ReadWriteWeb

You hear that? Nothing, right? That is beautiful, delightful silence. And it will continue for the next three to five months.

That is because the residents of a certain complex in Menlo Park, California have been forced to stop running their mouths following Facebook's S-1 filing for an initial public offering yesterday. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires a "quiet period" for any company preparing to go public. It is a bit of karmic justice for the ruckus caused when a company files its S-1. Facebook will be allowed to communicate some information, but nothing that could possibly influence investors. For a company that values the free flow of information, you might think that would be a problem. For Facebook? Probably not.

Groupon, the daily shopping deals service, took its first major step towards an initial public offering today. In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company estimates its IPO will be worth $750 million.

It becomes the second major tech company after LinkedIn to aim for the public market in the last month. The difference between Groupon and LinkedIn though is that Groupon makes significant revenue, has been around half as long as LinkedIn and may or may not actually be a technology company. What are the revenue and risk factors for investors thinking about Groupon stock? We take an in-depth look below.

Small cap hell is where you end up in about six months after your IPO, when all the high fives and champagne have receded into a distant memory. Unless your company is big enough. How big is big enough? According to Investopedia, small cap refers to companies with "a market capitalization of between $300 million and $2 billion."

That's right, to escape small cap hell you need to have a market cap over $2 billion.

It is not often that something as deeply geeky as XBRL gets onto the front page of Wired magazine. Daniel Roth's superb article about radical transparency raised the profile of those four letters. What could be more boring than an XML standard for accountants that has been around for a decade? On the other hand, what could be more exciting than something that might disrupt and recreate the deeply broken global financial system? I spent two days at the XBRL US National Conference in New York to find out the reality, which is somewhere in between.

With backing from the Sunlight Founation, non-profit CorpWatch launched CrocTail yesterday, an application to provide easy access to data from several hundred thousand publicly traded companies. We heard about it via Dion Hinchcliffe, a respected enterprise 2.0 consultant and blogger for ZDNet.

CorpWatch has also released the API they used to create CrocTail, one of only two to build structure around the filings data from the SEC's own EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) search system. The other, SEC Watch, was released in early March.

Four years ago, an eternity in internet time, Dallas Mavericks owner and controversial web thought leader Mark Cuban allegedly used inside information to dump all his stock in meta search engine Mamma.com hours before the company announced a round of fund raising that caused the value of stock in the company to drop dramatically. That's what the Securities and Exchange Commission says, at least, according to a short but high profile report this morning by the Wall St. Journal. Cuban owned a 6.3% stake in
the company.

The full text of the SEC complaint is here and key points are summarized below. Update: For a really strange twist to this story, see this email exchange reported on by the NYT.