(Reuters) – Facebook Inc is set to raise up to $18.4 billion in its IPO and become the first U.S. company to be worth more than $100 billion at its debut, as investors bet on a big pop in the stock when it begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. Frenzied demand, especially from individual investors hoping to buy into an Internet juggernaut that touches hundreds of millions of people every day, is expected to drive Facebook well above its initial public offering price of $38 a share, which was already at the top end of its target of $34 to $38.

Analysts were divided on how high the price might go on the first day of trade, with some expecting a relatively modest gain of 10 percent to 20 percent while others said anything short of a 50 percent jump would be disappointing.

“It will be bananas tomorrow,” said Greencrest Capital analyst Max Wolff. “This is all about the future, so it really is a lottery ticket.

“The stock could initially rise and then it could go parabolic on a wave of retail investor hope. These shares are going to trade on hope. I do not know how to value hope,” said Wolff.

Facebook is selling an up to 18 percent stake in the company at a valuation of $104 billion, comparable to the market worth of Amazon.com Inc, and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

The highly anticipated offering, the largest by a U.S. Internet company and the second-largest in U.S. history after Visa Inc, vaults the eight-year-old Facebook to the front ranks of corporate America.

It will give 28-year-old Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, a net worth of nearly $20 billion.

Enthusiasm for Facebook shares comes despite questions about the company’s long-term money-making capabilities, particularly after it reported a quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in April.

Others warn that the price tag, equivalent to over 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc’s 14 times and Google Inc’s 19 times, makes Facebook a risky bet.

“I think they’ll make money – it will just take them a little bit longer because they’re pioneering new ways for advertisers to reach customers,” said Walter Price, a portfolio manager at RCM Capital Management. “It’s not like there’s a simple formula. They have to try different things.”

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to people that the growth rate is going to moderate over the next couple of years,” he said, adding that he expects the stock to trade at around $42 on Friday, which would be an 11 percent gain.

HAVES, AND HAVE-NOTS

Wall Street’s top brokerages fought tooth-and-nail to ensure their wealthiest and most reliable clients got a slice of the IPO. Those with big accounts and a long history as customers likely got first dibs, and would-be buyers who had no such ties were lucky to get any, industry sources said.

A Morgan Stanley Smith Barney adviser based in the northeast said he saw internal figures that showed the firm had more than 60,000 orders for the IPO from 6,600 brokers in over 570 offices – eclipsing a more typical 500 brokers in 300 offices.

The brokerage arm of Morgan Stanley — the lead underwriter on the IPO and therefore expected to get the most shares — initially capped the number each retail client account could receive to 500 shares, which was lower than Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s ceiling of 2,000 shares.

But Morgan Stanley Smith Barney emailed its wealth advisers late on Thursday afternoon to say that it had raised the cap to 5,000 shares, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I am sure they were getting calls,” said Alois Pirker, research director at Aite Group LLC. “One of the advantages of being a lead underwriter is that you get preferential treatment. I am sure there were some wealthy individuals who were wondering if it would be better to be with Merrill Lynch.”

A spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a venture with Citigroup Inc, declined to comment.

For most retail investors, their first chance to invest in Facebook, which has some 900 million users, will be on Friday, when they risk getting trampled by institutional funds.

Financial advisers are warning that if the stock skyrockets, the average person might end up getting orders filled at a price much higher than they wanted and then face the possibility of losses as funds steamroll in and then zip back out, taking the price off its highs.

But these warnings are largely falling on deaf ears.

“A lot of retail investors are not concerned about valuation. That’s what is going to drive the first-day pop,” said Jim Krapfel, analyst at Morningstar. “I think anything over 50 percent will be considered a successful offering — anything under that would be underwhelming.”

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Facebook shares will begin trading at around 11 a.m. on Friday, when the well-known brand could attract enough interest to exceed the 458 million shares traded the day General Motors went public after emerging from bankruptcy in 2010.

Facebook will celebrate its Wall Street debut with an all-night “hackathon” at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.

Zuckerberg, fictionalized in the Oscar-winning 2010 film “The Social Network,” will control roughly 56 percent of the company’s voting shares after the offering.

His majority control has raised flags among some investors, uneasy with ceding so much power to the “hoodie”-wearing executive who wrote in a letter to potential shareholders that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

Facebook also faces challenges maintaining its growth momentum. Some investors worry the company has not yet figured out a way to make money from the growing number of users who access Facebook on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, revenue growth from Facebook’s online advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, has slowed in recent months.

One UBS adviser initially received calls from 12 clients clamoring to buy shares of Facebook, but over the past couple of weeks, two have changed their minds.

