Apple has enough cash on hand to buy every man, woman and child in the U.S., UK, and Germany a $300 iPod Touch, and have a little left over for a case or two. Apple has enough cash to buy every person on the planet a $20 lunch. And Apple has enough cash to pay off the national debts of New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Cuba, Egypt, Vietnam, and Singapore.

“No technology company has ever reported results like this,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said today, speaking about the company’s first quarter results which included record quarterly revenue of $54.5 billion and record quarterly profit of $13.1 billion.

In the three months of the quarter, Apple added $16 billion to its existing cash reserves of $121 billion. $94 billion of the total $137 billion is sitting offshore, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said. It would likely cost Apple billions in tax to repatriate it.

Apple is not the only technology company with bulging bank accounts. Google has well over $50 billion in cash reserves, Microsoft has over $60 billion in cash, and legendary investor Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway has similar numbers in its corporate piggy bank.

Apple, which up until recently had never paid dividends, will be issuing another dividend in February — on Valentine’s Day, the 14th. The company will be paying out $2.65 per share.

Apple’s results, which missed investors’ expectations in some of the key metrics such as iPhone sales, resulted in the stock dropping 10 percent in after-hours trading, signaling investors’ concerns with the company. But Apple’s cash hoard has to be a major positive for any investor, since it provides runway for the company to operate even it it has a bad quarter or two.

And frankly even — with $137 billion — a bad year or two.

photo credit: Oxfordshire Churches via photopin cc

This guest post was written by Danny Shader, CEO and founder of PayNearMe.

Lee Ault, CEO of the first check guarantee service, TeleCredit (which subsequently morphed into FiS Global), once described the moment his business exploded in the early 1970’s. In this era before ATMs, and when BankAmericard –-not yet renamed “Visa”  -– was approaching critical mass, retailers avoided accepting personal checks because they were considered too risky. Ault broke his pick trying to sell TeleCredit as a loss reduction service to the few retailers that accepted them.

The breakthrough came when he brought the “no checks accepted” signs he gathered from auto dealers in LA to meetings with automakers in Detroit. He opened the meetings by dumping the pile of signs on the table, and stated: “This is how you greet your customers today –- the first thing they hear from you is ‘no!’”

One company immediately realized that they could dramatically increase their business by making it easier for customers to pay with checks, and the rest, as they say, is history: TeleCredit’s “Welcome Check!” signs soon appeared in store windows everywhere, consumers pulled out their checkbooks, and everyone benefited. All the while, credit card usage continued to grow.

So, here we are, fifty years later, and all eyes are on the great payment innovators of our day: Square, PayPal, Google, Intuit, WePay, Stripe, and many others who are revolutionizing or replacing “plastic.” But what about good ol’ cash?  Is it going away, as a Fortune Magazine cover story recently suggested?  With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Although we don’t often hear consumers trumpet how easy, cool or innovative it is to pull out a dollar bill at the register, there are still perhaps as many as 100 million U.S. consumers who must or prefer to pay with cash. Yet, most online businesses in the U.S. treat them like check-writers in the age of Leisure Suits, before Lee Ault went to Detroit.

Let’s take a look at who uses cash within the US, and why.

Others assume that cash consumers are universally less affluent. This turns out to be false as well. “Cash consumer” and “underbanked” are not synonyms. While it is true that more than 25% of U.S. households are considered un- or under-banked —  a population that has increased by 821,000 since 2009 – there are other giant audiences who simply prefer cash.

The most obvious are the roughly 21.5 million American teens, most of whom prefer to use cash because it’s the only form of tender they have (other than their parents’ plastic, anyway). Other groups consist of those who have maxed out their credit cards, use cash to budget, or simply don’t want their purchase histories to appear on their statements. These millions of people don’t come to mind when many of us conjure up images of cash consumers.

As Henry Blodget points out, Zynga insiders, including chief executive Marc Pincus, cashed out in April, selling 43 million shares for over $516 million in a secondary stock offering. Pincus himself raked in about $200 million of that total, according to Blodget’s report. All of the proceeds went to the stock holders, not the company.

[ update July 27: five law firms are now investigating Zynga for possible insider trading ]

Yesterday, results for the past three months were announced: earnings of precisely one skinny American penny for each of Zynga’s 736 million shares, driving Zynga’s stock price sharply downward.

Besides Pincus, other Zynga employees who cashed out include Zynga’s chief operating officer John Schappert and chief financial officer David Wehner. Investors who took the opportunity to sell include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Google, and four venture capital firms including Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Each of them sold over 300,000 shares at an average price of $12 per share.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Zynga CEO Marc Pincus

That netted all of these insiders a nice chunk more than anyone who sold at today’s price: just over $3.

There’s no indication of insider trading or improper behavior. Zynga blamed the blown quarter on a number of things that happened quickly: delay of The Ville game, Facebook changes that hurt engagement with older games, and Draw Something’s spectacular implosion.

But the optics look bad. And they look double plus ungood if you happen to be a Zynga investor with stock that has shed 80 percent of its value in a single year, coming down from a high of over $16 per share.

Good thing that all of the sellers, including Marc Pincus, only sold “a fraction of their holdings,” according to Blodget, so all of them remain well-vested in the company’s future.

Otherwise what just looks bad right now might actually be bad.

Image credit: Pakhnyushcha/ShutterStock

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[Update: We've just heard from a close source close to the investor syndicate on the pending round, and he said it's not true the founders are getting a majority of the round. He would not specify details.]

Cloud storage service Dropbox could be using the “vast majority” of the funds raised in a new $200-$300 million round to provide liquidity  to the company’s founders, according to a source familiar with the funding.

That would mean the founders would be personally pocketing a huge pile of cash, well before any public offering provided liquidity to other investors or to employees.

This kind of deal, in which founders get cash in exchange for their stock, is increasingly common, especially in late-stage investment rounds. Investors justify the move as a way to keep them managing aggressively, by removing some of their personal risk.

However, it’s a trend that has grown conspicuously in recent years, after once being extremely rare. You could argue that giving founders cash early on removes the fire in the founder’s belly. Content with cash, and more eager to spend it on homes and on a more balanced life-style, they may not want to keep driving the company as aggressively.

The dollar amounts behind recent founder liquidity rounds are becoming uncommonly high. For example, in January 2011, Groupon raised $950 million; a round in which existing shareholders received $344 million in cash. The regulatory filing does not provide details on who gets how much. Then, in June 2011, Groupon filed to go public with a massive offering of $750 million. Groupon shareholders were given a chance to sell up to 15% of their holdings via this offering. That could have been a peace offering from management for shareholders upset by Groupon’s denial of Google’s earlier $6 billion buyout offer.

Dropbox doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation, according to its internal public relations team. We’ve reached out for comment from the company’s investors, and are waiting to hear back.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (pictured) and has received $7.1 million total funding from Y Combinator, Accel Partners, Sequoia and others. (Update: That includes a seed round of $1.2 million in convertible debt from Sequoia and Amidzad Partners, which has also invested in VentureBeat.)

TechCrunch broke the news about the funding, and also reported that the company has collected term sheets from VCs that made bids in an investment auction. One of those offers could make Dropbox’s valuation $10 billion post-money. Yes, billion. Dropbox was previously valued at just $7 million. And yes, if the valuation crept that high, and interest was that competitive, it’s no doubt that investors offered sweet terms to the founders in order to get into the deal.

Founders can achieve liquidity through a sale or merger, IPO or by selling shares on the secondary market to an investor. This last scenario is typically done for working capital purposes (i.e. the company was bootstrapped and the founder has taken on personal debt) and there isn’t typically an economic benefit or cost to the company.

The problem with founder liquidity is it doesn’t help a company grow. It is traditionally used in mature, profitable companies when it is the only way for a new investor to gain an ownership stake. A move like this may be especially hard for employees and other management shareholders to swallow during bad economic periods. It isn’t something to be taken lightly.

Additional contributions from Matt Marshall.

Directed at consumers who don’t have access to credit cards, PayNearMe lets users pay cash for online goods and services. PayNearMe’s new mobile option lets you make online purchases simply by providing your phone number to an e-retailer.

After submitting your phone number, you just need to grab a PayNearMe card from a 7-Eleven store, and reply to a text message sent by the service with the card’s unique identification number. Then you just hand the card to a 7-Eleven cashier and pay for the amount owed with cash.

The company says it will be using its funding to add new retailer payment locations as well as new services. PayNearMe also announced that Mark Britto, CEO of mobile payment company Boku, will join its board of directors.

The company’s Kwedit Promise service is also still running. It allows consumers to receive digital goods with a promise to pay for them later with cash at 7 Eleven stores, by mailing cash, or by asking friends or relatives to pay for them.

Just as it was when we initially covered Kwedit, paying cash for virtual services still seems like a compelling choice for many consumers. The company says that over 50 percent of adults in the U.S. would rather pay for purchases using cash, and over a quarter of households don’t have access to credit cards or bank accounts (which gives you access to debit cards).

PayNearMe is based in Mountain View, Calif. The funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, and saw participation from new investor August Capital and current investors True Ventures and Maveron. The company previously raised $6.3 million in funding.