Google to debut new mobile payment service on Thursday (Yahoo! News)

After months of speculation, rumors, and teases, Bloomberg is reporting that Google will beat Apple to the punch and introduce a new mobile payment system on Thursday. The service will use near-field communication (NFC) technology, which uses special hardware inside of a mobile phone to make wireless transactions at stores equipped with NFC readers.

Google's new mobile payment option will reportedly be available exclusively to Sprint customers, at least at the start. The only smartphone on the U.S. market equipped with NFC technology is Google's Nexus S, which is available on both Sprint and T-Mobile. More phones with NFC capabilities are confirmed to be in the works, and there's even been talk of an upcoming iPhone model supporting the technology as well.

The service will reportedly launch in 5 cities at the start, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Chicago. No timetable was given on a further rollout, but that information may well be detailed when the service is officially announced on Thursday, so be sure to check back!

(Source)

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Yandex soars on Wall Street debut (AFP)

NEW YORK (AFP) – Yandex shares soared on Tuesday as Russia's top Internet portal and leading search engine made its Wall Street debut amid feverish investor enthusiasm for technology stocks.

Shares in Yandex, which is being traded under the ticker symbol "YNDX," gained 55.36 percent on the Nasdaq to close at $38.84.

Yandex, the first Russian company to carry out an initial public offering on the Nasdaq since 2006, is seeking to raise $1.3 billion in the largest Internet IPO since Google's in 2004.

The company will keep a total of $365 million, using the proceeds for "general corporate purposes, including investments in technology infrastructure, particularly new servers and data centers."

Yandex, valued at $8 billion, offered 52.2 million shares at $25 each with an option of selling an additional 5.2 million shares to cover over-allotments.

Yandex's IPO comes less than a week after career-focused social-networking firm LinkedIn staged a dazzling public launch of its own on Wall Street.

LinkedIn shares more than doubled in price after launching on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, reviving memories of the infamous dot-com boom.

Renren, China's largest social network, went public on May 4 at an IPO price of $14. The shares soared in the first few days of trading but have since fallen and closed at $12.26 on Tuesday, below their offer price.

In November Mail.ru -- Russia's largest free e-mail service -- raised $912 million on the London Stock Exchange.

In its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Yandex cited Mail.ru and Google as its chief rivals.

"We face strong competition from global and Russian companies that provide Internet search and other online services and content," it said. "Currently, we consider our principal competitors to be Google and Mail.ru."

Yandex accounted for 64 percent of search traffic in Russia last year and was the largest Russian Internet company in revenue terms. It reported profits of $134.3 million last year on revenue of $439.7 million.

Its website, yandex.ru, which was launched in 1997, received 38.3 million unique visitors in March.

"Investors are attracted to the fast-growing Internet companies, especially the ones that are the dominant companies in their markets," said Renaissance Capital analyst Stephanie Chang.

She said she was not surprised by the eagerness for Yandex shares "especially after LinkedIn's successful IPO last week."

"LinkedIn attracted a lot of attention because it had that social media angle to it," Chang said.

"Yandex is one of the only publicly traded Russian companies so that?s a good way for investors interested in growth in the Russian online advertising market to get access," she said.

Yandex was founded by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, who met while studying mathematics and physics in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Volozh is currently chief executive of Yandex while Segalovich serves as the company's chief technology officer.

The Russian edition of Forbes magazine lists Volozh as the 114th richest person in the country with a fortune estimated at $900 million. Segalovich's wealth was estimated at $600 million, making him the 159th richest.

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LinkedIn's hot debut no red flag for Fed official (Reuters)

CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The red hot trading debut of professional social networking company LinkedIn Corp is not raising any red flags for a top official at the U.S. Federal Reserve, whose flood of money some argue could fuel dangerous bubbles.

While declining to discuss any specific company, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans made clear that he is withholding judgment over whether a new dotcom bubble is under way. LinkedIn shares more than doubled in their first day of trading, evoking memories of the excitement surrounding Internet stocks in the 1990s and comments made by former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan about how to recognize "irrational exuberance" building into an asset bubble.

"We are at one of those time periods where technology is changing dramatically, people are finding ways to use the technology in amazing ways, and I have no way of knowing that those aren't just exactly the right valuations," Evans told reporters after a speech in Chicago.

"Market functioning is pretty good at the moment, and so I would expect it would work out just about as well as you would expect -- which means that sometimes it's exactly the right price and other times it's higher or lower."

