The catch is that regulations govern how much the exchange can return to investors to make up for technological malfunctions—such claims are limited to $3 million a month, though Nasdaq has expressed desire to distribute an additional $10.7 million, or the amount the exchange earned on shares it unexpectedly held on Facebook's opening day.

Even at upwards of $14 million, Nasdaq could only begin to pay back losses suffered by Citigroup, UBS, Citadel and Knight Capital—the four largest market makers for Facebook stock who are believed to have lost up to $115 million on the trading delays. Total claims could range from $150 to $200 million, Reuters says, and Nasdaq appears to be playing hardball:

The exchange has done little to conciliate market making clients - a number of which lost tens of millions of dollars each due to the trading problems. There has been no outright apology.

Facebook shares, meanwhile, have continued to face-plant, falling today even as the S&P 500 climbed, coming to rest at $25.87, or down 32 percent from the offering price.

But investors eagerly snapped up shares of "content farm" king Demand Media Wednesday. Then on Thursday LinkedIn, the smaller, more professional social network, made its IPO intentions official. 

One troubling sign, however, from these early offerings, is the lies the securities filings have revealed. The CEOs at both Demand Media and LinkedIn had proudly proclaimed to tech journalists the profits their companies had achieved. But the S-1 filings they had to make in order to IPO tell a very different tale. 

In August of 2009, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told Business Insider that the company was "still profitable" and that ad sales were up 50% year over year. But in its IPO filings yesterday, LinkedIn revealed it actually lost $3.4 million in 2009.

Pre-IPO, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt was on record multiple times saying his company had always been profitable. The IPO filings revealed that in fact Demand Media's losses were mounting, climbing from $14 million in 2008 to $22 million in 2009. 

"I think that they (LinkedIn certainly) would argue that they ARE and have been profitable but for the heavy investment in infrastructure that they are making to build the even more incredible company that they hope they will be one day," says Lawrence Lenihan, CEO of local VC First Mark Capital. "Unfortunately, that is not how the public markets work. This is the critical problem of American business –how can you invest for future gains without the present pains of the market valuing you less. This myopia will be our downfall unless we can create another structure that embraces that investment with trust and accountability of management for delivering those returns in the future."

It's a powerful reminder to journalists that a CEO's claim of profitability isn't worth much without the data to back it up. And for all the talk of how this tech bubble is different from the dot-com version, the first two offerings of 2011 show hot web properties with shaky financials are not a thing of the past. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

There are some impressive numbers in here, demonstrating again why the current boom in tech is a different animal than the dot-com bubble of a decade ago. 

LinkedIn had $161 million in revenues for the nine months ending Sept. 30, double what they made in the same period the year before. 

The site also came close to doubling it's user base, growing from 55 million to 90 million. Not bad, but also nowhere near the torrid pace of growth demonstrated by Facebook. 

Last but not least, the company reported a profit of $1.85 million, a far cry from the $3.4 million in losses it reported a year earlier. 

Among the risk factors the company noted were the fact that many of it registered users aren't very active on the site and a small fraction of its users generate the majority of its page views. 

Hmmm, sounds like the typical comment troll ratio to us, and Gawker seems to be doing just fine. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

The company is worth more than $2 billion, with 1,000 full-time employees and more than 90 million members. LinkedIn just made it possible for advertisers to target customers by job title, company name and other factors as it focuses on revenue.

LinkedIn was founded in 2002 and launched in 2003 as a social network for professionals, a veneer it maintains due to the de-emphasis on photos, walls, quizzes, FarmVille and other juvenalia found on the web's social networks. As the joke goes, "Facebook: I peed! Foursquare: I'm peeing here. LinkedIn: I pee well." Demand Media would be "How to pee," of course.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

A Journal source on the delay:

"Tony needs to get his feet underneath him and understand the business and the voice of the company," another person familiar with the matter said. "The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go."

To judge from one day's trading in today's two public offerings, there's hefty demand for new public companies. Maybe this has something to do with the putative death of the IPO.

Former parent eBay jettisoned Skype in fall of 2009 to a group of investors headed by Silver Lake Partners.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

But with companies like Facebook and Zynga generating real revenue and raising monster capital on the private market, an IPO looks less attractive. 

You see, Zuckerberg, nice Jewish boy though he may be, would prefer to skip all the hard stuff, like Torah study, or pesky SEC disclosures.

He justs invites Uncle Goldman and Cousin Sachs over, they cut a check, and he teaches them how to work these farkakte computers. 

Because IPOs, like Bar Mitzvah parties, are really all about the schwag, the brisk trade in Facebook shares on the secondary market has already ensured that all those overworked engineers go home with a little something extra from the party. 

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper

Goldman was injecting cash into Facebook on favorable terms in order to win itself the inside track to manage the IPO, many reasoned. 

But NYU professor Scott Galloway has an intruiging theory. He says we may be seeing the emergence of a new, semiprivate IPO. 

In this model, a small group of blue-chip investors get a piece of Facebook. Shares become more liquid, enabling employees to cash out, but the company avoids the hassle of public disclosure, analyst calls and quarterly benchmarks. 

Of course, the SEC is looking into the trade of Facebook shares, both through Goldman's special vehicle and on exchanges like SecondMarket, to see if it has reached the threshold of 499 shareholders, and must begin to make its finances public. 

In the meantime, however, the real loser, says Galloway, is Wall Street. "I think going public is vastly overrated and I think this next generation of entrepreneurs has realized that," says Galloway. ""I think that the SEC, the NYSE, the Nasdaq and the whole industrial complex around taking companies public is the loser."

There's no small irony here, of course, that Mark Zuckerberg, who preaches the virtues of total transparency, is doing everything he can to avoid going public. 

H/T Dan Primack

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper

There were just 45 offerings of tech companies in 2010 and only 16 in 2009, Evelyn M. Rusli writes at Dealbook in a post about the outlook for I.P.O.'s in 2011. By contrast, hundreds of I.P.O.'s a year were coming out of Silicon Valley at the peak of the '90s tech bubble.

"I.P.O. is still the golden ticket. Real entrepreneurs want to I.P.O," writes Bernard Lunn in a bullish post on tech I.P.O.'s at ReadWriteWeb.

Dealbook also reported today that the group coupon site Groupon is preparing for an I.P.O. at the end of 2011. That's after it raises $950 million to expand into cities around the world. New York's Gilt Groupe is another company with I.P.O. ambitions--at least, there has been buzz about it. All Things D reported that Gilt expects to hit revenues of $400 million a year and probably will go public, but it continues to raise money.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

This would be Groupon's seventh round or Series G financing. The company has raised a total of $171 million to date from angel and VC investors, according to Crunchbase--big money for a company with a simple idea.

The company was emboldened by recent acquisition talks with Google, which wanted to buy Groupon for an astonishing $6 billion. Groupon turned a profit in just eight months, resulting in investor hype and doting press coverage.

Groupon's light on technology--it's basically an email listserve and a website--so its biggest expense is its salesforce. The company has been aggressively expanding into new cities in the U.S. and Canada.

Groupon probably wants the money so it can continue expanding at home and abroad, where many Groupon clones have proliferated in the absence of the megastar of group buying.

Ten years ago, such a promising company would have issued stock to raise the cash to afford such adventures. But a few things are different now. The disclosure and accounting requirements for a public company are more stringent since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act enacted in 2002.

And the current easy money climate has made it possible to raise vast sums of private financing and not have to deal with any of the complications associated with taking a company public and keeping a large number of shareholders happy.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries