Google Offering Raises $4.18B!

[Dashken]

Google raised $4.18 billion in its much-anticipated follow-on offering late Wednesday, giving the company cash likely to be used for rapid expansion and new services.

The Mountain View, California-based search giant priced the additional 14,159,265 shares at $295, which was 2.7 percent below the stock's closing price of $303. The underwriters have an option to buy an additional 600,000 shares to cover over-allotments.

Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston served as joint book-running managers. Allen & Co., Citigroup Global Markets, JP Morgan Securities, Lehman Borthers, UBS Warburg, Blaylock & Company, and Thomas Weisel Partners acted as co-managers. Goldman Sachs and WR Hambrecht, which helped underwrite the company's IPO did not participate.

Google shares fell $8.68 to $303 on Wednesday before the offering was priced. But the stock has risen from about $280 since the secondary offering was announced on August 18, the anniversary of Google's IPO. Part of Wednesday’s decline reflected a 28 percent drop in the value of Baidu, the Chinese search engine in which Google holds a 2.6 percent stake (see Analysts Doubt Baidu’s Value).

Google, which already had about $3 billion in cash, has offered only broad reasons for raising the additional money, but there has been widespread speculation that the company intends to acquire Baidu, which leads market share in China's search market. Google in No. 2 in China, so the combination would give it a strong dominance in the world fastest-growing Internet market. Baidu's value was $2.64 billion after Wednesday's plunge.

Meanwhile, Google on Wednesday also introduced a service called Blog Search, thereby expanding the blog capabilities it introduced when it purchased Pyra Labs, the developer of the Blogger software, back in 2003. Google now hosts thousands of blogs on the Blogspot site that came with the Blogger purchase.

“Every day millions of bloggers use the web to express themselves—sometimes to just a few friends, sometimes to a worldwide audience,” said Jason Goldman of the Blog Search team at Google in a blog posting. “We wanted to create a better way to allow people to find out what’s being written in blogs as it’s being created.”

The service will offer searches of blogs across the web, so users can find commentary on breaking news, TV episodes, or other information similar to the way they might get it from an RSS (really simple syndication). The service only began indexing blog entries from June 2005 but plans to index older blog entries as well. Blog Search will index blogs that publish feeds as well as collect information about blogs that inform indexing sites about new entries.


Feeds and Languages

The site will offer users the ability to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, as they can through Google News. Blog Search will offer both a Google and Blogger look and feel. Users of Blogger and Blogspot will be able to check the other blogs through a special box on the site. The Blogger Dashboard and NavBars on the sites will be able to access the search.

Google has long provided links to many blogs across the web, but the new service will focus on blog updates specifically. However, Google will be facing competition from existing blog search providers.

Blog Search is available in many languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Russian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Searches can be limited to author, title, or date. Users can also find out what other sites are linking to a particular blog or posting. Blog searches can be saved as alerts or queries that get updated automatically.

Google will face competition from other search providers, such as Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, which are sure to enhance their own blog search capabilities. Other companies that provide blog searches include Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Intelliseek (BlogPulse), and Memorandum, while blinkx offers video blog searches.

Source: http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13574

[ZuePhok]

wow...more millionaires

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by ZuePhok

wow...more millionaires

If only one was me...