If you would have asked any stock analyst in the world back in September when Apple shares were sitting at $705 if shares had a chance of falling below $400 within six months, they would have admonished you for being a moron. It wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t. Now that we’re five months out from the peak of Apple’s value, it seems that $400 isn’t such an impossible number after all. The stock closed yesterday at $430.47, down $10.93 from the day before to reach its lowest point since the slide started last September. It seems that Apple may have fallen victim to their own hype machine in many ways….

Those who follow my cynical posts about over-inflated social site valuations know that it’s hard for me to agree with numbers. I giggled when Facebook hit $70 billion before going public at much higher. I stared in disbelief when Google offered $6 billion for Groupon then realized that I had to be in a persistent dream state when Groupon turned them down. I cringed when I heard that Digg wasn’t taking a rumored $200 million offer four years ago or the subsequent $80 million offer two years ago before selling off at $500,000 last year. I coughed a little when Instagram sold for a billion dollars, then…

Every day we see more people using their smartphones to make payments whether through apps directly on them or by using them to pay for purchases at stores. The rise of mobile payment types is only being outpaced by adoption which is accelerating at a breakneck pace. This infographic by Mobile Payments Infographic comes to us from Long Beach Honda and breaks down what the future of mobile payments may look like. Click to enlarge. Related articles Mobile Payments Infographic Shows a Jackpot for Business The mobile payments wars [Infographic] Lois Hamblet, CEO of Ziptip, a Mobile Payments Solution…

Day one was a disappointment as there was no “pop”. Day two was even worse, showing the shares slide 11% to close at $34.03. Is this a bad sign for the long term? No. Not necessarily. The new billionaires in Palo Alto will not become millionaires any time soon and the shares aren’t going to drop much further than they already have. They likely won’t go much higher than their IPO value, either, until some big news about how the infusion of money is being invested hits the wire. Until then, expect a few gains, a few losses, and an overall stabilization of the stock for the next few weeks. This was all created…

The biggest IPO in tech history is appearing to be smaller than people thought according to a recent report from Bloomberg. With growth prospects for their advertising model raising warning flags, the company has been strict with their policy of not allowing revenue to get in the way of user experience. To the all-important long-term investors, this is terrifying. To the fast-moving investors who see Facebook as an opportunity to ride the initial wave of enthusiasm, it isn’t much better news. There is little doubt that the stocks will start at one price and shoot up in the short term. There is growing…

The only thing certain about the future of daily deals is that the industry’s future is uncertain. It’s not a play on words or a failed attempt at sounding clever. If you ask 10 people where daily deals will be a year from now, you’ll probably get 10 completely different responses. The truth is, nobody knows for sure. We know that Wall Street isn’t treating Groupon well right now. We know that LivingSocial is looking as strong today as Groupon did a year ago after announcing a national deal with McDonald’s. We know that fortunes in the daily deals industry can turn on a dime. We also know that users are…

In less than a month, Groupon’s highly-lauded stocks have plummeted from their IPO sale price of $28 closing today at $15.24, down 46% since their November 4th initial public offering. That’s the good news. The bad news is that recovery, if any, will be short-lived. We anticipated bad times, declaring that Groupon was not IPO-ready, but it appears that things are worse than we thought. Since going public, Groupon has done very little to enhance or promote their product the way that a newly-public company normally would. Their “big launch” this month of an “exciting new feature” is, for the most…

The social network has its fingers in a majority of websites in one way or another. Businesses promote their Facebook pages on the homepage of their websites. Blogs, bloggers, journalists, and mainstream publications often have several different Facebook widgets littered everywhere on every page. In less than a month, Facebook will have over 700 million users. It sounds like a safe bet. In reality, it’s guaranteed to be an utter failure in the not-so-long run based upon a combination of history, reality, and mathematics. The Platform The biggest challenge that innovative service sites such…

With alarmists sounding the alarms and naysayers saying, “nay,” it’s certainly looking very similar to the way things were over a decade ago right before the dotcom bubble burst. Did we learn our lesson back then or are we in the process of repeating our mistakes? Few can argue against the concept that we’re in another tech bubble. The only real debate is whether or not the bubble will burst. With Facebook leading the way with valuations far exceeding prospects of revenue and slowdown in growth, it’s the poster child for both high-value investors as well as those warning of a more catastrophic collapse…