According to a VC Experts report, Groupon gave the State of Delaware a heads up on December 17th with an Amended Certificate to authorize a $980 million round of Series G funding.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean the company will be raising that amount, it does give it the capacity to do so. The report says to expect a SEC Form D with the exact amount of finacing to be filed next week.

Yesterday, our post about AOL’s promotional discs by way of an excellent thread on Quora invoked quite a bit of feedback. That’s hardly surprising given that every man, woman, and child (at least in the United States) probably had their hands on one of the discs at some point in the 1990s. In fact, Jan Brandt, AOL’s former Chief Marketing Officer, dropped a huge knowledge bomb in the Quora thread after we published our original post: “At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it,” she wrote. Wow.

And she followed up today in a new thread with even more interesting information about the program. Specifically, someone asked: What was the Conversion Rate of AOL CDs in the 1990′s? Given how widespread the discs were, you might think AOL wasn’t (or wasn’t able to) monitor the rates so closely. But they were, according to Brandt. “The profitability of each and every disk and promotion effort was tracked and analyzed. We conducted approximately 2000 different tests each year and used these results to develop future programs. Despite the label ‘carpet bombing,’ there was actually a very high level of marketing sophistication and almost all decisions were data and results driven,” she writes.

Earlier this years Linkedin Labs, which showcases projects created by LinkedIn employees, launched a feature that lets you quickly convert your profile on the professional social networking site into a more traditional resume. It’s quite slick, with a handful of templates to choose from and buttons to convert it to PDF for easy printing (or to share it on Twitter and Facebook).

Now SnapPages, a website builder that we’ve covered before, has launched a new feature that does something similar, but with a bit more flexibility.

Over the weekend, there was a ton of talk about 2011 being the year in which Android “explodes” onto the market. You could argue that 2010 was already that year, but plenty of numbers indicate that 2011 will be much bigger for the platform. But despite Android as a whole already outselling the iPhone, there’s little debate that amongst developers, iOS is still the platform you develop for first. But this could change as well in 2011, at least according to one developer. And it’s significant because he’s been an iPhone-first guy up until now.

Akshay Kothari is the co-founder of Alphonso Labs, the development house behind the popular Pulse news reader app. Pulse started as an iPad app first, then expanded to the iPhone, then came to Android. Kothari credits both the support they’ve received from Apple and the press surrounding the iPad as the reason why they’ve been so iOS-centric up until now. But, “our thinking about the Android platform has changed significantly over the last couple weeks,” he writes to us.

Only four more days of 2010; four more days till we get to 2011. So what to expect in the new year? What do we most hope for and fear about 2011?

For TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld, 2011 might be the year that touch becomes central to the computing experience. It may also be the year when both mobile and social – John Doerr’s third wave – grows up to finally become the dominant sector of the tech industry.

Could 2011 be 2000 all over again? Could we see a collapse of all the optimism now surrounding mobile and social? Were Fred Wilson’s warnings about tech’s current irrational exuberance correct? Not according to Schonfeld who, while acknowledging that there are too many me-too companies, believes that the established players driving the current boom – Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter – are for real.

Is Schonfeld right? Should we be partying like it’s 1999? Or could 2011, like 2000, be remembered as the year when the music died?

Video ahead.

Addicted to Quora? Wish there were a way to search the Q&A site directly from your browser as well as receive notifications about your notifications while surfing the web? Well, this awesome Google Chrome extension created by Andrew Brown is just what your browser ordered.

Now you can be one click away from a Quora fix everywhere you go online (Brown plans on eventually showing you full notifications while you browse). Die hard fans can grab the repo now from Github or download the extension here if you’re already in Chrome.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions about private stock markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. The SEC has sent “information requests to several participants in the buying and selling of stock” a number of companies, reports the New York Times (although private market SecondMarket says they have received no request from the SEC).

Over the past year, trading in shares of still-private companies such as Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn has skyrocketed, allowing employees and early investors to sell their shares even without an IPO. About $400 million worth of shares will pass hands this year on SecondMarket, which is the largest of the private exchanges, up from about $100 million in 2009. The lack of liquidity because of the general postponement of IPOs among many Internet startups is fueling this growth. Only qualified institutions and high net-worth individual investors are allowed to participate in these markets, but as more and more shares trade hands the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule could be triggered which would require the companies to report audited financial results just like a publicly-traded company.

Investors are buying shares on these markets with little to no knowledge of the actual financial results of the underlying companies. There are no disclosure requirements because these markets take advantage of employees or early shareholders who want to unload their shares to the highest bidder. Investors see these markets as a chance to get in on hot, pre-IPO, Internet startups.

During the holiday season, there’s a newsroom tradition to look back at the year’s funny and memorable videos. At TechCrunchTV, we don’t want to disappoint. TechCrunchTV launched this June and since then, we’ve produced around 1,000 videos. We’ve asked tough questions to CEO’s, entrepreneurs, VC’s, and angels. We brought you exclusive interviews with new start-ups and top tech companies. We provided live coverage of Disrupt. And, as you can see in this video, we’ve had our share of funnier moments.

Highlights include a backstage moment with our new AOL boss; Jason Kincaid and MG Siegler turn into their favorite smartphones; John Biggs vs Four Loko; Michael Arrington as a robot; and two famous words from Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz.

