After some timing drama, daily deal site Groupon finally has begun trading on the NASDAQ this morning, in the most hotly anticipated and largest Internet company IPO since Google. The company — which trades under the ticker $GRPN — priced its shares at $20 last night, but began trading at $28, an increase of 40%.

Like LinkedIn, Groupon is only floating a small amount of shares,  35 million – about 5.5% of its 637.3 million shares outstanding. The first trade would pin its market cap at 17.8 billion, with a 980 million raise.

Following in the footsteps of GroupMe, another startup born at a Disrupt Hackathon is moving on to becoming areal company. Last May, Docracy was one of our Hackathon winners, and now it’s raised a $650,000 seed round led by First Round Capital. Vaizra Investments, Rick Webb and Quotidian Ventures also participated.

When Docracy launches publicly, it will be a repository for legal and business documents such as NDAs and term sheets. Anyone will be able to upload a document, which will be translated into native HTML5. The documents can be redlined, shared, and even signed. The more a document is signed, the more social proof it gathers that it is a well-accepted document.

Snapjoy, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, wants to fix that: they’re offering to keep your photos backed up and organized automatically. And they’re taking on the likes of Flickr, iPhoto, and Picasa as they hope to become your go-to app for photo management.

The web-based service, which launches today to the public, looks nice — you can try a live demo right here. After uploading some photos (a process which Snapjoy says is significantly faster than some competitors) the app categorizes your photos for you, using metadata to try to intelligently place the correct photos in each album.

Now another victim has come forward.

Troy Dayton first wrote about how his Oakland home was rented by a meth addict with a stolen identity in a comment to one of our posts about the company. I contacted Troy and we spoke by phone today about what happened. His situation is very similar to EJ’s.

Here’s Troy’s original comment:

Something very similar happened to me about 2 months ago.

In addition to valuables stolen, the thieves/addicts did thousands of dollars of bizarre damage to my rented home and left it littered with meth pipes. They were identity thieves, too and all my personal information was strewn about. Further investigation of my own led me to evidence that the people were not just thieves but were also dangerous. I too, feared for my own safety and would not stay at my house for some time.

I had a similar problem with haphazard communication from people at AirBnB. I gave them multiple opportunities to make me a happy customer to which they did but then retracted their offer after their was miscommunication among the team. Sometimes days went by without hearing from anyone, while I was fear-stricken, totally disoriented, and angry. It was almost the most absurd customer service crisis one could ever imagine. But I am one squeaky wheel, and we eventually found an agreeable solution that I was generally pleased with.

I have since both rented my place out and stayed in others’ homes from airbnb.

Here’s what I learned: if you rent out your home, there is a limit to how much AIrbnb can do to protect you. It’s not their fault, but it is their fault that they up-play how much they protect you and downplay what people should do to protect themselves. At the end of the day you are renting to a stranger. You should check there ID’s and phone numbers to make sure they match. I would ask for a link to a social networking site like linkedin, FB, or couchsurfing if there are not credible testimonials on AirBnb. I would chat with them on the phone prior to agreeing to rent to them. Had I done these things, the people that ruined my house would have never made it in.

Also, go with your gut. My gut said something wasn’t right about the people that rented my place, but I didn’t know how to handle that gut feeling and wasn’t sure how airbnb would have treated me or them had I told them I didn’t want them to stay even after they booked it.

Here’s a way Airb’nb can turn this into another revenue stream: Most rental insurance won’t cover this because you are essentially subletting. If major theft and damage is as rare as Air bnb says it is, which I believe is true, then they should be able to get a great insurance policy tailored just for their customers that they can sell for an additional fee to the renters.

Also, as short-term renting like a hotel becomes more common and other websites move in on Airbnb they are going to need more value to justify their very high fees, perhaps insurance and background checks would be a great addition. Of course, if I was the insurance company, I’d require the owners of the property being rented to double check the ID’s of the people checking in to be sure that the background checks are actually for the people checking in.

