Technology, Yelp | featured news

The stock market operates in mysterious ways. Yelp shares are actually trading sharply higher this morning, despite the expiration of the company's post-IPO lock-up period. As I noted earlier, the stock had lost about a third of its value in anticipation of today's event; for reasons that are not entirely clear, the stock has responded to the news with a major rally.

Yelp is feeding its online reviews of restaurants and other local merchants to Microsoft's Bing search engine in a move to compete against Zagat ratings on Google.

With so much money going into social media as a marketing and branding tool, it’s hard for businesses to discern the true value that their social media efforts are bringing. How much are they really getting when someone posts a tweet about them or mentions them on Facebook? Are they getting real value or is it all just another intangible to throw into the advertising budget like billboard signs and television ads?

Consumer review website Yelp Inc's shares traded more than 60 percent above their initial public offering price in their market debut on Friday, as investors rushed to buy a piece of the growing local advertising market... Yelp's shares were trading up 62 percent at $24.60 on Friday morning. At that level, the company is valued at about $1.43 billion -- about 17 times its 2011 revenue.

It's likely that investors will see a first-day rise in Yelp's shares during its IPO this week, but the ability of the online review site to hold on to those debut gains is debatable.

YelpInc., the online review website, has picked Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to lead an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $2 billion, according to people familiar with the plans. Yelp intends to file its IPO plans publicly within the next few weeks, said one person familiar with the matter. It's aiming to complete the sale in the first quarter, though timing may change with market conditions, the person said.

Since last year, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Citysearch—sites with local-business reviews generated by their visitors—have complained Google effectively stole their content and posted it on Google's own pages. Google Places competes with those sites and provides information on millions of restaurants, hotels and other businesses, including store hours, location and photos.

Instead of seeking another round of financing, Yelp is considering an IPO. After announcing in 2010 that Yelp would not likely go public for several years, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that the company had put an IPO back on the table.

The founders of Zagat Survey hope that the rise of apps will help prove its pay model correct... But in the next breath, most of them wonder why Zagat hasn’t won on the Web. The review site Yelp, for example, which made its debut in 2004, draws much more traffic.

Small businesses have complained about how Yelp chooses and ranks reviews. Yelp is responding with changes to the site.