By now, much of the connected universe, and certainly all of technolphilia, is aware of Facebook’s IPO, which seeks to raise up to $5 billion (and perhaps eventually $10 billion) when its shares go public this spring. The net effect is a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion for the 8-year-old social network.

Mining the 150-page S-1 for gold can be something of a scavenger hunt. Of course, Facebook’s user reach and engagement metrics explode off the document: 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 2011, 483 million daily active users (DAUs), 425 million mobile MAUs (as detailed by MLM’s Mike Boland), 2.7 billion likes and comments per day, and the list goes on. Facebook’s engagement stats — and the data that those enable it to collect about its audience and on behalf of its advertisers — is the envy of companies everywhere.

Also, its $1 billion in net income was a conveniently round and easily discoverable number. But probing deeper, the data told other narratives as well: some promising, others alarming and several yet to be determined.

The Good

Facebook’s top-line revenues continue to grow, as one would expect with a maturing network whose domestic and global reach is ubiquitous. Revenues eclipsed $3.7 billion in 2011, an 88 percent increase year over year. Advertising jumped 69 percent from 2010, with 56 percent of that U.S.-based. Perhaps more encouraging was its deepening payments business, which now accounts for 15 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, skyrocketing from $106 million to $557 million in just 12 months.

Facebook also already boasts $3.8 billion in cash on hand, and that number is about to multiply.

The Bad

Although $3.7 billion in revenues seems like a handsome haul, the top-line number actually came in lighter than many analysts expected. The 69 percent increase in ad revenues looks modest when noted that this stream boomed by 145 percent from 2009 to 2010. And that was even as Facebook boosted its total ads delivered by 42 percent and average price per ad by 18 percent.

Meanwhile, it is not realizing meaningful money from its 425 million mobile users. Facebook is in the strange position of both attacking and defending on mobile platforms. While it continues to enhance its apps suite and build new mobile products, and will soon place Sponsored Stories ads within mobile news feeds, it also wants to refrain from cannibalizing the ads business it has amassed on the desktop. As a result, substitutive mobile growth is listed as a risk factor.

The (Unknown) Future

Facebook’s future appears as uncertain as it is promising (and vice versa). Naturally the company must continually calibrate its monetization engine, and quickly unpack new revenue sources (as it has with Facebook Credits over the past two years). Here are three domains that we feel Facebook may address with its newfound cash and investor pressure:

- Ad Network: Facebook’s reach is undeniable. Its user data trove is deep, perhaps unparalleled. And thousands of third-party sites have linked to Facebook’s platform through Connect, a single sign-on conduit that can socialize a website experience based on the user’s Facebook social graph. Mash it all together, and an ad network — both desktop and mobile — seems irresistible and inevitable. For now, we’ll call it “Facebook AdSense.”

- Payments Expansion: Facebook has already ported its Credits currency beyond gaming and virtual goods to digital products such as movies and music. Now, will the network usher Credits into real-world goods and services, making it a full-service social commerce portal? It toyed with the idea during its short-lived deals trial last summer, in which Credits were a payment option (though not the only one). Expect many experiments to come.

- Local: Facebook has never shown the propensity to build a sales force of the mass and scope necessary to exhaustively address local markets and SMBs (as opposed to say Groupon). Even its deals play was an aggregated approach through partners. However, it does collect much of its advertising revenues from small and mid-market businesses that self-serve on the platform. Now it has opened up its Ads API to all qualified developers, enabling more partners with local audiences (agencies, media, etc.) to manage scaled ads campaigns on behalf of a fleet of clients. As just one example, French directory publisher PagesJaunes recently joined the API program.

A more enterprising probe of the S-1 will publish to Social Local Media clients in the coming days.

Local isn’t easy, or even worthwhile. Chris Devore, Seattle-based co-ounder of Judy’s Book, wants to remind entrepreneurs to stay away. In a new blog post, Devore gives three top reasons NOT to do a local + online start-up:

1- There’s no money in it.
2- It doesn’t scale.
3- It’s too obvious.

“Combine expensive, high-touch selling, small budgets and high churn rates, and you have a perfect recipe for persistent negative margins,” says Devore. “There are literally millions of business opportunities that [are] …. better than the best local business I’ve ever seen.”

It’s a good blog post with sound reasoning. I suspect Devore, one of the most passionate entrepreneurs out there, has a major local project up his sleeve and will be socializing it at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.

Universities stimulate major business zones in various cities. So do airports. Hence the Dulles tech corridor in D.C. So does the success of major companies.

People leave with their stock options and develop their own companies. Witness Wang in Boston, Microsoft in Seattle, AOL in D.C., Qualcomm in San Diego. Too many to count in Silicon Valley. Qualcomm alone has led to at least 500 wireless companies in San Diego.

