debbiegage

Court documents filed with Canopy's Chapter 7 bankruptcy today show that the company owes nearly $26 million -- most of it to holders of Health Savings Accounts that were managed by Canopy or one of its partners. The difference between what Canopy thought was in the accounts and what remained there as of November 30 is nearly $20 million. Thousands of accounts are affected -- the documents show that 13,697 accounts, with a balance of more than $17 million, were held by Coventry Health Care. Coventry is reimbursing its account holders and has filed a claim to get the money back from Canopy. Other account holders include Dewitt Stern, FlexRight, ISU Financial Services, Shawnee Administrative Services, Veritas Health Systems Administrators and Canopy itself, through its Wellfund program. Account holders may have a tough time getting their money back, though,

The beleaguered startup has asked a federal judge to convert its petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy into a Chapter 7, which means it will shut down. A hearing is scheduled tomorrow on this and several other issues in Chicago. Under Chapter 7, all disputes over Canopy's finances will be handled by an independent trustee who's been appointed by the court. That means all of Canopy's creditors -- including those people who deposited money in a Canopy Health Savings Account and expected to use it to pay their medical bills -- will now have "one throat to choke," said a source close to the company. Canopy's HSA account holders have been left hanging for three weeks.

Americans have a more negative view of the aughts -- the years from 2000-2009 -- than they do of any other decade in the last 50 years, according to a survey released this month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Negative impressions outweigh good ones by nearly two-to-one (50% to 27%) and cut across all age groups. The negative thoughts seem to be driven mostly by the 9-11 attacks, which won a majority of votes for defining event of the decade, followed (distantly) by the election of President Barack Obama, last year's financial crisis, the election of former President George Bush, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. Despite the gloom, though, many people's opinions of the social changes that have occurred this last decade are positive, and most of those changes are driven by technology. So venture capitalists and entrepreneurs can take a bow. Check out PEW's list after the jump --

SCVNGR's new funding -- a $4 million round led by Google Ventures with participation from Highland Capital, SCVNGR's first backer -- was nailed down by mid-October, but Google and Highland wanted to wait until January 12 to announce it "so they could control how the information gets disseminated," according to SCVNGR founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch. Those plans were blown when Priebatsch filed the company's Form D to the SEC on December 24, Christmas Eve, when he thought no one would be working. "I figured no one would notice," he said. He claims to have saved some new information for a press release, though -- details on the company's ambitious plans for expansion. Priebatsch, now 21, dropped out of Princeton to found SCVNGR -- his third company -- about 18 months ago.

SecondMarket started dealing in private company shares on April 23, and after a slow start -- 15 or 20 transactions in the first four months, with around $20 million in securities changing hands -- saw business take off in the last part of the year. Since September over $100 million in shares have been traded, according to managing director Adam Oliveri, and $320 million worth of shares are now listed for sale. Some of these shares are from top private companies --not companies whose shares investors may want to get rid of -- and they're being traded by top venture firms that traditionally invest in later stage startups.

The biggest hoarders of all are technology and healthcare companies -- some of the very companies that VCs and entrepreneurs hope will acquire their startups. Standard & Poor's analyst Howard Silverblatt has been digging into the S&P 500 and found that as of September 30, companies had $820 billion of cash in their pockets -- 80 weeks of net income, a record. Silverblatt excluded financial companies and utilities from his analysis because they're regulated, which means they couldn't pay for something in cash today. But the others have been steadily increasing their cash piles since 2008, and over a third of the cash -- 36% -- is held by technology companies.

Harvard Business Review is the latest organization to weigh in on this question -- this week they ranked the leaders of the top 100 performing companies and found that only one of them, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who's now a candidate for governor of California, is female. Of the top 2,000 CEOs, 29 were women -- about 1.5%. My daughter, who's in another male-dominated profession, science, says there are probably templates for articles like this -- women don't get enough flexibility for family time, etc. But Harvard offered some interesting specific reasons for why women struggle to make it to the top of companies.

The Federal Trade Commission has been talking to Google about AdMob for several weeks and has issued a formal second request for information, Google said today. Given Google's dominance in search and the Obama administration's heightened scrutiny of tech mergers, the FTC's interest in AdMob is not a surprise. Google had to wait nearly a year before federal regulators last year allowed it to acquire DoubleClick, which boosted Google's ability to offer display ads. Also last year, Google abandoned its proposal to share search advertising revenue with Yahoo by running ads against Yahoo search queries after Microsoft and others complained and the Justice Department intervened.

A class action lawsuit has been filed in federal court in East St. Louis against Amcore Financial, a bank that allegedly held $17 million in Health Savings Accounts that were managed by Canopy Financial's software. The suit was filed on December 15, four days after peHUB reported that Canopy had sent a letter to account holders saying it had reason to believe that former executives were skimming money from the accounts. The accounts -- which are now frozen because of a dispute over how much should be in them -- are a way for employers to let their employees set aside money for medical bills and get a tax break for doing so. However, plaintiff Susan Patton claims that "several millions of dollars" of the money has been misappropriated and that she and the other account holders -- over 1,000 people -- have no access to what's left. (UPDATE: In a statement, Amcore says it is "not a custodian of any health savings accounts, and accordingly we believe claimant's allegations are without merit. Amcore will vigorously defend itself against this claim.")

Here in the Bay Area, where we don't have winter, it's still possible to drive to work and see sheep grazing in a green field. Check out this video posted last week by John Earnhardt, a senior manager of media relations for Cisco, who captured the sheep chomping away across from Cisco's campus in north San Jose near the intersection of two very busy streets -- Highway 237 and Zanker Road. You can ignore his over-the-top marketing pitch about how sheep are followers and Cisco is an innovator and enjoy the obliviousness of the sheep in the middle of all that traffic and the glimpse of green, in December, less than a week before Christmas.