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According to reports published on Tuesday, Groupon‘s President and Chief Operating Officer Rob Solomon is stepping down.

Despite his departure, Solomon “will remain a friend and advisor to the company,’’ according to spokeswoman Julie Mossler. After working with the daily-deals website for about a year of lightning-fast growth, Solomon is returning to what CEO Andrew Mason called “God’s country in Woodside, California.” Before Groupon, Solomon served as a partner at Technology Crossover Ventures and held leadership roles at Yahoo! Inc. and a few startups.

“Rob has added enormous value to Groupon and we’ll miss having him around,” Mason said in an email. “He’ll remain a friend and adviser to the company.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Solomon said he is “absolutely not” leaving because of a problem at Groupon and has not disclosed the actual cause for his move. While the online coupon site has yet to find a replacement for , it is reportedly “talking to lots of world-class COO types.”

Solomon’s decision comes at the same time as Groupon’s recent push towards hundreds of new cities. While it’s doubled users in the last three months, Groupon also “has held talks with banks about an IPO,” according to sources at Business Week. “The share sale, which would value the company at as much as $25 billion, may happen this year, the people said.”

Eric Lefkofsky, who both co-founded investment firm Lightbank and serves as chairman of Groupon’s board of directors, declined to comment on any plans for a Groupon IPO. He said that for his venture capital firm, “we would love to be affiliated with [Rob Solomon] if we can.”

Technology services firm PC Connection Inc. recently acquired Chicago-based ValCom Technology of Illinois, provider of tech services to medium-to-large corporations, for a total of $11.6 million (subject to confirmation of stockholders’ equity at closing).

PC Connection, which sells technology products and services to clients that include businesses, consumers and state and federal governments, paid the shareholders of ValCom $8.6 million at closing.  They will pay up to $3 million more based on performance over the next 18 months.

“We are very pleased to have ValCom Technology join the PC Connection family of companies,” said Patricia Gallup, chairman and chief executive of PC Connection. “We are expanding our managed services offerings through this acquisition, and we look forward to leveraging the resources of this highly skilled organization over our existing customer base.”

In business for 28 years and with over 200 employees, technology consulting company ValCom Technology generated about $40 million in revenue last year. Due to its new acquisition by PC Connection, it will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Merrimack, New Hampshire-based technology company, while continuing operations in its Itasca, Illinois-facility.

ValCom will still do business under the ValCom, ValCom Technology, and ValCom Technology Management Solutions trade names.

Before making the purchase, PC Connection believed acquiring the Chicago-based tech consultant would serve to directly boost the company’s earnings, and that supposition is proving to be correct already. According to Business Week, “PC Connection shares gained 5 cents to close at $7.93. In after-hours trading, following the announcement of the acquisition, the stock rose another 2 cents.”

For more information about PC Connection, visit PCConnection.com.

Edited by Meagan Lopez

Here in the Midwest, there’s a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas and earn the funding to put those ideas into action: through Funded by Night, a competition that will be held at the third annual FutureMidwest Conference in April. The startup with the best pitch will walk away with a hefty chunk of funding to pursue their dreams: a convertible note of $100,000.

Funded by Night comes from Jeff Epstein, founder and CEO of zferral; Jordan Wolfe of uwemp.com, and Raji Bedi of DoingTonight.com. Epstein originally announced it during a midVentures’ interview, stating it was a bit inspired by midVenturesLAUNCH.

According to the nonprofit startup showcase’s website, competition will be fierce: “There isn’t enough time for your 40-slide pitch decks,” it advises. “Have a working demo, and bring your A-game. Oh yeah, prepare to schedule a few meetings with the investors in attendance too.”

The $100,000 convertible note comes from two of the newest venture capital firms in Southeast Michigan: Ludlow Ventures LLC of Southfield and Detroit Venture Partners LLC, the new firm from Dan Gilbert, Josh Linker, and Brian Hermelin.

“A company will make its pitch and walk out three hours later with a check, which is cool,” said Jonathon Triest, managing partner of Ludlow Ventures. “We hope to make it an annual event.”