Analysts have faulted the Fed for keeping rates too low too long in the early 2000s, fueling the housing bubble whose collapse helped plunge the nation into its worst recession since the 1930s.

Some Fed officials, including Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, have raised concerns that the Fed's current round of asset-buying may inadvertently fuel speculation and bubbles. Evans was asked about his views on asset bubbles after a speech in which he said the Fed should keep rates near zero for an extended period to help support the economy.

"I know that some people are concerned that exuberance is coming back a little too quickly in certain market segments," he said. But regulators are keeping a sharp eye out for problems, and the Fed is also watching the situation closely, he said.

"I'm hard pressed to second guess the market pricing mechanism for assets, as long as I think those markets are functioning appropriately," he said.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir in Chicago and Clare Baldwin and Alina Selyukh in New York; Editing by Gary Hill)

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LinkedIn share price more than doubles in NYSE debut (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – LinkedIn Corp's shares more than doubled in their public trading debut on Thursday, evoking memories of the investor love affair with Internet stocks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

Shares of the online professional social networking company closed at $94.25, 109 percent above their $45 initial public offering price. They rose as high as $121.97, in their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Just two weeks ago, LinkedIn proposed a price range for the IPO that valued it at just over $3 billion. Less than a decade ago, the company was nothing more than an ambitious idea and a computer in one man's living room.

Now, its $8.9 billion market value makes it larger than Harley Davidson Inc, Moodys Corp and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.

"It seems to bring back memories of the tech bubble," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. "Based on what I know it seems like investors are a little overly enthusiastic."

One hedge fund manager who flipped his holdings in the low-80's described how difficult it was to get shares. "I got 500 shares and was told to consider myself lucky," he said.

"There are billion-dollar institutions that are not getting any stock," he said, recounting something he learned from salesperson at one of the lead banks.

LinkedIn is the first prominent U.S. social networking company to publicly test how hungry investors are for social media companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga.

Such exuberant debut trading in recent years has been the prerogative of Chinese Internet stocks. LinkedIn shares marked the biggest first-day price jump since shares of Qihoo 360 Technology Co, China's third most-popular Internet company, rose 134 percent in their NYSE debut.

Like Facebook, Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn allows users to create profile pages displaying a picture and details about themselves.

While Facebook often has more informal profiles that may include a photo album from a recent trip, for example, LinkedIn is seen as the place for a professional persona. The profile pages are basically an online database of electronic resumes.

The company's 2010 net income was $3.4 million attributable to common stockholders on net revenue of $243.1 million.

As of March 31, LinkedIn had 1,288 employees and 102 million registered members. Based on LinkedIn's current market value, each of those users is valued at about $96.

MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES, OH MY!

LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner, a newly minted millionaire, shrugged off the trading craze or even worries that the pricing underestimated the appetite for the stock.

"Speaking for myself, personally I'm not even thinking twice about where the price is today and leaving money on the table or even anything remotely along those lines," he said, adding that the stock "will take care of itself."

He also cautioned against viewing LinkedIn as a proxy for other potential big-name IPOs, saying those stocks would also be driven by their fundamental value.

Weiner, who sold about 5 percent of his holdings in the offering, made $5.2 million on the IPO. Based on the latest stock price, his remaining stake in LinkedIn is worth about $208 million.

LinkedIn's co-founder and ex-PayPal executive Reid Hoffman made $5.2 million selling less than 1 percent of his shares. His remaining stake in the company -- 21.7 percent of the voting power -- is now worth about $1.8 billion.

The company raised $352.8 million on Wednesday by selling 8 percent of the company, or 7.84 million shares, for $45 apiece. The company increased its anticipated price range by $10 on Tuesday to $42 to $45 per share.

Bankers typically try to price an IPO so that the stock rises about 15 percent on the first day of trading -- enough to reward investors who made a bet, but not so much that the company and shareholders feel they could have made much more.

The company's shares were sold at about 17.5 times its 2010 sales. They are now worth 37 times the company's 2010 sales. By comparison, Google Inc's shares are valued at just under six times 2010 sales.

"There's a lot of enthusiasm and maybe there's excess demand because there is just not a whole lot of supply of these types of companies in the market. That can drive a richer valuation but it's not a bubble," said Scott Cutler, co-head of U.S. listings at NYSE.

Underwriters on the IPO were led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin and Alina Selyukh. Additional reporting by Edward Krudy, Rodrigo Campos, Angela Moon, Dan Wilchins, Chris Sanders, Caroline Valetkevitch and IFR's Stephen Lacey; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Maureen Bavdek and Robert MacMillan)

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