But the impact dies down after a while, and local development slows. That makes it harder for a market to recruit quality engineers and other positions to the area.

Now, two former AOL principals, Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, are seeking to reinject the infusion of cash that AOL once provided for the D.C. metro area.

Case and Leonsis — interestingly, competing investors in LivingSocial and Groupon, respectively — have announced a $450 million Revolution Growth Fund to jumpstart the D.C. area’s technology start-ups, and, they hope, find the next “LivingSocial.”

Both men have been major philanthropists in the D.C. area, but this, of course, is also a major business initiative.

Leonsis — owner of the Washington Caps and Washington Wizards, vice chair of Groupon, board member of Amex, investor in SB Nation, author of “This Business of Happiness” — is keynoting ILM East, which is taking place March 26-28 in Boston. Can’t get enough AOL nostalgia? Former AOL Time Warner President and current CEO of Clear Channel Entertainment Bob Pittman is keynoting the great lineup at ILM West Dec. 12-14).

Yelp’s S-1, which was issued last week as a run-up to a $100 million IPO, reveals a lot of new data about the reviews leader. The big question about Yelp has been whether it can grow against increased pressure from Google, and also begin to take market share away from traditional media players such as Yellow Pages.

Yelp’s plan for growth relies heavily on overseas growth. It is now in 22 international cities on top of 43 domestic markets. But it would also grow its primary business via local and brand advertising, monetizing mobile services that now make up 40 percent of its searches, boosting revenues from deals (where it has lowered expectations), and more revenue sharing dollars from restaurant reservations and travel.

Launched in 2004, Yelp had initially risen to the top of the heap among service and city guide leaders by dominating Google’s organic local search. After Google’s effort to acquire Yelp for $500 million ended under murky circumstances, Yelp has seen its prior dominance of Google search fade away. Moreover, Google Places — enhanced by Google’s purchase of Zagat — now looms as a competitor in its own right for reviews and advertising.

“Our success depends on our ability to maintain a prominent presence in search results for queries regarding local businesses on Google,” notes the S-1.

Yet, Yelp is growing splendidly, even with the apparent Google woes. Yelp earned $47.7 million in 2010 and $58.4 million in net revenues in the first nine months of 2011, representing 80 percent growth over the first nine months of 2010.

During the first nine months of 2011, the company claimed 19,000 paid accounts — up 75 percent from the same period in 2010, and 529,000 claimed pages, up 114 percent. And in a business where the number of current reviews is its currency, it has an archive of 22 million reviews, up 66 percent from the same period in 2010. Overall, it sees 61 million monthly users.

Yelp is primarily known for its restaurant reviews. That is still its primary image, and what has made “to yelp” a verb. But Yelp is also more diversified than generally perceived, and resembles a combination city magazine/Yellow Pages.

Restaurants and dining now make up 23 percent. Other major segments include shopping (22 percent), services (10 percent), beauty (9 percent), arts and entertainment (8 percent), health (5 percent), nightlife (4 percent), and travel and hotel (4 percent). It also has a broad demographic, with 42 percent between the ages of 18 and 34, and 33 percent between the ages of 35 and 49.

What investors will be looking at is not only Yelp’s ability to grow and move into new areas, but also its potential for profits. The company has accumulated a deficit of $32.1 million since its launch, and lost roughly $7.6 million in the first nine months of 2011. Sales and marketing costs have been especially heavy, eating up $38.5 million for the first nine months of 2011.

Business Insider suggests that “Yelp is Groupon without the cash flow,” basing its comment on Yelp’s increasing marketing costs for customer acquisitions. But to us, Yelp is working to get over a tipping point. And unlike Groupon’s one-time relationship with local businesses, Yelp is working on Yellow Pages-like renewal rates.

In fact, the key to Yelp is to continue its ability to maintain and leverage its huge user base, satisfy advertisers, and stay abreast of social media trends that help match users with establishments based on their interests. It won’t be easy and is not a sure thing. But Yelp’s trajectory to date has been an impressive one.

Shares of Yelp Searches

In the wake of Groupon’s successful IPO, Angie’s List is apparently set to issue its own IPO on Thursday. The offering would raise up to $113 million for the Indianapolis-based company, which provides members-only reviews of services and medical providers. For us, the big question is whether consumers will continue to be willing to pay from $10 to $67 a year for a safe firewall when other review services, including Yelp and ServiceMagic, are free (answer: I’m a member).

We’ve recently written about highlights from the S-1, noting that the company has a membership roster of 820,000 paying households in 170 U.S. markets, and earned $25.58 million last year. We also noted that while revenues were split 50/50 between membership fees and advertising in 2008, it has now shifted to 39 percent membership fees and 61 percent advertising. The company, which apparently turned down a buy-out offer from Gannett several years ago, currently has 19,750 advertisers.