To apply to make a presentation, startups should head over to FundedbyNight.com. There is no fee, although applicants have to cover their own travel expenses to FutureMidwest, held April 28-29 at Detroit’s Eastern Market. Of all the applicants, the top 25 startups will get the chance to make their pitches Thursday afternoon in person at the conference, with a winner named the same night.

About 700 people attended FutureMidwest last year, and nearly 1,000 are expected next month. The terms of the convertible note from Funded by Night are posted on its website.

Last week, Jon Pasky and I traveled to Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest (SXSW). SXSW Interactive can basically be described as 20,000 attendees across digital media, tech startups, web development, and tech companies all converging around over 300 panels, workshops, events, and parties. Unlike the upcomingTechWeek, SXSW organizes most of the content (speakers, panels, and workshops) itself making it one of the largest digital conferences in the world.

People, Speakers, Topics: Jon and I tried to carefully balance the educational components of SXSW with healthy networking: meeting up with founders of SitterCity, TechCocktail, Hipmunk, SocialDevCamp, Plancast, Twilio; too many that I’ve lost count. Between randomly bumping into fellow Chicago and San Francisco startups, I made a note to attend the events on “Decentralized Identity” and “Government Data as Platform” while Jon attended the O’Reilly IGNITE events and the Lean Startup Meetups.

Lessons for midVentures: As conference organizers, SXSW taught us some valuable lessons in A) creating conference content focused on diverse audiences and interests in a single shared space; B) Enabling an ecosystem of independent 3rd party events, workshops, and parties alongside your own conference; and C) utilizing mass real-time social media via Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Foursquare, Plancast, new group texting services like Beluga and GroupMe…and any new social technology that just launched in 2011. Social media is not just how you acquire customers, it’s the relationship you sustain with your customer during the lifecycle of your involvement.

Tips from SXSW: This was our first SXSW, but here are some tips we picked up along the way:

• Power-Networker. Do not default to your existing social group. SXSW is an opportunity to find the “yous” from other cities. Find some interesting startups attending SXSW on Twitter and go out of your way to find the “you” in that startup.
• Randomness. Attend an event that sounds completely foreign to you. Data people tend to go to data events; digital agency people tend to go to workshops in social media. SXSW is an opportunity to sample new topics and communities in tech.
• Promote. Promote your brand whenever possible. Most of the year, it is considered inappropriate to hand out stickers, t-shirts and printed beta invites to your startup brand. Yet at SXSW, every startup is a party promoter for their brand. Make your brand a few decibels louder.

Compliments to TechCocktail, Silicon Prairie News, and InfoChimps for organizing some of the best events we attended.

Chicago-based mobile coupon startup SampleSaint, which allows coupons to be scanned through a checkout system on any mobile device, will be relocating to Cincinnati this spring, taking advantage of a $250,000 cash infusion from Southwest Ohio tech investor CincyTech.

SampleSaint founder and CEO Lawrence Griffith said said he’s looking forward to the move and the chance to join Cincinnati’s thriving consumer marketing industry.

“With companies such as Procter, Kroger, Macy’s and Dunnhumby, it is a hub of expertise about the consumer mindset,” he said. “Samplesaint looks forward to finding its place in that ecosystem.”

With SampleSaint’s technology, consumers benefit from being able to download online coupons directly to their smartphones, which can then be scanned at store checkout; likewise, retailers benefit from SampleSaint’s database that allows customer identification, redemption, and expiration date of coupons to be immediately determined. According to Marc Shaw, director of integrated marketing at Unilever, which was one of the first companies to test SampleSaint’s technology, integrating coupons with mobile technology only makes sense. “The cellphone is the thing that when you leave it behind at home, you go back and get it,” he said. “It’s the organizer of our lives.”

Through CincyTech’s $250,000 investment in this concept, the startup expects to continue growing, with plans to add 10 new employees this year.

“We really liked Lawrence’s experience with large-company business development roles and with agencies,” CincyTech President Bob Coy said. “His background is key to showing consumer products companies the value of his technology.”

Drawing SampleSaint to Cincinnati marks the second time a CincyTech investment has moved a Chicago tech company out to the Buckeye State. The first being $250,000 that pulled TurboBOTZ, creators of a digital retailing marketplace for buying/selling used video games, away from the Windy City.

For more information on SampleSaint, visit SampleSaint.com.