Groupon Panic: Is It Insolvent--and Could IPO Get Pulled?

Four weeks ago, Martin Tobias, CEO of Groupon competitor Tippr, said Groupon could become insolvent and had fewer than 18 months of capital in the bank.

"If they had to pay their merchants in four days rather than 90 days, they would be insolvent," Martin said [ watch Martin here ].

"The second thing is, if you look at their 80M subscribers, only 15M of them have purchased so they've spent a lot of money on customer acquisition for customers that are never ever going to buy from them. The numbers that they have to acquire to continue to fill the churn is incredibly high."

Even more, the founders of the company have already

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Better Than Photos: Storytree Records and Shares Stories for Families and Organizations

WHAT: Capture family or community stories on video (or audio) and share them. Create a "storytree" by recording a story asking a family member to answer a question you choose. For example, grandchildren can ask grandparents to record a video on how they met. Only those in a storytree can see the posts.

Storytree requires a webcam for video but users can upload any type of content. iPhone app in the works. Considering building storytelling booths.

LAUNCHERS: Matt Sullivan, CEO [ @Matthawaii, LinkedIn ]. Zach Weiner, CTO. [ @Zweinz, LinkedIn ].

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Bringing Quantified Self to the Masses: Habit Labs Creates Games to Make You Live Healthier

WHAT: Create healthy habits with software tools that can be tailored to people's goals and the ways they want to communicate. Current product is Health Month, which makes achieving health goals a social game and is integrated with Fitbit and the Withings scale.

The next product, code-named Budge and expected to be released in about six months, will consider a person's context -- events like parties and conferences, weather and location -- to make relevant recommendations. For instance, if it's raining and you normally run outside, Budge would recommend indoor exercises or the gym to keep you on track. If you ate too much one night, Budge would help you get back on track with losing those five pounds.

LAUNCHERS:  Jen McCabe, CEO, and Buster Benson, CTO.

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In Crowded Music Market, Console.fm Signs up 10K+ in First Three Weeks

WHAT: Gathers electronic music from around the web and arranges songs into genre-specific rooms. Stream curated list or choose your tracks, and share them on Twitter and Facebook. Console.fm sources stream from Soundcloud – about 2,200 songs are currently on the site – and is continuously updated with new music. Recently added Facebook comments to each page/room.

LAUNCHERS: Alex Baldwin, CEO and designer [ @alexbaldwin, LinkedIn ].
Alex Manelis, developer [ @amanelis, LinkedIn ]. Josh Deeden, Developer [ @jdeeden, LinkedIn ]. Jake Kuczeruk, community manager [ @kuczeruk, LinkedIn ].

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Kickstarter Clone Ideame Caters to Latin America

Argentina-based Ideame is the the latest company to use Kickstarter's model of crowdfunding creative projects abroad.

U.S.-based Indiegogo was among the first, and Kickstarter copycats have also popped up in countries like Sweden (Funded by Me).

All with similar interfaces (see below), Ideame intends to give Latin American startups, which it says investors have overlooked in the past, their own crowdfunding platform.

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