LinkedIn Stocks Shoot Up 109 Percent; Google Expands Its Mountain View Property By 25 Percent

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Today, Mountain View Patch brings you a weekly “Bits and Bytes” column, where we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

LinkedIn on Thursday when the company went public on the market. While stocks opened at $45-a-share, they shot up by 109 percent to a $94.25-a-share closing price, leading analysts to speculate that more social networking sites will follow the 8-year-old company’s lead.

At least one company looks forward to tax day: Intuit Inc., the maker of tax filing software Turbo Tax, announced Thursday that its third-quarter net income rose by 19 percent. Its net income in the first quarter rose to $688 million, or $2.20 per share, up from $576 million, or $1.78 per share, a year ago. They attributed their success to the increasing number of Americans who are going online to file taxes.

Google is goggling the Mountain View real estate market. Google will rent six of seven buildings of “the Quad” on Ellis Street until 2013, at which time they’ll also spread into the seventh building. Overall, Google is expanding its office space by 120,000 square feet—600,000 feet at the Quad and 600,000 feet at its Shoreline location. This increases its Mountain View holdings by 25 percent.

Symantec, a data storage and protection provider, has acquired its Mountain View neighbor Clearwell Systems for $390 million. Clearwell Systems, which also has an office in London, managed legal matters and corporate investigations.

A survey released Wednesday by the local CyberSource Corporation showed that airlines lost $1.4 billion in online payment fraud. Still, that’s a 31 percent improvement from 2008. The company also released fraud detection algorithms for its Decision Manager system, created specifically for the travel industry.

The city of San Francisco chose Microsoft over Google in a bid to provide a cloud-computing email service to the city. San Francisco will dish out $1.2 million per year to Microsoft for the service, which will cover about 23,000 government employees. Still, Google has lined up some other noteworthy email clients recently, such as the city of Los Angeles in 2009.

Eye-Fi, a wireless memory card maker whose products are found in places such as Amazon.com and Walmart, has a new CEO: its very own founder, Yoval Koren. Koren was CEO from 2005-07 until Jef Holove became CEO. He now nabsthe top spot again.