Dot-coms embrace 'low-float' IPOs

Zynga, the biggest developer of Facebook games, plans to sell a small number of shares when it holds its initial public offering later this month, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said last week. The low-float strategy as well was used by LinkedIn last month to maintain control of its company during going public, and Pandora Media is taking the same tack with its IPO. Zynga would make less than 10 percent of its shares available to the public, compared with a 24 percent average among U.S. research IPOs in the past year. The approach is fueling concern that the scarcity of shares will inflate stock values and contribute to another dot-com bubble. "You have people overly excited," says Francis Gaskins, president of industry tracker IPODesktop.com. "It's a supply-demand thing. There's not that much supply, and there's pumped-up demand."

The much-anticipated iCloud service on Monday

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the much-anticipated iCloud service on Monday, giving users a way to synchronize their devices and store files on remote data centers. By letting clients update their iPhones without hooking up to a computer, he took another step toward sidelining the very industry he pioneered. Jobs, who helped popularize home computers with the Apple II and the Mac in the 1970s and '80s, no longer sees the devices as innovation hubs. As part of the iCloud announcement, Apple as well introduced iTunes Match, a service that lets clients bring their music libraries into the cloud, at a cost of $24.99 a year.

Dot-com startups tried and failed to tackle the pet-supply business while the Internet bubble - most notably, the Bay Area's Pets.com and its trademark sock puppet. Now the entrepreneurs behind Diapers.com think they can make it work. Quidsi, which became part of Amazon.com previously this year, is opening a new site called Wag.com, promising to cater to the "other baby" of the family. Quidsi is counting on its scale and heavily automated warehouses to give it an edge this time around, as so then as the fact that there are more Web shoppers now than in the 1990s.

Steve Jobs made a different kind of pitch to the Cupertino City Council last week, unveiling plans for a giant circular office building that will accommodate about 12,000 Apple employees. The new facility would be built a few blocks from the company's headquarters, on land bought from Hewlett-Packard. A parking lot will be constructed underneath the building, allowing 80 percent of the site to be landscaping. "It's a little like a spaceship landed," Jobs said in describing the design. "We've seen these office parks with lots of buildings and they get pretty boring pretty fast, so we'd like to do something better than that." Apple plans to break ground at once year and move in by 2015.