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.

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.

Areas like Silicon Valley and Boston are well known as focal points of innovation and venture funding, making them popular places to start. But Silicon Valley has increasingly approached venture spending in a dramatically different manner, encouraging companies to dive into the market almost immediately.

Rather than perfecting a product over years, these companies will put together a working model and continue to fix and tweak as they speak with prospective clients, often incorporating comments and specific requests. Many take the same approach to business models, going through a process of constant testing and exposure to real-world conditions.

The approach has quickly gained interest beyond Silicon Valley as well, with Harvard Business School requiring students to start their own businesses over the course of the school year and the National Science Foundation developing its N.S.F. Innovation Corps grants on the idea.

“It’s all about how to apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification,” Errol Arkilic, a program manager at the foundation, told the Times. “And that is exactly why this method is the one the N.S.F. selected.”

StartUpSmart notes that the concept has been around for at least three years, but has gained increased visibility with the publishing of The Lean Startup, written by venture investor Eric Ries. The book outlines a few other key ideas behind lean start-ups, including openness to potential ventures in any field and, importantly, the understanding that many such businesses will fail despite their founders’ best efforts.

“Over 70 years, this Valley has developed a culture that does not personalize failure,” Randy Komisar, of venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, told the Times. “If you’re not corrupt, stupid or lazy, we see failure as learning — learn from it, and reapply it.”

While this seems like a positive approach to new businesses, the model still has its opponents. Xconomy’s Jamie Goldstein notes that the companies that have grown fastest after the introduction of their product were those that tackled issues that they were unclear they could solve. The businesses focused on the product with the understanding that a big enough innovation would ultimately find clients.

In advance of the release of the iPad last year, Apple completed contracts with several major global publishers to allow the Apple store to sell many popular e-books. Unlike traditional contracts, Apple arranged to allow the publishers to set the ultimate sale price, rather than simply agreeing on a wholesale price and leaving the rest to individual retailers.

The European Commission has grown concerned that such a policy could lead to a decline in competition between retailers, though it stopped short of claiming the companies breached anti-trust regulations.

Others, however, have already made such claims, with one lawsuit in the U.S. alleging that Apple collaborated with publishers to raise prices in order to boost profits and put pressure on other e-book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, according to Computerworld.

The Wall Street Journal reports that China has seen a spike in the number of companies looking to conduct initial public offerings after many businesses were forced to delay their plans during the down economy this summer. Reuters reported in September that several IPOs potentially worth as much as $4.5 billion were canceled in one week late in that month.

Now, companies ranging from wind turbine and equipment manufacturer Guodian Technology & Environment Group to Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group, along with the country’s fourth-largest insurer and second-largest brokerage, have filed for IPOs potentially worth as much as $7.4 billion.

“A lot of IPOs have been pushed back by the narrowing market window as the European crisis evolves, but we’ve seen more companies eager to tap overseas capital for their expansion,” Fang Fang, vice chairman of Asia investment banking at JP Morgan Chase, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is driven on one hand by the continued urbanization, fixed-asset investment, and domestic consumption, and on the other hand by tight monetary supply in China.”

All told, Bloomberg reports that the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing has seen nearly 110 companies request permission to conduct an IPO. Though less than half of that number has received approval, it still amounts to 40 companies and a full 20 are expected to complete the process before the end of the year.

The move appears to be an attempt to hop on still-high sentiment toward China as the economy begins to slow down. Reuters reports that the latest purchasing managers’ index from HSBC found continuing slowdown across the Chinese economy, with growth in the services sector dropping from 54.1 on the index in October to 52.5 in November.

Already the country has seen its annualized growth rate fall to 9.1 percent in the third quarter, but the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that number could decline further to around 8.5 percent.

While the number of Chinese options will be high for the foreseeable future, the declining performance of the country’s economy could combine with the poor showings of several Chinese companies filing in the U.S. Chinese video site Tudou has fallen roughly 50 percent since its IPO over the summer, while its rival Youku has fallen about 50 percent from early trading and more than two-thirds from its peak over the summer.