The Wall Street Journal reports that Jive, a producer of social networking tools used by businesses, was initially expected to price this week at between $8 and $10 per share, giving the company a valuation between $458 million and $573 million.

With market demand high, however, Jive followed Groupon’s example and unexpectedly raised its offering price to $12 per share, giving the company a market valuation of more than $687 million.

Even at this higher price, however, the company saw so much interest that its underwriters – Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – ended up selling 2.7 million more shares than initially planned, bringing the total to 13.4 million.

The stock performed well on its first day, closing up 25.42 percent at $15.05 per share and holding largely steady throughout the day. This reflects a slight improvement over recent offerings like Groupon, which often saw a drop after initial trading, but over the course of the year essentially all newly public technology companies have experienced substantial drops.

The yields that are currently being generated by other market opportunities are driving investors to seek out these financial instruments, according to Risk Magazine. Pershing Securities, a New Jersey-based firm that offers structured financial instruments and and ETFs as well as acting as a clearing house, has observed the number of ETF positions taken by clients of its firm spike 56 percent in the last year.

“With current yields in the U.S., investors are looking outside of just money markets and bond funds… and a lot of the answers are coming in the form of equity dividends,” Sandra Motusesky, director of investment solutions for product management and development at the company, told the media outlet.

Dow Jones has responded to the surging demand for these dividend paying funds by offering more dividend indices, according to the media outlet. Of the ETFs that have seen the largest of influx of funds this year, several of the top five are appealing because of their dividends, ETF Database reports.

Zynga chief executive officer Mark Pincus, unlike the heads of many young technology companies, is an experienced veteran of the technology sector, and even of the IPO market.

The 45-year-old Pincus first came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s at the forefront of the dot-com era. He founded two different online companies, one of which was ultimately sold and the other of which became a major investing force in the industry.

Even as he led these companies to substantial success, he also created tension within the companies, drawing the ire of his board of directors at one point. However, the experience offered Pincus experience in negotiating that secured him an investment in Zynga from Google and, eventually, the strong support of Facebook as a feature of the massive social networking platform.

Pincus’ earlier experiences also left him with a drive to retain control of his company, however, and Reuters reports that a special class of stocks provide him with 37 percent of voting power in the company, roughly 70 times that of the common stock being sold at the company’s upcoming IPO.

The poll asked people the following question: “just thinking about your own situation, how much money per year would you need to make in order to consider yourself rich?”

The participants provided responses ranging from as little as less than $60,000 in annual income to more than $1 million, according to the survey.

The New York Times reports that having a household income of $150,000 would place that household ahead of either 89 percent or 90 percent of households.

The current debate surrounding “tax credits for the rich” involves additional tax benefits provided to individuals earning more than $250,000 per year and families generating more than $200,000 per year. Households earning this amount are somewhere between the 96th and 97th percentiles.

The results varied significantly depending on demographic differences. Young people without families generally do not have to worry about coping with high expenses, though loans have proven an increasingly heavy burden for many young Americans.

The new treaty requires countries in the European Union to limit their deficits to no more than 0.5 percent of their gross domestic product, though that rule can be bent under certain circumstances. It will also impose penalties for those who break that rule and require a greater degree of information sharing.

The treaty did not garner full support of all member nations, with the U.K. and Hungary refusing to support the treaty, though all members of the euro zone voted in favor and it also received a welcome boost from Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank.

‘It is a very good outcome for euro area members and it’s going to be the basis for a good fiscal compact and more disciplined economic policy in euro area countries,” Draghi said, according to The Times.

That same morning, however, The New York Times notes that Moody’s Investors Service also downgraded the credit ratings of three of the largest banks in France – Société Générale, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole – illustrating the still growing impact of the debt crisis.

Initial public offerings are always an uncertain investment to an extent, with companies often going public without a long-proven track record of success, sometimes looking for the funds necessary to keep the company going. The 2011 IPO market has not proven any easier, with many companies canceling or delaying their IPOs over the summer as the global economy suffered a downturn with both the U.S. and Europe struggling through debt crises.

