GROUPON FILES $750 MILLION IPO WITH SEC

On Thursday, Groupon, the popular location-based coupon service, filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The start-up, which alerts 83 million email subscribers in 43 different countries of local deals that range from restaurant discounts to sailing lessons, hopes to raise $750 million in its IPO. “Expect us to make ambitious bets on our future that distract us from our current business,” Andrew Mason, Groupon’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Some bets we’ll get right, and others we’ll get wrong, but we think it’s the only way to continuously build disruptive products,” Mason added.

Groupon launched in November, 2007, has more than 7,000 employees, and reported $645 million in revenues during Q1 2011, however they have never made a profit.

RUMOR: FACEBOOK GOING PUBLIC IN 2011

A rumor is floating around that Facebook will be going public in 2011. What started the rumor? An SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, not the Southereastern Conference, investigation. Even though Facebook is a privitely held company, it still issues shares. By law unless Facebook goes public they must keep the number of shareholders in their private company to under 500, but those 499 shareholders can then buy, sell and trade their stock without any oversight and that is what the SEC is irked about.

The SEC believes the unregulated shares have caused Facebook's value to be inflated by billions of dollars. Facebook really doesn't want the SEC to investigate them since some of the trades may not have been kosher and there may be over 500 shareholders. Because of this, Facebook can decide to become a public company and avoid the SEC investigation.

This is not unheard of. Google was forced to go public in 2004 to overcome the 500 shareholder rule. So Facebook really has two options, either buy out the shareholders or go public. Both have advantages and disadvantages, so it will be interesting to see what they do. [SF Gate]

RUMOR: CISCO TO BUY SKYPE

Cisco has made an initial offer to buy Skype according to a source at TechCrunch.  Cisco is trying to get the deal done before the IPO process is complete for Skype, who has filed with SEC.  Skype is hoping for a valuation of around $5 billion and Cisco would have to make an offer in that range to make it of interest.

Google has also been rumored to be interested in Skype, however anti-trust concerns may have persuaded them not to pursue the acquisition.