Groupon went public in November 2011 at $20 per share to much over-hyped fanfare as is now the norm on Wall Street.

The stock ran up to over $30 then plunged below the IPO price as it became painfully aware to investors that there was more fluff in Groupon’s business model and hocus-pocus accounting practices than Donald Trump’s comb-over.

Now, at precisely the moment the ‘lockup’ expired, that point at which Groupon’s founders are free to sell their shares on the open market, it appears these insiders are dumping the stock like they dump destructive deep discounts on unsuspecting retailers.

As of this print Groupon is trading at $9.66, down 9.21% for the day, and down a whopping 69% from its high of $31.14 – and the stock is barely six months old.

What makes Groupon’s obvious overvaluation so alarming is that now we have Facebook’s IPO – an IPO that will go down in history as a textbook example of how Wall Street over-hypes a public offering, giving the stock an initial ‘pump’ and hence an artificial price, then institutional investors who got the stock at the IPO price (or lower) dump the stock at peak prices leaving the retail investor holding on for dear life as the roller coaster car plunges to the ground.

And now, in the case of Groupon you’ve got management obviously offloading their shares the moment they are legally able. It doesn’t say a lot for their faith in their own business. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the Facebook lockup expires.

This is perhaps the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

Sisters Lennon and Maisy Stella going a’cappella on their cover of Call Your Girlfriend, originally performed by Robyn and covered later (a’cappella) by Erato.

Twelve year old Lennon has some guitar chops too. Check out their other videos on YouTube. The counter is currently showing only 304 views but comments are already into the thousands – so the counter is probably stuck and will catch up over the next 24 hours.

Klout.com measures the social media influence of 85 million social media users around the world. Brands actually reward top Klout users with cool things like iPads and smart phones. Other such social influence tracking sites are popping up all over undoubtedly with their eye on monetizing social influence.

Our question is how far will this trend go? Here’s one plausible scenario.

Let’s say you’re a heavy Facebook user with a large Twitter following and you’re an avid Pinner. Let’s also say that one day the marketing department over at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry, contacts Klout and asks for a list of people who have Tweeted, posted, or Pinned information about Blackberry phones over the last year. Let’s also assume Klout is tracking that kind of thing which undoubtedly, they are. And guess what? Your name popped up.

So the RIM people now have you on their radar as a potential promoter of their Crackberries. They send you an email or they message you on FB or Twitter soliciting you to directly promote their brand in exchange for certain gratuities, not the least of which might be a Crackberry of your own or in a perfect world, cash.

You oblige and start Tweeting, posting, and Pinning your heart out about all things Crackberry. People are sharing your stuff because you’ve got social influence and the people at RIM are ecstatic because of all the sharing going on. Ultimately, someone actually buys a Crackberry as a result of one of your Tweets and RIM just about has conniption fit because they’re so damn happy that social media actually generated a sale. They proceed to pay you with a Crackberry of your own and upon opening the box you marvel at this technological dinosaur and wonder to yourself, what the hell just happened?

That’s the same question that GM just asked themselves before they pulled their paid ads from Facebook. While GM’s circumstance was different than my rambling example above the principle is identical. What does anyone’s social media influence have to do with anything unless it converts into dollars?

The fact is that social influence is an intangible that may or may not carry measurable value. Sites like Klout and SocialStock are looking to monetize this potential value and consequently, in some manner, pay you.

But will our newly found social influence jobs come with health care? If it does, I’m in…

FourSquare, the popular check-in app has a new competitor on the block. They’re called Belly and they combine check-ins with loyalty rewards in a winning combination that is taking the loyalty rewards space by storm.

Imagine walking into your favorite doughnut shop or java joint and holding your iPhone up to the store’s Belly iPad and your reward account gets updated in a split second scan.

Belly aims to replace the clutter of punch cards in your wallet with a QR Code driven index of all your favorite rewards stores. I knew all this technology was going to mean something someday. Pardon me… I’m getting choked up…

Find them at BellyCard.com

From TechCrunch -

Belly, the Chicago-based loyalty platform which just closed its $10 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month, is today announcing a pretty significant milestone: its 1 millionth check-in. The startup allows customers to check-in to a location using a physical loyalty card or mobile app which they scan via a consumer-facing iPad installed at point-of-sale. By doing so, customers collect points that can later be redeemed for unique rewards tailored specifically for the business in question.

The company has been growing fast, and CEO Logan LaHive tells us that in some of Belly’s locations, there have been more Belly check-ins within its first month of being up-and-running, than the total number of Foursquare check-ins the business has seen to date.

“I’m not here to make outlandish statements,” says LaHive, referring to this impressive metric. “Some stores are more active and engaged than others, so it would be ridiculous for me to say 100% of locations. But in our active locations, they’re surpassing all-time Foursquare check-ins in their first month.”

