Marianne Oleson has been charged with 33 felony charges in the Winnebago County Court. The prosecutors say the woman claimed to own shares of Facebook stock and swindled at least 4 people in to buying the fake stock. One complaint states that one man gave Oleson 28,000 dollars in cash money in exchange for “legitimate looking” documents.

Officials say Oleson acquired the documents from a Florida company that owns private stock of the social network giant by telling the company she was interested in buying 1 million dollars worth of shares.

Oleson has many aliases including the last names of Jansen, Milock and Maloney. Randy Stafford, the aforementioned man that was swindled says he was indeed “swindled”. Stafford performed construction on Oleson’s home and after she couldn’t afford to pay him, she offered him the stock in exchange; Stafford said:

“I think it’s a great opportunity, it’s a growing business so on and so forth.”

Reportedly, 18,00 dollars was in payment for work he did on the home and stafford payed an additional 10,000 dollars for the stocks themselves. Stafford went on to say:

“I’m interested in my options and investments so you don’t have to work as hard and make it a lot easier money for my kids and family.”

Stafford went on to say that “something didn’t feel right”; seems his instincts were correct; according to the victim, Oleson had bought up to 1 million dollars worth of the faux stock.

Police officials say that stafford wasn’t the only one duped. Jeff Bellin of the Winnebago County Sheriff’s office says:

“There were other victims initially identified and from there, it just grew.”

A criminal complaint lists 5 victims including Stafford that purchased or had the fake stock given to them as a gift. Bellin feels that there may be more victims out there too. To add insult to injury, Oleson is facing marijuana possession charges on top of her previous charges.

Apple’s stock rose nearly six percent in midday trading according to the Mercury News. This put their individual stock price at $445.29 which put their market cap at $415 billion. Exxon’s share price was down one percet at $86.52 per share with a market cap of $414 billion.

The two companies have been battling all day back and forth for the top spot in market value. There has only been $1 billion standing between them for most of the day.

This new momentum for Apple has some shareholders hoping that Apple will use it massive reserves of cash to pay investors back in the form of a dividend. Reuters reports that Apple, which last paid a dividend in 1995, is “actively discussing” the cash balance but didn’t have anything to announce.

“We do believe the company should examine a meaningful dividend closely and are intrigued by the possibilities around any sizeable acquisitions that could improve its wireless and online services,” Barclays Capital wrote in a note to clients, according to Reuters.

Apple’s success has also improved the outlook for the company’s suppliers, Broadcom and TriQuint, according to Fox Business.

As of right now, Apple’s stocks are selling for $447.45 per share and Exxon’s are selling for $86.54 per share. Apple’s market value is staying steady at $415 billion and Exxon’s is staying at $414 billion.

The prices can and will fluctuate over the day, but we can call it as of now that Apple is once again the number one most valuable company in the world.

This IPO values the company at around $12.8 billion.

The oversubscribed company added five million shares to its offering, upping the figure from 30 million shares sold to 35 million shares sold. This still only amounts to 5.5% of the company.

The $20 a share pricing is slightly higher than what was expected. The price range that was originally discussed was between $16 and $18 a share.

It looks like most of the trepidation surrounding Groupon’s IPO went by the wayside as people rushed to buy a piece of the company. On the bumpy road to an IPO, Groupon had been hit with executive troubles, and criticism of accounting practices.

This IPO is the second largest by an internet-based company – all time. Of course, the biggest IPO crown belongs to Google in 2004. Groupon will begin trading Friday under the symbol “GRPN.”

Here’s some of the chatter surrounding the huge IPO:

Rocky Agrawal at VentureBeat says that he still believes that Groupon is a “terrible company for investors, small businesses and ultimately for consumers.” But he’s buying shares –

All of that said, I’ve put in my request with my broker for shares in the IPO because Groupon has scientifically engineered its IPO to inflate share prices. Its float is one of the tiniest in the last decade. Most likely this thing will have a nice pop.

What do you think of Groupon’s IPO? Let us know in the comments.

LinkedIn announced its pricing at $5 per share, but by the end of trading yesterday it had reached a high of $107 per share. Shares are currently hovering around $101 to $103.

Initial reporting valued the social network at around $4 billion. Some are now indicating that LinkedIn could be worth more than $9 billion dollars, an absolutely astounding figure.

So the tech world sounded off on Twitter as LinkedIn’s valuation continued to climb. Many talked about the infamous “tech bubble,” which others pointed to LinkedIn’s IPO success as a sign of future social networks’ success in public offerings. Others from inside the social media field simply congratulated the people at LinkedIn on their big day.