Ultimately many analysts and even companies have found themselves looking from one high-profile IPO to the next, hoping that it would perform well and provide some encouraging signs for investors. Most recently, daily deals site Groupon completed a $700 million IPO, but it quickly followed the same pattern of most other companies this year and slumped below its early trading prices.

But Forbes reports that online gaming company Zynga, the creator of popular mobile and Facebook games like FarmVille and Words with Friends, stands a strong chance of surviving where many others have not. Valuing itself at $7 billion, Zynga has set far more modest goals than some recent IPOs and actually manages to back it up with a well-established business model that has already managed to make substantial profit – $30 million on $829 million of revenue over the past nine months.

Indeed, Bloomberg reports that Zynga announced on Thursday, December 8, that the company already has enough orders to cover the sizable portion of shares it intends to sell – 14 percent of common stocks, well more than many recent IPOs – at a price range of $8.50 to $10 per share.

Bloomberg notes that Zynga has given itself a substantially larger price-to-sales ratio than some of its primary competitors, but this still compares favorably with other IPOs seen so far this year.

Meanwhile, The Chicago Tribune reports that Zynga founder and chief executive officer Mark Pincus claimed at a luncheon in Boston that his company could reasonably double the number of players who actually pay for the company’s games. At present, paying customers account for only 3 percent of the 6.7 million players of Zynga games.

Investors are likely to remain wary after a bed that saw collapses from essentially every major IPO, but Zynga nonetheless offers as much promise of a spark as any of those earlier entrants held.

The Associated Press reports that Verizon, one of Google’s key allies in the mobile sphere, has decided not to include the company’s new Google Wallet function in its latest smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Verizon was integral in the promotion of Android-based phones as an alternative to iPhones, but the company has been slow to warm up to the Wallet app, which is designed to allow users to attach virtual “credit cards” to the phone and pay by simply tapping the phone on a type of reader.

Verizon noted potential security concerns with the new system, but the company’s reticence to adopt the technology likely stems at least in part with its place in ISIS, a group of telecommunications companies that are hoping to create their own mobile payments system.

The only phone currently allowing the use of Google Wallet is run through Sprint, which is not a part of ISIS. The Los Angeles Times notes that the move to block Google Wallet is particularly surprising given that the Galaxy Nexus was designed specifically to have such capabilities.

Wide selloffs have left the stocks of many companies that are in a strong financial positions with low price-to-earnings ratios, according to the media outlet. Companies headquartered in the United States are currently sitting on $2 trillion in cash, which could set the stage for moves aimed at rewarding shareholders such as raising dividends, acquiring other companies and engaging in share buybacks.

Various market experts shared their input and predictions at the event. Shawn Kravetz, who works as the chief investment officer of Esplanade Capital, said that investors might have to lose their thirst for companies with fast profits and instead put their money in organizations that will generate slow, steady growth, the media outlet reports.

“Things aren’t generally getting worse and in many cases we’re getting a little bit better,” he told the media outlet. “If you stick to your game plan and let the markets come to you,” challenges in the past nine months will prove a “gift in disguise.”

Investors who purchased stock right after the financial crisis had the opportunity for very strong returns simply by holding their equities for a few years.

Data provided by consulting firm Aon Hewitt indicates that the median number of investment options available in these retirement plans has risen from 10 in 2001 to 18 currently available, MarketWatch reports.

Some companies are bucking this trend and starting to offer fewer options to their employees, according to the media outlet. The number of choices is dwindling because these firms are worried that all the options might make the retirement plan participants more likely to err.

“The thrill is gone with making every investment option available to people,” Mark Davis, senior vice president and financial adviser at CapTrust Financial Advisors, told the media outlet. “A lot of our clients are wanting to manage what their participants are exposed to in a much more aggressive way than they have in the past.”

Ted Benna, the so called “father of 401k,” has mirrored these concerns by saying that the retirement plan he created now offers too many options and increases the likelihood that 401k participants will make mistakes, according to MSN Money.