If not quite an obituary, The New York Times examines what went wrong with Groupon, and how Wall Street overlooked multiple warning signs in its haste to bring the company public. “Underwriters are supposed to be gatekeepers, not just a sales and marketing agent,” say Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant for the S.E.C. “Underwriters have gotten to the point of being cheerleaders. I question whether they are really fulfilling their obligation to investors.” The offending underwriter, in Groupon’s case, was Goldman Sachs, which beat out other investment banks to shepherd what was, as NYT writes, “supposed to be …

Social navigation application Waze has raised $30 million in a new financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “If you tote around an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, Waze offers an intelligent way to beat traffic,” Mashable explains. Waze debuted as a social traffic service in Israel in early 2009. Currently, the start-up has 1.3 million drivers in the country -- representing a large share of the country’s smartphone-ready citizens, according to Waze CEO Noam Bardin. Worldwide, the service has north of 7.3 million registered users, while, Los Angeles presently accounts for the largest concentration of Waze users …

Yahoo late Monday confirmed the transitioning of Raymie Stata from CTO to the newly created role of Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). The change will allow Stata “to return to his entrepreneurial roots,” Yahoo said in a statement. Meanwhile, sources tell AllThingsD that Stata had simply planned to leave Yahoo, and that his new role is “an unusual arrangement for a big company,” adding: “Typically, departing execs become EIRs at venture firms.” In his place, Yahoo has appoint Ash Munshi to the role of CTO. “Ash has a well-established career managing successful global technology organizations at the most senior levels with …

Quarterly revenue is one way to rank Silicon Valley’s top companies. Another, as Mercury News shows us, is Santa Clara County’s annual "business personal property" list. This past year’s tax data -- which tracks the total value of a company's computers, furniture and other business equipment -- reveals that Google and Apple both ranked among the top four companies for the first time, trailing only Cisco and Lockheed Martin. Google, for one, spent more than $154 million on computers and business equipment during the past year -- the county's biggest value increase in dollars. Yet, “Facebook's one-year rise relative to …

Online study companion Grockit just closed another $7 million round of financing led by existing backer Atlas Ventures. Applying social networking and gaming mechanics to studying, Grockit lets students work on sample test problems together, and rewards them with points and badges. Also, the start-up “has been on a bit of tear recently,” writes VentureBeat. Since the beginning of September, the company integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph API “to give students access from within Facebook, introduced a one-for-one program called ‘Grockit for Good’ that matches each account purchased with one-year of free access for under-served students, added a VP of …

Apple sold over 4 million iPhone 4S units in just 3 days, it boasted in a Monday morning press release. “There’s no other way to say this: Wow,” IntoMobile.com writes on the news. "For a device that let down many technophiles because it looks exactly the same as the previous model that shipped more than one year ago, the iPhone 4S has really proven everyone in the media wrong.” One reason for this strong performance, IntoMobile suggests, is pent up demand. “Add up the huge number of iPhone 3GS users that have been anxiously awaiting for their 2 year contract …

Exploring familiar territory for any search engine or Web browser, The New York Times considers the power of default choices. “For behavioral economists, psychologists and marketers, defaults are part of a rich field of study that explores ‘decision architecture’ -- how a choice is presented or framed,” NYT explains, while citing the 2008 book “Nudge,” for popularizing the field. Written by Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor, “nudges,” as explained in the book, are default choices. Citing economists and psychologists, Nudges frame how a person is presented …

Thumbtack.com, an online marketplace for local services, purportedly called 10 vendors offering daily deals -- five from Groupon and five from LivingSocial -- and found eight instances where they were quoted a price over the phone that was cheaper than the advertised regular price being offered. For Business Insider, that justified the headline: “BUSTED: Groupon And Living Social Caught Inflating Regular Prices To Make Deals Look Better.” Sure, in the body of its story, BI admits: “This is an extremely small sample size, but it is worth noting.” So, is there a story here? Scrape the sensationalistic headline, and the …

Well, that didn’t take long. This week, just hours after Skype officially joined the Microsoft family, the VoIP provider removed Google Toolbar from its installer package for Windows. “The release notes for Skype 5.6 confirm the change in an update that also contains ‘attribution of used third party software’ (perhaps another Microsoft-related change) and bug fixes,” The Next Web reports. Google offers incentives to developers who bundle its toolbar with their products. Now that Skype is part of Microsoft, however, such a deal would be “awkward to say the least,” as Next Web puts it. “And it won’t need the …

Bit.ly has come a long way since its days as an upstart link shortening service. Having since developed into a respected social Web analytics provider, the company just debuted its first Enterprise product. Built on top of its new search platform, the reputation tracking alert system can, Bit.ly says, predict which brand-new pages will receive a lot of traffic in the future. How? Andrew Cohen, GM at Bit.ly, tells ReadWriteWeb that the company watches the huge number of links passed through its service and drills down to index their text content. Then, “Using the Apache Lucene-based technology developed at LinkedIn …