First, that bubble talk:

The staffs of other social networks Twitter and Facebook also talked about the IPO:

Here are some more reactions from the blogging and tech writing world:

Opening on Tuesday, HP’s stock took a hit and is currently trading at $40.72/share. A $0.75 decrease from yesterday. This can be attributed to talks of “new directions” and “long-term strategy“, as such terms can lessen the confidence of investors.

Apotheker mentioned cloud services as a market HP plans to invest heavily in moving forward. He even promised to deliver a cloud infrastructure in 2011. Services HP will offer include an app store, along with other programs for enterprises.

To coincide with their cloud services, HP will move forward with their expansive plans for WebOS. Last year, HP purchased Palm and looked to their WebOS platform as an investment opportunity. Last month, HP laid out their list of devices which will utilize WebOS: HP TouchPad, Veer and Pre3. Of their plans for the mobile space, Apotheker believes there could be 100 million devices a year running the WebOS platform.

Bill Shope, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, had mixed feelings towards the CEO’s plans, “We were impressed with the new CEO’s long-term vision, and agree with his view on the areas where HP needs to focus in coming years” he continues, “Nevertheless, we still believe the company is underestimating the costs of its current transformation and the resulting risks to medium-term margin stability.”

The obvious problems ahead for HP come from staunch competition they’ll be facing in the new markets they plan to dive into. On the cloud side of things, Oracle and Cisco are established companies with renowned products. Their mobile plans will be going up against the two-headed monster of Android, and iOS.

While HP has a tough journey ahead, sometimes it’s bold words and plans that are needed to come up from a rut. Ever since the abrupt exit of ex-CEO, Mark Hurd, the company has been sliding backwards. Their stock has been down 20% the past year.

Apotheker has laid out the plan, now it’s time to see how HP handles the follow through.

One of Facebook’s directors and largest investors, Peter Thiel, tells the magazine about the apparent misadventures in trying to get a deal done with the folks and Twitter. We know the outcome on this one was a “No deal!” but because all of this was happening last fall during Twitter’s meteoric rise makes it pretty interesting.

This is the first time there has been a public recognition of these talks. Facebook is still looking to expand but Thiel shapes up the attempted union with Twitter as follows

Thiel said the parties disagreed over price and structure when they seriously considered a deal last fall. “It became pretty clear it wasn’t going to happen,” Thiel says from the mid-Manhattan office of his hedge fund Clarium Capital. “The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock. And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth.”

As noted by Thiel it’s a sticky proposition trying to value the stock of a company that has no liquid market. The valuation of Facebook at $15 billion used for the investment by Microsoft no longer applies The internal valuation found in court documents of $3.7 billion that occurred at about the same time as that deal with Microsoft shows that the Redmond company had either seen something Facebook didn’t but that’s for another story.

While the two companies still talk there appears to be no interest in any deal that involves Facebook stock because its valuation is a moving target at best. While it appears that Microsoft overpaid considerably there may not have been another one of those born in the next five minutes (sucker, anyone?).

Twitter has recognized that the stock valuation was the main sticking point in the negotiations that had a value on Twitter at the time around $500 million. Since then however, Twitter has been growing at breakneck speed and appears to be in no hurry to get involved in any deals.

Representatives of Twitter liked the sound of $500 million but balked when Facebook said its stock was worth $8 billion to $9 billion. Twitter’s team knew that Facebook was letting employees sell stock on the secondary market at company valuations ranging from $2 billion to $4 billion. “We said it’s not worth it,” the person says. “Don’t treat us like children.”

Add to that the belief from Twitter management is gaining serious momentum and not even near its full potential and it certainly makes sense that they wait for the best deal.

As for Facebook, they continue to move forward. A rumored hiring freeze has been set aside and Thiel states that the focus is on getting the product right and not on turning on the ad faucet which is what made MySpace what it is today (unusable?). With other board members like Marc Andreesen saying that Facebook could generate about $1 billion per year right now that must be hard to keep away. The question is as Facebook keeps making gaffes that get their users upset just how receptive will the community ever be to attempts to monetize the service?

This is a question that not only haunts Facebook but Twitter and many other social media vehicles. The question is as Facebook keeps making gaffes that get their users upset, how receptive will the community ever be to attempts to monetize the service? This is a question that not only haunts Facebook but Twitter and many other social media vehicles. It’s likely that during this downturn caution will be exercised but someday these folks have to turn a profit, right?

Comments

Before we talk about how much more legitimate traditional news sources are though, let’s keep in mind that iReport is owned by CNN. Let’s also keep in mind that this is not the first time that Jobs himself has been the object of false reporting involving him and fatal health circumstances. Not too long ago, "trusted news source" Bloomberg accidentally posted his obituary with one critical flaw. He was not dead. Shortly after this morning’s report, CNN pulled the story from iReport and disabled the account of the user who posted it.