Additional opportunities come from the introduction of Angie’s List’s Big Deal, which is now in 27 cities and is available to members and non-members alike. More than 63,000 deals have been sold since its launch in June 2010.

With Groupon going public, the promotions space is getting tremendously revved up. Hoping to get in on the action are promotional relatives of the deals space, including providers of grocery “cents off” coupons, retail weekly sales (circulars), retail rewards and Buy One Get One Free. While most of these don’t do much with local advertisers, they do target local consumers, and they envision a general morphing of the space (to the degree that a cents off coupon for Park’s Sausages can morph into a Groupon night on the town).

Players include such entities such as Coupons.com, ShopLocal, iCoupons.com, Valpak.com, RedPlum.com, FindnSave, Savings.com, Clipper.com and YourBestDeals.com. Each has sought to integrate the various types of promotions together, sometimes with mobile and social solutions.

Today’s news is that 300-person Coupons.com is taking new institutional investment that will pump a whopping $100 million into its development (another $100 million will be given to employees and investors in an unusual liquidity event). The effort seeks to make the company an investment alternative (and in some ways, more rounded) to Groupon and others.

The Mountain View, California-based company, which was founded in 1998, claims a network of “tens of thousands” of websites across the Internet, including retailer sites that span 46,000 store locations, as well as affiliate publishers. The network includes consumer electronics, shopping carts and kiosks, as well as mobile apps. GigaOm (via Daily Deal Media) cites sources that suggest the company earned $50 million in 2010 and will earn $100 million this year. It also says the company’s valuation is pegged at $1 billion.

The investment will be used to add 100 people and “further accelerate the company’s growing momentum in shifting the newspaper-dominated coupons industry to digital as well as expand the coupon industry.”

The success of failure of the company, of course, ultimately depends on its ability to shift with the industry, which, pre-recession, had actually been moving away from coupons toward other customer acquisition methods.

Currently, Coupons.com is focused on digital coupons that must be printed out. But major efforts are afoot to integrate Coupons.com offers into social and mobile networks, where they might attract younger users.

The company says it is also looking to “reach across the digital landscape — everywhere brands and retailers can engage with consumers.” It already has a head start in mobile via the acquisition of Free State Labs LLC, the developers of Grocery iQ, a mobile shopping list application. NFC-based transactions on mobile phones are in the works.

Coupons.com also plans a new effort to enable “smaller manufacturers, which could not place offers in the newspaper insert because of budget requirements or category exclusivity restrictions.” International is also on the wish list. The company currently offers coupons and vouchers in 12 European countries through its 50 percent ownership of U.K.-based Couponstar Ltd.

Facebook Head of Groups Justin Shaffer told attendees at Where 2.0 that one of Facebook’s goals is to develop the largest database of “interesting” places. The collection of places has “really been the focus” of his division for the past four to six months, he said. At the same time, the database of places is probably something of a commodity for Facebook, and other services. “The coordinates are approaching a commodity. But (we’re) pushing up the stack with services, etc.”

Shaffer, former CEO of Hot Potato, a group software site acquired last year by Facebook, said that a “social network” involves storytelling, memories and serendipity. The latter is “where friends check in and find you.” He added that a social network itself can be broken down into three basic elements: “Open,” “Geo” and “Temporal.”

Open would mean your social network acquaintances, Geo would be a friend’s photo of the Eiffel Tower, and Temporal would show the four people who are “here” right now. The importance of check-ins is “not really where you are, [it is about] who you are with,” he said.

Content-wise, it all splits into the “Open Graph,” “Data” and “businesses.” Data would include places and events, and businesses would include check-in deals and pages. While it would be ultimately helpful to develop standards, Shaffer warned that “everyone isn’t going to agree on meta data or categories.”

Speaking on a panel with Shaffer at Where, Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi, who has just raised a new $4.2 million round from Comcast Interactive Capital, agreed that the basic information is probably approaching commodity status. The challenge is to build a package that it unbeatable, said Shirazi. A listing of “The Top 10 Bars in San Francisco” would be an example.

Content, and geotagging of content, “is where this will realistically go,” added Shirazi. Fwix, a 22-person company that started two years ago as a news aggregator, is now expanding into vertical content areas such as real estate and video transcriptions. If Fwix could use places data to win even 1 percent of Google search results, it would be “huge,” he said.

As it turns out, the daily deals landscape is more sophisticated than many first thought. New contours are emerging, each replete with opportunity and threat. Bluntly branding the space as “the next big thing” or a “can’t-miss opportunity” lacks the necessary strategic discernment in an industry replete with competitors and fortressed with high barriers to scale. Similarly, the question of whether the deals explosion is leading Silicon Valley toward the brink of tech bubble 2.0 requires more than a “yes” or “no” answer. “It depends” is more like it.