For those unfamiliar with Belly’s operations, the now 50 plus-person team works with each business to develop custom and unique digital loyalty programs for retailers’ stores. Merchants pay a monthly subscription, and Belly provides an iPad, physical cards and key chain tags, the consumer-facing mobile apps, marketing materials, and a backend analytics system. For consumers, the idea is that Belly could eventually grow large enough to replace all the different loyalty cards cluttering up customers’ wallets.

While some new startups are hesitant to reveal their metrics early on, Belly gladly shares practically everything they have on file. The company’s over 200,000 users are delivering 10,000 check-ins on average per day. A third of Belly’s users check in to more than one business, 55% have checked in more than once, and 22% have checked in more than five times.

It took Belly 166 days to reach its first 100,000 check-ins, 27 more days to reach 200,000, and is now seeing around 100,000 check-ins every eight days. Around 2,000 to 3,000 new users are added per day to the service, and customers have redeemed over 14,000 rewards since the company’s launch in August 2011.

Belly has nearly $13 million in total funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightbank, and others. The company is now working to transition to HTML5 for its apps, and is planning aggressive expansions to new markets, thanks to the recent infusion of capital.

Awash in cash from their less-than-stellar IPO, Facebook will undoubtedly go on a buying spree, snatching up much needed strategic components to shore up its cross-platform footprint.

Already, talk of a Facebook phone is widely circulating in the blog-o-sphere. Now, a credible source has leaked to Pocket-Lint.com that Facebook is eyeballing Opera as a potential acquisition to stake Facebook in the Internet browser space.

If you haven’t tried Opera yet, give it a shot. It presents a highly intuitive browsing experience and has a great mobile browser that is seeing rapid growth. From Pocket-Lint.com –

A Facebook browser that would allow you keep up to date with your social life from in-built plug-ins and features on the menu bar could be on the cards. Pocket-lint has heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser.

According to our man in the know, the company could be about to expand into the browser space to take on the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and now even Yahoo, who has recently launched its own browser.

The move – which would no doubt send shivers of panic through Google – although unlikely to affect Chrome’s continued growth in the short term, would see the two tech giants battle it out on your desktop and mobile for web surfing as well as social networking.

Opera already has a very good mobile browser, which has seen strong growth in the two years it has been available. And Facebook’s buying the company would save it having to build a browser from scratch.

Since the Facebook IPO, which netted the company over $16 billion, Mark Zuckerberg’s organisation has plenty of cash to expand. It has also left us in no doubt that it wants to get into the mobile sector more and more. Owning its own browser to market data from users regardless of whether or not they are actually on the Facebook website would be one such way of doing that.

Opera claims to have around 200 million users across all of its platforms.

The story of how Eric Simons, just two years removed from a Chicago high school, came to be living in AOL’s Palo Alto campus could well become part of Silicon Valley lore, especially because it highlights the lengths some entrepreneurs will go to make their dreams a reality. And though stories abound these days of startup founders barely old enough to drink swimming in venture capital, far more have to get by on packaged noodles and the good will of friends with extra couches.

You hear it all the time, but Simons, now 20, was a mediocre student with little interest in school. That changed one day when his high school chemistry teacher confronted him and demanded to know what she could do to get him interested.

“I was stumped,” Simons writes on the About Us page of his startup, ClassConnect. “She didn’t ask me to try harder, she didn’t ask me to stay after for help or study more — she asked me to figure out how she could grab my interest. No one had ever bothered to ask me that before. A few moments later I replied, ‘let’s get everyone working together on computers — I’ll even build the software for us to use.’” His life as an entrepreneur had begun.

He wanted to get straight into the thick of it, so after high school, and a short period crashing on couches with friends at the University of Illinois, Simons accepted a slot in the inaugural class of Imagine K12, a new Silicon Valley incubator focused entirely on education. His plan? Start a company that builds tools allowing teachers to create and discover lesson plans, and share them with students and teachers.

“Teachers around the U.S. and the world are asked to teach from a checklist,” Simons said. “They’re asked to teach the exact same thing…and they’re all going and creating their own lessons. What we’ve built is almost a GitHub for teacher lessons. They can fork someone else’s lesson plan and use that as a springboard.”

Is it ironic that a bad student ended up launching a company that aims to revolutionize education? Simons doesn’t think so. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like school,” he said. “I didn’t like [the way it was done]. I said, I’m going to take a crack at this. I’m young enough that I can take a crack at some crazy stuff. Ten years from now, maybe I can’t be sleeping on people’s couches.”

For Simons, “crazy stuff” meant moving to Silicon Valley and trying to get his fledgling company off the ground. But his initial idea wasn’t quite working. Imagine K12 was a great place to get mentorship and learn how startups are built, but he and his ClassConnect partners had been given just $20,000 by the incubator, and after the four-month program ended, the money was gone. When his friends left to go back to college, Simons needed another solution.

“I couldn’t afford to live anywhere,” Simons recalled. “I started living out of AOL’s headquarters.”

For someone with neither money nor an aversion to sleeping on others’ couches, the AOL building had plenty of allure. “They had a gym there with showers,” Simons said. “I’d take a shower after work. I was like, ‘I could totally work here…They have food upstairs, they have every drink on tap. This would be a sweet place to live.’”

Note that Simons said he would work there. After his four months in the incubator, he was used to toiling away at ClassConnect inside the building, and with other programs, from the Stanford-focused incubator StartX to AOL’s own First Floor Labs also taking up space there, there was no shortage of non-AOL employees shuffling in and out all the time. But Simons was intent on launching his startup, so why not find a desk and pound away for 12 to 16 hours a day?

“There were so many people going in and out each day,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, he just works, here, he’s working late every night. Wow, what a hard worker.’”

Having spent several months legitimately working in the building, often quite late, Simons had noticed that although there were security guards with nightly rounds, there were at least three couches that seemed outside those patrols. Plus, they looked fairly comfortable. He claimed them.

This was his routine: He’d work until midnight or later, and then fall asleep around 2 a.m. on one of the couches. At 7 a.m. — and no later than 8 a.m. so he’d be safely out of his field bed before anyone else arrived — he’d wake up, go down to the gym for a workout and a shower, and then go back upstairs and scarf a breakfast of cereal and water or Coke. Then he’d work all day, finally waiting until everyone else in the building had gone home before returning to one of his three favored couches.

“I got a really good work ethic,” he said, “and I got in shape, since I had to work out every morning.”

But the real point was that he was spending next to nothing. The first month, he spent just $30, mainly on the occasional trip to McDonald’s or for “random food expenditures when I got sick of eating ramen and cereal. I could have not spent a dollar, but I was going crazy.”

Then, of course, there was Thanksgiving. That Thursday, to splurge, he grabbed dinner at a local Boston Market.

“It was a game I was playing,” he said. “What is the minimum amount of money I can spend each day to stay alive. You do some crazy things.”

Some of those crazy things included getting by with the barest of wardrobes. But because he had access to the building gym, he kept everything other than the clothes on his back and his computer there. “I only had maybe five to ten T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a pair of shorts,” he said, “so it all fit in one locker. [Plus] they had their own laundromat there, so I’d wash my clothes there.”

Then came that fateful morning with the 6 a.m. yelling. “One of the guys who manages the building came in at like 5 or 6 in the morning,” Simons lamented, “and he scoured the entire place to find me. And he ripped me a new one. He was pissed that I was treating it like a dorm. Which was reasonable.”

Though the security guard was angry, he knew that Simons was part of Imagine K12. So no one called the police. He lost his badge, but he still had access to the incubator, and continues to go to the AOL building for meetings to this day. But he treads carefully. “When I’m there, I beeline for the Imagine K12 office,” he said, “and when I’m done, I beeline straight for the door.”

After moving out of the AOL building, things began looking up financially. Based on the strength of what he’d built for ClassConnect, especially after pivoting and focusing solely on letting teachers share lesson plans, Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer.

“I was aware” of Simons living at AOL, Clint Korver of Ulu Ventures told CNET. “Tenacity and commitment are key attributes of a great entrepreneur. Eric has these in spades as demonstrated by his willingness to do whatever it takes to get his company off the ground.”

Now, Simons said, he’s looking to raise an additional $500,000.

But one thing the initial $50,000 got for him is a rental house in Palo Alto. It’s also made it possible for him to hire an engineer and a couple of interns for ClassConnect, all of whom will share the new pad.

But being the consummate entrepreneur, he decided to use the house to raise extra cash. One of the bedrooms has two bunk beds, so Simons turned the place into a hacker house by renting them out on Airbnb, and trying to make a couple grand a month to help with the rent.

So is Simons just a kid with a particularly honed entrepreneurial spirit?

“Yeah, save money whenever possible, and use all the resources you can,” he said. “And don’t die. That’s basically my motto.”

A dude comes out to his best friend. Worst mistake he ever made.

A woman has a love child with a famous man. He pays through the nose to keep it quiet.

A young coed is stripping her way through college. She is suicidal.

A married woman convinces her husband to join a three-way. Marital bliss?

That last one was a brain-teaser. Was the third person an extra dude or chick? We just have to know. We think we’ll send an email requesting a follow up story section to see how these tantalizing soundbites turn out.

Check it out for yourself. The site is PostSecret.com. Its won a Webby or two and just went over big at a recent TED conference.

Did we really expect anything less from the Facebook IPO? It was oversubscribed, overvalued, over-hyped, and overblown more than any other IPO in history.

While Facebook stock will most likely prove to be an excellent investment like Google or Apple its IPO was still a recipe for a classic Wall Street swindle.

Enter Morgan Stanley, Facebook management, and the unsuspecting individual stock investor. In a classic pump-and-dump Morgan Stanley allowed Facebook’s IPO price to be over-valued as they quietly prepared downward adjustments to Facebook’s short-term revenue projections, shared this crucial decision-making information with their wealthiest clients, but withheld it from average investors.

Facebook management exacerbated the potential disaster when at the last minute it upped the number of shares being issued to the public by 25%.

The fix was on. Wealthy investors had privileged information the unsuspecting public did not. Leading up to the IPO those in-the-know lined up their short trades and the rest is history. After Facebook’s stock opened in fiasco-fashion on day one, the short-side of the trade leaked and the dog-pile was on. Game over.

From Mashable -

Shareholders have sued Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the company’s bungled IPO, charging they hid bearish forecasts prior to going public, according to a report.

The suit charges that Facebook and its lead underwriter concealed “a severe and pronounced reduction” in Facebook revenue growth forecasts before the company’s shares were offered to the public, according to Reuters.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, according to Reuters, which did not provide further details.

An amusing letter from former President Ronald Reagan in response to a 13-year-old boy’s request for disaster relief funds to clean up his room is making the rounds again on social media, thanks to a blog writer.

Shaun Usher of Letters of Note tweeted the classic correspondence. Seventh-grader Andy Smith from Irmo, South Carolina, wrote Reagan in 1984: “Today my mother declared my bedroom a disaster area. I would like to request federal funds to hire a crew to clean up my room.”

Reagan’s reply:

Dear Andy:

I’m sorry to be so late in answering your letter but as you know I’ve been in China and found your letter here upon my return.

Your application for disaster relief has been duly noted but I must point out one technical problem; the authority declaring the disaster is supposed to make the request. In this case your mother.

However setting that aside I’ll have to point out the larger problem of available funds. This has been a year of disasters, 539 hurricanes as of May 4th and several more since, numerous floods, forest fires, drought in Texas and a number of earthquakes. What I’m getting at is that funds are dangerously low.

May I make a suggestion? This administration, believing that government has done many things that could better be done by volunteers at the local level, has sponsored a Private Sector Initiative program, calling upon people to practice voluntarism in the solving of a number of local problems.

Your situation appears to be a natural. I’m sure your mother was fully justified in proclaiming your room a disaster. Therefore you are in an excellent position to launch another volunteer program to go along with the more than 3,000 already underway in our nation—congratulations.

Give my best regards to your mother.

Sincerely,

Ronald Reagan

—From Reagan: A Life in Letters

The tweet has been viewed 189,500 times in the past two days. It is unknown if the letter remedied the situation.

Economists are increasingly worried that many young Americans will spend coming years buried under student debt. Joe Mihalic was determined not to be one of them.

Faced with $90,000 in student debt from his days at Harvard Business School, Mihalic vowed last August to eliminate every penny by this summer. He did — three months early.

The 29-year-old from Austin, Texas, is now becoming an Internet celebrity of sorts as financial advisers and young Americans link to his blog, NoMoreHarvardDebt.com, which had 180,000 hits as of Thursday morning. His story is touching a nerve at a time when young Americans are more indebted than ever.

So how did he cut through $90,000 in seven months? It helps to have a low-six-figure salary, as Mihalic does working for Dell Inc. But he also recommends getting roommates, a second job (in his case, landscaping), forgoing all restaurant dining (even McDonald’s), selling all unnecessary items around the house — and getting a flask.

Mihalic said he spent months taking a flask of liquor to bars so he could continue to go out drinking with friends without running up a tab. (Be warned: this is typically illegal.) Instead of the movies, he took dates out hiking, or for bagels and coffee. He ate protein bars packed from home and walked several miles to the city, to save a few bucks on transportation, during a trip to Michigan. He got two roommates to rent out his house.

Mihalic also took steps that financial advisers typically say are a no-no: He liquidated his individual retirement account, drawing a tax penalty, and stopped contributing to his 401(k), even though his employer offers a matching contribution.

“My mentality was I want to be done with these student loans as quick as possible,” Mr. Mihalic says in a phone interview, adding: “It was an emotional decision.”

He made his last student-debt payment six weeks ago. He said he saved roughly $40,000 in interest that he would have paid had he stayed on the 15-year schedule for repayment of his loans.

He says he learned other lessons, too.

“The flask thing, it’s kind of demeaning,” he says. “The funny thing is that girls weren’t really sketched out by it…They did laugh, and I could still get their phone number. It taught me a lot — you don’t have to be this flashy dude, buying drinks.”