Ed Oswald

LinkedIn's first day as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange has been by just about any measure a blockbuster success. After announcing Wednesday that it had raised $352.8 million in an initial public offering, pricing shares at $45, the stock shot up more than 109 percent to a closing price of $94.25.

At that level, the company would be worth a staggering $8.9 billion, and would have had the most successful IPO since Google's in 2004. It also certainly begins anew the talk among financial analysts of a new "tech bubble" developing in the sector.

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A crucial piece of Sony's online infrastructure is slated to return on May 24, according to a memo sent to developers and publishers this week. Gaming news site Gamasutra obtained the note on the PlayStation Store, Sony's repository for gaming content and downloadable games.

The store is also a major source of additional revenue for developers, thus its return is highly anticipated. Backlogged content that was supposed to be released during the store's downtime will be made available on a rolling basis over the next few weeks, the note details.

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Corporate-minded social network LinkedIn announced it had sold more 7.84 million shares in an initial public offering at $45 each, raising $352.8 million for the company. The high demand for stock in LinkedIn also caused it to raise its IPO price to $42 to $45 from an initial range of $32 to $35.

The windfall certainly benefits co-founders Reid Hoffman and Jean-Luc Vaillant, who founded the company in Reid's living room in 2002 with three others. It also may signal the beginning of another spurt of tech IPOs -- a rare commodity since the dot-com bust.

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Reports indicate that Sony still does not have its network fully secure: an exploit is now available allowing users to reset your account password with only an e-mail address and date of birth. With this data now publicly available due to the previous hack of the PlayStation Network, it puts millions of users again at risk.

The issue, first reported by gaming blog Nyleveia late Tuesday, shows how stunningly insecure Sony's servers just may be. Details of the vulnerability were released to the Japanese company before being publicized.

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Going against what seems to be the prevailing logic, the ad-supported Wi-Fi Kindle is now the best selling device on Amazon, the company's bestseller list indicates. The top three are all Kindles, with the Wi-Fi model coming in second and the Wi-Fi+3G model third.

Amazon sells the version of Kindle with ads for $114, $25 less than the $139 price of its sister ad-less Wi-Fi only model. The version that adds 3G connectivity retails for $189. The online retailer has been selling the ad-supported model for about a month, and the devices overall regularly top Amazon's bestseller list.

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The proposed $39 billion merger between T-Mobile and AT&T was the focus of a Senate antitrust committee Thursday, with its chair warning of the "profound implications" of such a deal. While the two companies have repeatedly said the deal would take a year to close, in recent weeks regulators have appeared ready to slow down the process.

Combining the second and fourth largest wireless providers in the US would create a wireless behemoth that would likely far eclipse market-leading Verizon Wireless, and leave current third place Sprint in a precarious and unfavorable position facing two much larger competitors. Such a merger could prove difficult to approve.

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Facebook found itself doing damage control Thursday after it was revealed the company had attempted to create negative press for Google. Two employees of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller had endeavored to pitch stories over the search giant's privacy issues.

News of the botched effort was broken by The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons on Wednesday night. Without specifying how, Lyons said evidence pointed to the social networking site as being the mysterious client of Burson-Marsteller's, and the company admitted to doing so.

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The merger of NBC and Comcast had its opponents when it was first announced in December 2009, however the FCC later found it to be acceptable and approved the merger the following year. Now one of those FCC commissioners behind the approval is the combined company's newest hire.

Republican Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker was one of the most vocal critics of placing any conditions on the deal, and said it could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms." Four months later, Comcast/NBCUniversal's Washington office has a new senior vice president of government affairs.

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For years, an accidental security flaw in the way Facebook handled embedded frames allowed applications developers to access information on a user's profile that installed that application. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 applications may have enabled this flaw, potentially affecting millions.

Symantec, the company that discovered the vulnerability, reported it to Facebook. The flaw has been fixed, but it is unknown if any of the data had been used maliciously.

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As the outage of the PlayStation Network entered its 20th day, Sony says that it would still be awhile yet before it is able to bring the gaming network back online. In a short statement on Tuesday, spokesperson Patrick Seybold seemed to ask for a bit more patience from its users.

"I know you all want to know exactly when the services will be restored," Seybold posted to the PlayStation blog. "At this time, I can't give you an exact date, as it will likely be at least a few more days." Such words are likely not comforting to the millions of PlayStation 3 users who have been shut out of online gameplay for nearly a month.

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Android continues to gain momentum, with over 100 million Android devices now activated, and approximately 400,000 new activations daily, the company reported on Tuesday. That number is up from the 300,000 activations daily that it had reported in December of last year, and is likely now surpassing iOS overall.

Official activation data has not been available from Apple since September of last year, when Steve Jobs said the company was activating about 230,000 iOS devices per day. Some anecdotal data indicates that this may now be nearing 300,000 per day, but it has yet to be officially confirmed.

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Google may have become heavy-handed in pressuring its Android device manufacturers to follow certain guidelines, recently released internal documents show. The documents have been released as part of a continuing lawsuit between it and Skyhook wireless over Google's insistence that Motorola use its own GPS location services.

Skyhook had originally won a contract to replace Google's location services with its own in all Motorola phones. The move apparently bothered the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, and it allegedly pressured Motorola into dropping the agreement. Skyhook then sued Google, alleging anti-competitive behavior.

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As Sony is in the final stages of getting the PlayStation Network back online, a new threat may be emerging. People with knowledge of the IRC chat room where hackers have been congregating to discuss the attacks are discussing a new effort, CNET reported late Thursday.

This news comes amid word from Sony that it had entered "the final stages of internal testing of the new system," likely indicating PSN would be back up in a matter of days. The issue also has prompted a letter from Sony chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer, who reiterated that the company was working "around the clock" on the issue.

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Skype once again finds itself as the target of a possible buyout, as both Google and Facebook have been said to seeking either a joint venture with the company or an outright acquisition. Any deal is said to be worth some $3 to 4 billion according to Reuters sources.

The company is also in the midst of seeking an initial public offering, which could raise up to $1 billion for the company. That is expected to take place sometime in the second half of this year, and it is not clear if the talks with either company may cause Skype to change plans or scrap the idea altogether.

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Several tech companies are again finding themselves in hot water over their hiring practices, as they were sued in California Superior Court on Wednesday over allegations of conspiring to fix employee pay. Named in the suit are Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Inuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, among others.

Former Lucasfilm employee Siddharth Hariharan is the lead plaintiff in the suit, which seeks class action status. He says the companies over the years signed deals with one another that eliminated competition in the job market, as well as placed caps on the pay of skilled workers.

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