A stage-full of bankers and investors debated this topic at the recent Daily Deal Summit in New York without reaching much consensus.

On the one hand, leading group buying brands such as Groupon and LivingSocial are radically altering local advertising and marketing by touching local merchants with a direct, trackable customer acquisition tool that verifies ROI … all without the burden of upfront costs. There are merchants aplenty yearning to draw new business without the traditional media headaches of lofty price points and fuzzy metrics.

BIA/Kelsey approximates that there are at least 10 million SMBs in the addressable advertising pool. James Min, head of media banking at Montgomery & Co., noted that even if Groupon and LivingSocial are building sales armies, that still leaves “a lot of greenfield opportunity” for other originators and media companies to participate.

Then there are the actual revenues that these still relatively young market leaders are already driving. Groupon’s 2011 revenues could reach $3 billion to $4 billion, prompting reports of a desired IPO at a $25 billion valuation. The business models and sudden returns weren’t as evident a decade ago. Real money is changing hands … quickly and compellingly. Instant, personalized and geotargeted deals surface more inventory to meet crushing demand. New revenue streams are continually opening.

On the other hand, what’s good for a few isn’t necessarily good for all. The network effects that early movers create can become bubble effects for clones and stragglers. As the market fragments and verticalizes, Ben Choi of Maveron sees entrants that want to specialize as, say, “the Groupon for yogurt.” Only a couple, however, get the requisite funding to grow at scale.

Meanwhile, Battery Ventures associate Blake Bartlett asks if targeted niches such as Groupon for yogurt create “a truly different e-commerce experience, or are simply saying ‘let’s create a better Groupon?’ ” If the latter is true, can new incremental value be generated?

Groupon and LivingSocial topple scale barriers with sales heft. For other players, partnerships are the vehicle. But two essential questions remain: What is the critical mass necessary to claim effective scale, and how many can actually get there? These questions are particularly pointed seeing as Groupon hires new sales force every day. Sales scale would multiply even more if, as Min volunteered, they acquire a Yellow Pages company out of bankruptcy after filing their IPO. “Someone’s going to buy one of them, and it’s going to be an Internet company.”

Where do you fall on the deals market: frothy, robust or somewhere in-between?

With several recent tech valuations raising eyebrows — Quora at $86 million, Twitter at nearly $8 billion to name just two — a word that’s been tossed around Silicon Valley a lot these days is “froth.” Sean Moriarty, entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield Fund, told the ILM East audience, however, that not all froth is bad froth.

Moriarty’s interpretation: Froth and rampant enthusiasm exist because there are “great companies being built … real companies getting to revenue and profitability very quickly.” That, in Moriarty’s mind, is what separates present tech fervor from bubblish late-1990s’ optimism.

BIA/Kelsey’s Matt Booth, moderating the session, noted that few truly local online business have reached $1 billion in annual revenues, and two of the most prominent — AutoTrader and Groupon — are verticals. Moriarty, who formerly ran Ticketmaster, sees plenty of promise around verticals, namely travel, but also sees a marketplace that is wide and deep enough for a variety of successful local entrants.

Speaking of Groupon, the evolution of group buying is at the top of many minds in Boston this week, including Moriarty’s. His viewpoint echoes what BIA/Kelsey also foresees — necessary consolidation and inevitable attrition in a noisy space. But the bigger idea of deal a day isn’t going anywhere. “The notion of interacting with large audience with increasingly targeted offers is here to stay.”

And what about the next billion-dollar idea for entrepreneurs in the audience? There are lots of customer acquisition channels out there (Groupon and its 400 clones), but loyalty/retention tools in the vein of what Evan Cohen and Foursquare are building could serve new value.

Taking another approach is Chicago-based Total Attorneys. The company, founded in 2002, focuses on helping small law firms and solo practitioners grow and manage their practices. Today, the company announced a growth capital investment by BIA Digital Partners II LLP, which is a sister company to BIA/Kelsey, the publisher of this blog. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

According to a release, Total Attorneys has built its business based on two marketplace shifts: the migration of attorney marketing from traditional media to online performance-based media and consumer interest in seeking information and transacting business over the Internet.

The release additionally notes that “a flood of new, tech-savvy lawyers has entered the legal marketplace looking to build long-term, fulfilling careers as counselors and practitioners rather than living by the billable hour or focusing on making partner in a large law firm … these attorneys are aware of the growing demand for online legal services and seek solutions to help them deliver unbundled legal services online and enable them to create web-based offices that streamline practice management.”