Groupon continued to adjust its IPO documents earlier this week. The company said that it had split its voting common stock but not raised the $16 to $18 share price. Groupon’s prospectus, a regulatory document all companies looking to make initial public offerings must file, has undergone a number of changes since the company first announced plans to go public. READ MORE
As CNET tells the story, the fight at Microsoft to abandon Courier, a planned two-screen tablet computer, produced two factions. The Allardites, led by Xbox-creator J. Allard, wanted a diptych-like tablet with touchscreen capability. Steven Sinofsky, head of Microsoft’s Windows division, led the counter-revolutionary Sinofskyites, who claimed that a version of Windows for tablet computers was still a figment of the imagination. READ MORE
Rumors that Yahoo might be planning to reject bids on the company sent shares into a tailspin, leading to the company’s worst day of trading in two months. The market was responding to speculation that the company may sell the portion of its business in Asia and pass the proceeds on to stockholders. READ MORE
In what some analysts see as a bid to keep its valuation up, Groupon is offering less stock in its IPO, only 4.7 percent of its stock overall, than any other American Internet IPO of similar value since 2000. When LinkedIn had its IPO in May, it offered 8.3 percent of its stock. READ MORE
E-book publishers continued to debate who they are and why at the Books in Browsers conference in San Francisco, which was hosted by the Internet Archive and O’Reilly Media. All present seemed to agree that books are dying, that a technology that has proven resilient for hundreds of years will perish, and that electronic books, which have yet to gain a recognizable form, will prevail. READ MORE
China made a surprise move earlier this week in the race to build the supercomputer of the future. At a meeting in Jinan, China, industry and government officials announced the Sunway BlueLight MPP, a supercomputer that can perform up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, and which is composed entirely of 8,700 Chinese ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors. READ MORE
Codeacademy, an online classroom for the aspiring programmer, has netted $2.5 million in venture funds. The company announced yesterday that it had completed its first round of financing, led by Union Square Ventures and other firms. The company was launched this past summer, and claims that more than 500,000 people have used the site since then. READ MORE
Redbox has tried to position itself as the easy way to rent DVDs locally. How customers will respond to the decision by Coinstar, the company that owns Redbox, to raise rental prices from $1 to $1.20 may determine the company’s future. The announcement comes as Netflix bleeds subscribers and tries to figure out its own position in the market. READ MORE
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has been called upon by the Knight Foundation, a sponsor of innovative media projects, to bring a venture-capital mentality to the befuddled industry. Hughes will take a position on the Foundation’s board. Hughes and digital media experts from MIT and Harvard will join board members like ProPublica founder Paul Steiger in finding ways to make journalism profitable again. READ MORE
Prism Skylabs has developed a product that offers real-time updates on a store using footage from security cameras. The product, which is undergoing a trial run at a few small stores, sees itself as offering “analytics” on coffee shops, boutiques, and other locations. READ MORE