We recently wrote about thingd, the ambitious startup that wants to build a “database of every thing in the world.” The startup, which has raised funding from a group of impressive investors, recently rolled out Fancy, a social shopping/blogging platform to list products.

The idea behind Fancy is fairly simple. Via a bookmarklet, you can flag and import pictures of pretty much anything from other websites into your Fancy profile. You can also download pictures and text into your profile as well. Or you can snap a photo of a favorite product from Fancy’s iPhone app. You can tag photos (i.e. shoes, furniture) to make them searchable on the site.

Union Square Ventures is raising $200 million for a new fund called the Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund LP. According to an SEC filing, the VC firm already raised $135 million for the fund from 19 investors. The last time Union Square raised money was for its $156 million Union Square Ventures 2008 LP fund.

Union Square Ventures is the leading early stage VC firm in New York City led by Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and Albert Wenger. Its portfolio includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, Tumblr, Boxee, Disqus, Etsy, Clickable, and Indeed.

Phone management system Ifbyphone has raised $8 million in Series B funding from the company’s CEO Irv Shapiro, Apex Venture Partners, Origin Ventures, Spring Mill Ventures, i2A Fund and Second Century Ventures (the National Association of Realtors’ investment fund). This brings the Chicago-based company’s total funding to $16 million.

Ifbyphone’s Web-based management applications allow businesses to track, route, and automate phone calls to. Users can use the company’s software to manage call flow, set up virtual call centers, measure advertising, and to automate manual clerical tasks.

It looks like Sears wants to get in the online movie market. The retail company, which also owns Kmart, has just announced that it is launching a Netflix-like movie download service, called Alphaline Entertainment.

Powered by Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow platform (Rovi just bought Sonic Solutions for $720 million), Alphaline allows Sears and Kmart customers to download movies and and TV shows online. The company says that it plans to make the platform available to users on a variety of devices, including mobile.

Intel acquired McAfee has just released its forecast for the top targets for cyber criminals in 2011, and a number of popular platforms have made the list. The antivirus and security software company’s labs group, McAfee Labs, says that Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, are all expected to be targets in the New Year.

McAfee Labs says that URL-shortening services, which create more than 3,000 URLs per minute, will be a significant target for cyber criminals in 2011. Because social media sites are already riddles with cyber criminals, these links are going to be used for spam, scamming and other malicious purposes, says the company. Interestingly, McAfee recently launched its own URL shortener, McAf.ee

There’s no doubt in my mind that 2011 will be a big year for location and context-aware applications, and thus also for the companies that enable developers and publishers to build or enhance software that takes advantages of information on users’ whereabouts, such as SimpleGeo and Twitter (which acquired GeoAPI maker Mixer Labs about a year ago).

Enter Zumigo, a company that offers a suite of fully hosted applications and services that feature advanced mobile messaging and location-based services. The startup hasn’t made any noise to date, but an SEC filing reveals that they’ve just raised $420,000 in funding.

Dashwire, which offers a mobile services platform for carriers, handset manufacturers and retailers, has raised $1 million in debt financing, according to this SEC filing.

Dashwire’s Dashworks platform (PDF) is a “mobile-plus-web app” solution that helps people setup their phones, migrate from one device to another, backup everything on the phone, keep it in sync online and share photos and videos with others through social networking services.

We knew Zynga’s Facebook game CityVille was a hit if the company ever had one (and it’s had several already) but the growth that it is displaying is simply mind-blowing.

Last week, the Sim City-esque game logged about 61.7 million monthly active users, effectively eclipsing its other hit game, FarmVille. Today, CityVille is at close to 72.5 million monthly active users, which means that it has already outgrown FarmVille (which boasts roughly 57,4 million monthly active users) by more than 25 percent.

Inspired by a tweet from First Round Capital VC Charlie O’Donnell (“Can someone hack a Foursquare app that cc’s my checkin photos to Flickr?”), developer Benny Wong has created Flicksquare, an app that takes advantage of Foursquare’s recent enabling of photo check-in features, allowing you to also send your Foursquare photos to Flickr.

While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr and Facebook export capability a couple of weeks ago, Wong has beat it to the punch.

Earlier this week, some folks over on the XDA developers forum got their hands on a leaked test build of a revamped Android music player. This evening the footage was spotted by Engadget, and now the word is spreading like wildfire: Android is going to get a default music player that isn’t totally mediocre.

Alright, maybe I’m being a little harsh — the music player that ships with the stock build of Android can play music just fine. But it’s also underwhelming, especially when compared to the iPhone’s much slicker music application. It’s drab and there’s nothing like Apple’s Cover Flow — but all that’s changing.

Continuing today’s theme of scouring Quora for interesting nuggets of information, a Q&A about Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile browser is of some interest. In response to the question: Will Firefox Mobile ever be released for iOS devices?, Mobile Firefox developer, Matt Brubeck, this morning gave his answer.

First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices,” Brubeck wrote. Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains.

Let’s say you want to find that perfect quirky little black dress for New Year’s? Like a mashup of Etsy, Flickr color search, and Google Instant, Glancely lets you search Etsy visually, sorting instant results by color and by price so you can scan through multiple green knit caps or purple socks or whatever handmade items your heart desires. Hold your mouse over an item to get a closer look and click on an item to go straight to its Etsy profile.