The online music streaming company stock opened at an impressive $20 per share, shooting up as high as $25 soon after trading began before quickly settling back down below open at $17.42. Pandora’s respectable $20 initial offering was much higher than expected in the months following the company’s announcement that it would begin trading on the stock exchange in February. Prices were initially set a paltry $9 per share, but increased last week to $10 to $12 each. The company priced its initial public offering at $16 per share the day before trading began.

As has been the case with other tech stocks, impressive early gains made by Pandora were quickly followed by decline to levels not far from opening prices. By the time of print, only one day after release, Pandora’s stocks were trading well below opening value at around $14.50 per share.

The release of Pandora stock into the market closely follows professional social marketing website LinkedIn’s initial public offering in May. Like Pandora, LinkedIn enjoyed considerable gains in early trading. Their stocks began with at an initial price of $45 per share before opening at a sky-high $86, closing the first day up 80% and wowing investors. Since then, however, prices have cooled considerably, falling to their current levels around $70 each.

Understanding what these numbers mean for the tech industry as a whole is a little more difficult. Rumblings have been growing pretty loud from technology news agencies and financial reporters alike about the possibility of a new tech bubble. The rapid incline of LinkedIn followed by gradual decline might be pointed to as evidence of such a bubble. Of course, others will simply brush such worries aside, labeling them as usual market fluctuations. Yet inflated valuations from Groupon and Twitter, both of which may be in the tens of billions, suggest that things may already be getting out of control.

What is clear, however, is that stock offerings are not a sure way for online companies to raise their valuation quickly. While larger, more powerful web-based companies have done extremely well in past years through such offerings, these latest releases show that such constant growth can no longer be taken for granted.

These events all ultimately build up to a hotly anticipated public release of Facebook stock… eventually. While the company has been expected to begin selling to the public sometime around April of 2012, when they will be forced to release financial information that makes an IPO more appealing, confusing showings from tech companies like Pandora may cause them to rethink any such plans. Additionally, new legislation may push back Facebook’s deadline to release those financial numbers, easing any pressure to preemptively offer public stock.

As more web companies enter the ring the viability of many tech companies may become more clear. If a bubble has indeed begun to grow, the attitudes of other companies will likely reflect the confidence of Pandora and Groupon in their public trading habits.

Let me introduce several tutorial indexing sources whose purpose is to organize and categorize the best of tutorials available online.

Tutorial Center

This one is indeed a center with pretty broad scale of issues dealt with in the wide selection of collected links to tutorials. It’s no use giving examples of categories since you can hardly think of any application that would be left out (at least of the best known ones). Submitted tutorials are examined to make sure only the high quality ones make it to the list.

Tutorial Vault

Tutorialvault’s focused on graphic and coding tutorials which are hand-picked and split into just several main categories, basically those most often sought after like Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS ones and a few others. Although Adobe apps apparently lead the chart here, the other categories are nicely filled as well. So far over 2300 pieces and counting.

Tech Screencast

This collection of screencasts only deals with issues related to web development in its heavier form and contains videos providing useful hints about different technologies and programming/scripting languages used to propel websites – RoR, ASP, PHP and more. The number of published screencasts is not that high but their quality seems pretty good to me.

Bonus: Inkscaper’s Dreamland

I couldn’t resist adding this one at the end, although this resource is purely aimed at the OS vector graphics editor Inkscape and graphics made in it. I must admit I haven’t used Inkscape much so far but after seeing what these guys can do in it, I knew I had to give it more attention, perhaps as much as GIMP deserves. Should you be a designer or just someone who deals with graphics in their free time, you definitely don’t wanna pass this valuable screencast.

“Using particle-based tools, the Extreme Loading technology generates iterative visuals with the added realism of material based physics. According to the developer, it can be used to design a destructible set — simulations can be run long before the set is built — and the resulting 3D files can be brought into Maya or comparable package for dressing and compositing.”

The second video is a dynamically transparent window that responds to the movements of people passing by. Using a camera, passers-by are tracked, and the data is processed by a system that controls custom-built interactive windows on the facade.

Looks incredible does not it ? Well the look of this flat screen monitor setup is not the only incredible thing, the price is incredible as well: $7,499. The primary monitor has a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 and the five 20.1” flat screens one of 1600×1200. The number of total active pixels from this monitor setup is almost 8 million ! It seems that the only input is a dual link dvi-d connection in the central flat screen monitor.

If you would have the money for flat screen monitors like this would you purchase it or would you invest the money elsewhere ?