ipo

The world's most populous nation is warming up to social networking, restrictive shackles and all. Chinese social site Renren, with its 117 million users, filed to go public last week, giving stateside investors another shot to cash in on China's online revolution from the inside.

Last month, IBM's Watson supercomputer beat trivia champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy. At the core of Watson's success was something called Semantic Analysis Technology, and if you want to make your own Jeopardy bet, put some money on the companies that supply it.

A new crop of tech IPOs are en route to the market, among them vacation rental website HomeAway, online radio site Pandora and business networking site LinkedIn. But how can you tell if these startups are worthy of your cash? Here are the four questions to ask before buying into an IPO.

RPX has been in business since just 2008, but it has rapidly built a list of big-name clients attracted to its novel service. It offers tech companies a way to gain access to patents without having to own them outright -- and without having to deal with litigious "patent trolls."

Groupon is planning an initial public offering that would value the three-year-old online coupon distribution site at as much as $15 billion -- more than double what Google reportedly bid on the company last year -- The New York Times reported.

Unless you're ultra-wealthy or willing to chance the vagaries of the secondary markets, you can't invest yet in hot social networking companies like Facebook, Zynga or Groupon. But soon there may be an alternative: a new fund called NeXt BDC Capital that will take stakes in top-quality venture-backed firms like those.

Companies such as Duke Energy and DuPont are off and running with megamergers early this year. Even Playboy is among the dealers. And market pros say the trend is far from over. Why are so many U.S. companies tying the knot? Fast growth is hard to come by in any other strategy.

You can put new clothes on formerly communist nations, but it's hard to change what's under their skin. Don't be fooled: Both Russia and China have really awful bones. So before investing in either one, know the risks that lurk below the surface.

Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne said Monday that he could increase Fiat's ownership in Chrysler to more than 50% should America's smallest domestic automaker seek to return to the stock market this year, but that he doesn't plan to merge the companies' operations.