Initial Public Offerings

So, against all odds, you managed to get your hands on a few shares of Facebook stock via one of the most hyped initial public offerings of all time and managed to survive its messy first day of trading. Congratulations. You're now married to Mark Zuckerberg. The 28-year-old company founder is today one of the most deeply-entrenched chief executives in American business. Thanks to a two-class stock structure, Zuckerberg will own about 28% of Facebook but control 57% of all shareholder votes.

So, against all odds, you managed to get your hands on a few shares of Facebook stock via one of the most hyped initial public offerings of all time and managed to survive its messy first day of trading. Congratulations. You're now married to Mark Zuckerberg. The 28-year-old company founder is today one of the most deeply-entrenched chief executives in American business. Thanks to a two-class stock structure, Zuckerberg will own about 28% of Facebook but control 57% of all shareholder votes.

Drug giant Merck & Co. said the planned spinoff of its Medco Health Solutions Inc. subsidiary to shareholders should happen this summer. Merck, which said in April that it would jettison Medco, on Wednesday filed details of the deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The transaction is expected to be tax-free to Merck holders. Medco is a pharmacy benefits management firm that develops prescription benefit programs for employers and runs a mail-order and online pharmacy.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dressed in his trademark hoodie and jeans, Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a cross-country roadshow to pitch his company's initial public stock offering. Hundreds of institutional investors stood in long lines Monday to pile into a ballroom at New York's Sheraton Hotel to hear the billion-dollar pitch from the 27-year-old chief executive before his company's hotly anticipated IPO. The meeting was closed to the media. Facebook is trying to build excitement for the IPO that in a few weeks could value the company at more than $96 billion.

Credit data giant Experian Corp. said it may go public soon with a $250-million stock offering--equal to about 23% of the $1.1-billion price placed on the company when it broke away last month from its former parent, TRW Inc. In a registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Experian said it would use proceeds from the offering to repay a $248.7-million loan from its main financial backers, Boston investment firms Bain Capital Inc. and Thomas H. Lee Co.

Seagate Technology Holdings, the largest maker of computer disk drives by revenue, has filed to raise as much as $1 billion in an initial public stock offering. Seagate, which has operations in Scotts Valley, Calif., and its investors will sell an undisclosed number of common shares at a price to be determined later, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Pointcast Inc., which pioneered the Internet "push" technology that delivers customized news and information, has filed for an initial public stock offering. The Sunnyvale company said it planned to offer 3.8 million shares through underwriters BT Alex. Brown Inc. and BancAmerica Robertson Stephens. The offering price is expected to be between $10 and $12 a share. The company said in a statement that it plans to use proceeds for general corporate purposes and to expand its marketing efforts.

Javelin Systems Inc., which sells point-of-sale computers for the food service industry, said it hopes to raise nearly $6 million, less underwriting fees, through a proposed initial public stock sale. The company said it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell 850,000 shares of common stock for $5 to $7 per share. All of the shares are to be issued and sold by the company.

Advanced Thermal Sciences Inc., which makes temperature-control systems for chip makers, withdrew its plan to go public in a market that has cooled toward new issues and semiconductor stocks. The Anaheim unit of B/E Aerospace Inc. had expected to raise up to $44 million when it announced its initial public offering in August under the name Advanced Thermal Technologies Inc.

SAN FRANCISCO — The rapid growth of Facebook Inc. showed signs of slowing in the first quarter, potentially cooling investors' fervor just weeks before the company's hotly anticipated initial public stock offering. Facebook generated $1.06 billion in sales, the second quarter in a row sales topped $1 billion. That represented a 45% jump from a year earlier but a 6% decline compared with the fourth quarter. The financial performance, the company's most anemic since at least 2010, fell below analysts' expectations.

First came Dow 13,000. Now comes Nasdaq 3,000. Solid economic news and no unpleasant surprises from the Federal Reserve's policymaking meeting propelled a vibrant stock-market rally that also pushed the Dow Jones industrial average up 218 points. The Nasdaq jumped 56.22 points, or 1.9%, to 3,039.88, its highest close in more than 11 years. The index has surged 16.7% this year amid investor excitement over the technology sector, spurred in part by a string of initial public offerings of social-media companies that is expected to hit its zenith later this year with the debut of Facebook Inc. Of course, the Nasdaq has seen 3,000 before - during the dot-com bubble in which the index eventually topped 5,000 before plummeting in the bust that took hold in early 2000 and stretched for nearly three years.

Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the iconic company that has been making guitars in California since its inception in 1946, is seeking to raise $200 million in an initial public stock offering. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Fender said it intends to use the money to help pay down $246.2 million in debt and to acquire other businesses. Although its corporate headquarters are now in Scottsdale, Ariz., the company was founded in Fullerton and makes its American Standard Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars at a 3-acre manufacturing plant in Corona.

Facebook's status used to be measured in the meteoric number of users who flocked to the world's most popular online hangout. Now Wall Street is wielding a very different yardstick. It's focused on how many ads Facebook can sell. The market value of the social networking giant could top $100 billion in the biggest ever initial public offering for an Internet company. To earn that valuation, Facebook, which made nearly all of its $3.7 billion in revenue last year from advertising, is going to have to turn big brands into paying customers.

Yelp Inc., the popular Internet site for customer-written reviews of restaurants, hotels and other services, expects its shares to hit the market at a price of $12 to $14 each, giving the company a value of as much as $840 million. The company said in a regulatory filing this week that it hopes to raise about $100 million in its initial public offering of more than 7.1 million shares. Its charitable foundation will sell 50,000 shares in the IPO, planned for early March. It plans to sell nearly 12% of the nearly 60 million total shares outstanding.

No one knows Facebook better than Facebook. Only seconds after the company's huge initial public stock offering was announced, Facebook users flooded the social network with comments. "Based on my news feeds, you would think Zuck just took over the world. Oh, Facebook," said Amanda Coolong, producer of a technology news site. "OOO What I could give to be able to get in on this," wrote Alexander Henry Sargent, expressing the oft-repeated hope that shares would be available to the common user.

The future of California's public schools, universities and health programs could be linked partly to the fictional town of FarmVille. The popular virtual world is the creation of Zynga, a San Francisco online game company that raised $1 billion in an initial public stock offering last year. Because California receives much of its income from capital gains taxes, such moves by businesses like Zynga can mean hundreds of millions of dollars for state coffers. More California technology companies are poised to go public this year - including a widely expected $10-billion offering from Facebook - than at any time since the dot-com boom, experts say. Their success could relieve state officials of the need to cut state services more deeply in the budget year that begins in July, but Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats are already squaring off over whether to count on the fruits of those transactions.