Apple’s stock temporarily dropped, and Silicon Alley Insider (who confirmed with Apple that the story was false) believes an SEC investigation will come about as a result of this fiasco, noting that the IP address of the "reporter" would be easily traceable.

As I tried to make the point in a recent article about CareerBuilder gaming Twitter, new media’s legitimacy deteriorates as a result of abuse on the part of some users, and it is up to the sites themselves to help eliminate offending content. CNN did the right thing by eliminating the story that was proven to be false.

Where the legitimacy shines through is in the communities themselves. There are always others to call something out as BS in new media formats where discussion is the key to coming away with useful information.

When all is said and done, it is up to readers to use their heads and think about where they are getting their info. Just as has always been the case, (even long before social media, blogs, and citizen journalism were ever heard of) you shouldn’t believe everything you read. But damning an entire medium because some abuse it is just ridiculous.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an email to employees saying that they could sell up to 20% of their shares up to $900,000. Some think that it is something of a ruse to allow the company to buy back the shares once the employees are allowed to sell. According to ValleyWag:

Facebook’s corporate charter has a relatively unusual provision for employee stock sales. The company has a right of first refusal over employees’ shares, meaning that it has the right to match any price offered by a buyer; most companies have tighter restrictions.

Employees have been told that sales outside the program will have "career-limiting effects"; promotions, raises, and new stock-option grants may be taken away from those who sell anyway. But Facebook has no such hold on ex-employees.

$4 billion seems to be the number that everyone has Facebook valued at, but this could easily increase if enough shares go at a higher price than Facebook’s suggested  $8.90 a share as VW’s Owen Thomas notes. That may very well be the case as Facebook’s popularity growth has been well documented. It’s even about to catch MySpace in the U.S., and looks set to amp up international efforts.

More details regarding the selling of stock  are supposed to be released from Facebook later this month.

The fallout from a little miss in Google earnings, as they fell short of analyst expectations, triggered ‘Eject’ buttons throughout the trading world. On Monday, trading in Google nearly doubled its usual volume.

Google closed at $495.43, nearly a 4 percent drop in price. Their market cap dipped under $155 billion, far away from when they had challenged Microsoft in cap value.

As of 6:50 pm ET, after hours movement pushed shares down another $1.38. At the end of December 2007, Google closed at $691.48.

One might think this presents a growth opportunity, one that those closest to the company, its inner circle, might take advantage of by demonstrating confidence with a few buy orders.

Ho ho, don’t wait too long for those to appear. Since the beginning of 2008, several Google insiders, including outgoing CFO George Reyes, have sold 11,953 shares at prices ranging from $650.33 to $695.96 per share. Total take: $8,079,450.00.

Zero buys by the insiders, going all the way back to February 2007. Over the past 12 months, Google insiders parted with 1.278 million shares, reaping over $671 billion dollars. Nobody’s putting their money on Google from inside the company.

That makes us wonder what kind of help Google can offer Yahoo as it faces an unsolicited bid from Microsoft. It doesn’t look like Google’s going to put in a competing bid, even if the most optimistic person thinks it could get past antitrust regulators here or in the EU.

After spending some time paging through parts of MSN Money while chatting with Jolley, we can see his point. The site does have some nice data integration from the sources that someone researching financial info would turn to individually.

The consumer focus of MSN Money probably made it easier for investors to keep heading to the site that dominates the online world of financial information. Yahoo Finance has been planted atop that list for quite some time.

MSN Money has its appeals, and Jolley wanted to bring them to our attention (and to yours by proxy, of course.) He started off by citing unique content, written by folks like Jim Jubak.

A couple of gems reside in the MSN Money list of Investment Tools. The Stock Research Wizard pulls information from Zacks Investment Research, comScore, and Reuters to build a profile of a company and its stock.

Stock history, price targets, and catalysts preceded an interesting comparison feature. Visitors can quickly bring up a comparison of a stock and two others. Stacked against each other, people see how the stocks compare in estimates to gain, shares priced cheapest relative to earnings, and other factors.

Exchange-traded funds have been around for a few years, and have gained a section on MSN Money. On the research page about them, visitors can easily see the winners and losers, and how various asset classes have been performing.

Jolley told us multimedia, as in videos, will be one of the ways Microsoft has in mind to bolster the site and gain against Yahoo Finance. These likely have space selected for them on the MSN Money homepage as well as other pages throughout the site.

MSN Money doesn’t go for the muted colors like the Wall Street Journal or even Yahoo Finance use. That could be part of the public perception, but MSN Money enjoys significant traffic now. They need to get more to overcome Yahoo and stave off the challenge of AOL Finance and other sites.

Here is analysis from Hitwise for US visits to Business & Finance sites for the week ending 12/15/2007: