Incadea, an Austrian company that provides software for BMW and other car dealerships, will raise around £17m on Friday, in a stock market float expected to value the company at £47m.

It’s a lot smaller than Facebook, but it is a rare technology listing in London, where the tech IPO market has been considered closed for a long time. 

©Pascal PerichWhen Josh Silverman received a call last year asking if he would like to work for American Express, he was surprised.

The 43-year-old technology entrepreneur’s life had always revolved around Silicon Valley start-ups. He had been chief executive of Skype and before that held a senior role at eBay. In the late 1990s he had cofounded Evite, the internet invitations company, and sold it in 2001. The thought of working for a 162-year-old blue-chip corporation was alien.

Since its launch in 2007 ooVoo has helped refine the consumer video chat market with its free high definition app. In the process it has become a favourite with the teenagers and young adults under 25 who make up more than two thirds of its 46m users.

Now the New York-based company’s management team, led by executive chairman Robert Jackman, is trying to consolidate its grip on the youth market with a upgrade to its social video chat service designed to make it easier to use and available on more devices.

Imagine touch-typing or playing a piano in the air, moulding virtual clay with your hands or simply scrolling effortlessly through web pages. The Leap can handle all this by sensing finger and hand movements and translating them to a computer and its display, reducing the need for keyboard, mouse or touchscreen.

A sign of a hot Android product is when Google gives thousands away to reward developers at its annual conference. The HTC Evo 4G smartphone was the freebie in May 2010 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet was last year’s. Updated versions of both went on sale this week. But are they a match yet for the latest iPad and iPhone?

Its initial public offering was priced at $38 on - the top end of its range, giving the Silicon Valley company a valuation of $104bn. But after opening at $42.05, Facebook’s underwriters had to fight to keep it above its float price, the shares closing at just $38.23, up 0.6 per cent.

For a Facebook “Timeline” of its opening day – from before the opening-bell ceremony at its Menlo Park headquarters through a frantic trading day – read Tim Bradshaw and Chris Nuttall’s live blog after the jump. 

A Hong Kong-based brokerage is offering free Facebook shares to all new customers in an attempt to cash in on the hype surrounding the initial public offering of the world’s biggest social network.

8 Securities, which launched in March, said customers would receive US$200 of Facebook shares simply by signing up to its online trading platform with a minimum deposit of HK$10,000 (US$1,287), a process it claimed took less than eight minutes.

However, investors hoping to flip the free Facebook shares immediately after they start trading on Friday are out of luck; 8 Securities will buy the shares on the open market in coming days and deposit them in customer accounts within 14 days.

In a so-very-Facebook move, the company is running an overnight hackathon on Thursday night, right up until founder Mark Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq opening bell on Friday morning – an attempt to show the world that the company’s heart really lies in the product, not the money.

The Japanese ecommerce giant won out over major US venture capital firms who were vying for a piece of Silicon Valley’s new sweetheart, which lets users clip images to a virtual pinboard.

The FT spoke to Hiroshi Mikitani, chief executive of Rakuten, about how social discovery can boost ecommerce and the growing importance of images over text on the web.