At the end of the day, I think AirBnb is well-intentioned but I think they are struggling with such fast growth and the management and communication systems have not scaled as fast as their business. Some PR and customer service nightmares are to be expected. My understanding is that they are hiring as fast as they can…but having been a part of teams of 20 somethings that multiply by orders of magnitude in a few months I can attest to the mayhem that surrounds this process. I hope they make dealing with catastrophic problems like the ones EJ and I experienced a top priority.

By phone today Troy told me about how the woman brought in friends to his home. They went through everything he owned, he said. “There were meth pipes everywhere,” he says, and damage to the bathroom and closet doors caused by, he guesses, a human foot or head, and probably an axe. They stole a computer from him as well as small amounts of cash that he left in the apartment. Any electronic device with a light they took apart (he guesses they were paranoid about being monitored). They unscrewed everything in his refrigerator and mixed things together. They stole his clothes, or shredded them. He found a sweater in the freezer.

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics.

But the researchers say the site is using sneaky techniques to prevent users from opting out of being tracked on popular sites, including the TV streaming site Hulu.com.

The discovery of KISSmetrics tracking techniques comes as federal regulators, browser makers, privacy activists and ad tracking companies are trying to define what tracking actually is. The FTC called on browser makers to add a “Do Not Track” setting that essentially lets users tell websites not to leave them alone — though it doesn’t block tracking on its own. It’s more like a “privacy, please” sign on a hotel door. One of the big questions surrounding Do Not Track is about web analytics software, which sites use to determine what’s popular on their site, how many unique visitors a site has a month, where users are coming from, and what pages they leave from.

An even more grotesque example of this was this week’s Airbnb scandal — the so-called #ransackgate (ugh).

Having been convinced by the company’s mantra of throwing open our doors to the world for monetary reward, a user by the name of “EJ” was shocked when a stranger comprehensively trashed her home. We’ll have to await the outcome of the police investigation to understand what really happened to EJ’s apartment, but what we know for sure is that Airbnb’s immediate, and subsequent, reaction was grotesque in its inhumanity. I’m not talking about the company’s initial apparent unwillingness to pay compensation — I’m talking about the behavior of the (unnamed) co-founder who wrote to EJ and asked her to remove her blog post about the incident, lest it affect the company’s ability to raise millions more dollars. From EJ’s blog…

‘I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases with me, as the investigation was ongoing. He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist” of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”’.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!

The question of whether Airbnb is run by nice guys is irrelevant. For all I know CEO Brian Chesky is a modern day Mother Theresa who had to break off his important work curing kitten cancer to deal with this growing PR nightmare. What’s relevant — and all too obvious — is that good old Brian and his co-founders stand to make millions, if not billions, of dollars from the success of Airbnb. His investors stand to make even more. That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users like EJ become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monitized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.

just.me, a stealth startup playing in the social and mobile spaces, has just raised $600,000 in seed funding from a list of all star investors including Google Ventures, True Ventures, SV Angel, Betaworks, Don Dodge, Patrick Gannon, Michael Parekh, Steve McArthur, and Harris Barton.

LucidChart, a web-based diagramming application, announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, 2M Companies, K9 Ventures, as well as several angel investors. The startup will use its new capital to ramp up hiring efforts and to begin positioning its app as a viable alternative to desktop software.

Demand for private company shares declined in the second quarter versus the first quarter but was up sharply year-over-year, according to a new report released today by SecondMarket. The market for private company stock saw $112 million in transactions last quarter, versus $156 million in the first quarter, or down 39 percent sequentially. On an annual basis, however, it was up 120 percent over the second quarter of 2010, which saw $51 million in transactions. And the $268 million worth of transactions in the first half of 2011, was up 75 percent from the first half of 2010 .

Read It Later, the popular service that lets you bookmark a webpage and access it later from any smartphone, computer, or tablet, has raised a $2.5 million funding round. The round marks the company’s first external funding, and includes investments from Foundation Capital (which led the round), Baseline Ventures, Google Ventures, Founder Collective, and several angel investors.