thursday? You've got nothing on the memory makers over at Corsair. It's barely past lunch time on the east coast and the company has already announced plans to drop its plans for a $78 million IPO thanks to "weak equity market conditions," and while the bigwigs were busy doing that, Corsair somehow squeezed in the time to launch its new Force Series 3 SSD notebook upgrade kits. Meanwhile, I'm barely through my second cup of coffee.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg tied the knot over the weekend, marrying his sweetheart of more than 9 years, and hopefully his marriage doesn't sputter the way Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) has. On just its second day of trading, the world's largest social playground saw its shares dip below its IPO price of $38 on Monday, a bad sign for those who thought pouring a ton of money into Facebook at the outset would lead to easy riches.
For a period of time yesterday, Facebook's value topped $102 billion when 150,000 of the company's Class B common stock traded at $44 each in a private auction hosted by SharesPost. As of this morning, Facebook shares are trading at $42 each in the private market, valuing the social networking site at a slightly less obscene $97.9 billion.
There is a lot of buzz around Facebook’s upcoming IPO. According to some reports, the IPO could create over a 1,000 fresh millionaires, including some highly unlikely ones like graffiti artist David Choe who reluctantly chose to receive Facebook stock in return for a paint job a few years back. That decision is expected to make him richer by as much as $200 million, and consequently a subject of envy far and wide, come Facebook IPO day. But not everyone likes to begrudge accidental millionaires like Choe their unexpected windfalls. There is no dearth of those who believe in creating their own windfall. Marianne Oleson, a 46-year-old resident of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is one such person.
It’s finally happened — the Facebook IPO is a real thing. No more speculation, no more guess-work. Facebook filed its S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this afternoon indicating its intention to go public with an eye toward raising $5 billion from sales of stock based on a $100 billion valuation. 
The topic of Facebook becoming a publicly traded entity is increasingly a matter of "when" and not "if," and if we're to focus on the former, the most likely answer is sooner rather than later. Nailing down an exact time frame has been difficult. Mark Zuckerberg isn't exactly approaching an IPO with any sense of urgency, though as competition heats up with Google and its Google+ platform, going public may be more important than he realizes.
AVG is well regarded in tech savvy circles for serving up generally capable free antivirus software, as well as a line of paid security products with more advanced features. It's a freemium model that's worked well for the company, and because AVG's antivirus software has remained fairly solid throughout the years, it's built a positive reputation for itself, one that might be worth a whole lot of money.
The company responsible for Farmville, Mafia Wars, and several other popular social games is finding out that nothing's guaranteed in the second coming of the dot-com bubble. Zynga shares began trading today, and at first, it looked as though Zynga would follow in the footsteps of Groupon, LinkedIn, and other social sites that have gone public and exploded on the stock market.
Zynga, the social gaming company that's made a fortune on casual titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is looking to raise $1 billion or more with its stock price between $8.50 and $10 a share. The plan is to sell 100 million shares, with another 15 million earmarked just in case demand goes over the top, which it probably will considering the past success of social Web-based IPOs.
There's no question Facebook will fetch a ton of cash if it's thrust upon the stock market, you can be as sure about that as anything else in this world. But can it fetch $10 billion? According to at least one report, that's how much Mark Zuckerberg and company hope to raise when Facebook goes public next year. If an initial public offering (IPO) brings in that kind of cash, it will ultimately value Facebook at more than $100 billion.
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