“A lot of people are thrown off by the recent negative stories in the press,” the adviser said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “One guy was worried about General Motors stopping its advertising on Facebook.”

GM said on Tuesday it would stop placing ads on Facebook, raising questions about whether display ads on the site are as effective as traditional media.

Overall, financial advisers are struggling to manage clients’ expectations about what the stock will do and in some cases, if they will be able to get any stock for them.

This week, Facebook increased the size of its IPO by almost 25 percent to 421 million shares, or a 15 percent stake in the company — a day after hiking its target price range about 14 percent.

If a greenshoe option for underwriters is exercised, as expected, the stake sold increases to 18 percent, raising north of $18.4 billion.

More than half of the proceeds of the IPO will go to existing shareholders, including early backers such as Accel Partners and Russia’s DST Global.

The more bullish had expected Facebook to price at $40 per share. However, the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by more than 2 percent on Thursday, quelling such optimism.

“I expect it to open at a nice premium, but I don’t expect a LinkedIn-type performance because of the sheer size of this IPO,” said Scott Sweet of research firm IPO Boutique.

Shares of professional networking company LinkedIn Corp doubled on their first day of trading.

Lee Simmons, industry specialist at Dun & Bradstreet, forecast a 10 percent to 20 percent gain for Facebook on Friday.

“You’ve got a large offering at an increased price, so a huge pop may be difficult to achieve,” Simmons said. “When you’re talking about doubling or a pop the size of LinkedIn…, the others were smaller floats, under 10 percent, so you had this artificial feeding frenzy.”

Facebook has 33 underwriters for the IPO, led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

Link: Facebook wraps up IPO, set for big Friday pop

It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data.

Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.

Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it.

Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, announced Twitter’s involvement in the privacy feature at a New York Internet Week privacy panel.

The announcement occurred during a session titled, “Opting in to Do Not Track: A morning mini-conference on privacy, tracking and more.”

In a message on Twitter, the company confirmed the FTC’s announcement.

Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said in a statement, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track.” Ms. Penner added: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track.”

Although Facebook has recently started allowing people to see the kind of data the company collects on them, there is no way to opt-out of Facebook’s aggressive information collection, which can even track people who are not logged into Facebook.

Twitter’s move to put power into the hands of the users with Do Not Track is part of a series of recent announcements by the company that seem to favor its users. Earlier this month Twitter filed a court motion to protect the information about one of its users who made use of Twitter during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Last month Twitter was also lauded for announcing the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, a new type of patent agreement that gives legal rights to engineers who are awarded a patent, stopping any potential for a patent to be used for offensive litigation in the future.

In a blog post on the Mozilla Web site, the company shared new statistics for the Do Not Track add-on and applauded Twitter for its actions.

“We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the Web,” Mozilla said in the post. Mozilla noted that the adoption rates of Do Not Track are now 8.6 percent for desktop users and 19 percent for mobile users.

Link: Twitter Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option

If there’s a significant week-long event occurring in New York City, you can bet that Mayor Michael Bloomberg will make a showing at some point. So it was no surprise when I got a call last night about a mysterious Bloomberg press conference scheduled for this morning at Internet Week New York.

At the event’s swanky SoHo headquarters, Bloomberg announced a new online map — the Made in New York Digital Map — that makes it easy to find the city’s tech startups and job opportunities. Given that new NYC startups and incubators are seemingly popping up every day, the map will be a useful way to make sense of everything tech going on in the city. And it looks to be a killer tool for landing a startup gig.

“Creative people want to be around other creative people,” Bloomberg said. “Creativity is driving the tech industry,” just as it is fashion, entertainment, and other industries in the city.

From the map’s site: “The Made in NY Digital Map is a visual testament to the vibrant state of New York’s digital industry – showing a powerful constellation of over 600 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the five boroughs. Browse by neighborhood, review job postings, or add your own startup to the digital landscape – the Made in NY Map is a living resource that reflects New York City’s dynamic innovation ecosystem.”

“The message is loud and clear: that New York is open for business,” said NYC’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne.

Bloomberg pointed to the map as one way to encourage more engineers to come to New York City. That will also become less of a problem once NYC’s new tech schools are up and running in a few years. Cornell and Technion are working on building a tech school in Roosevelt Island, and NYU is targeting a new tech campus in downtown Brooklyn.

The brains behind Internet Week New York created the Made in New York map in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (which will be updating it moving forward) and the NYC Economic Development Corporation. Sterne credits Commissioner Katherine Oliver with coming up for the original map idea.

Link: Made In New York: Mayor Bloomberg shows off NYC’s vibrant tech scene with an online map

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