The anecdote appears in a new profile of Dropbox in the latest issue of Forbes, which also disclosed that the service is on track to hit $240 million in sales this year, even though the vast majority of its users pay nothing to use it.

But the meat of the story comes further in: Dropbox just closed a massive $250 million Series B round of funding, at an implied valuation of $4 billion, from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round, bringing Dropbox’s total funding to date to $257.2 million. Houston’s stake, Forbes says, amounts to 15 percent of the equity, which would be worth about $600 million.

Houston may yet live to regret turning Jobs down. The Apple CEO proposed another meeting that never happened, then managed to single out Dropbox for disparagement as part of his iCloud keynote in June. That got the attention of Houston, who quickly fired off a memo to his team that included a list of once-hot companies that later crashed: MySpace, Netscape, Palm and Yahoo. Apple — which once viewed Dropbox as the sort of “strategic asset” for which it keeps its $70 billion war chest stuffed — is now the competition.

With the new money, LightSquared has pulled in $2.3 billion in funding over the last 12 months.

“This latest round of financing signals another endorsement by the financial markets of our business model, and LightSquared’s intent to use private capital to build out a new network to meet the growing demand across this entire nation for wireless broadband access,” LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the company is also working to address concerns that there could be interference with GPS systems if LightSquared builds its network on the spectrum it currently has a license for.

Last week the company submitted a plan to the Federal Communications Commission that it says takes care of 99.5 percent of interference issues.

“In contrast, the GPS device manufacturers, unlike relevant government agencies, have been largely uninterested in finding a win-win solution,” LightSquared said in a statement. “Rather, their only answer to a problem of their own making is to demand that the government simply block LightSquared from using the company’s own spectrum to roll out the first wholesale-only wireless broadband network for the entire nation -– an economic benefit worth as much as $120 billion to consumers.”

Now that Amazon’s $175 million investment in social buying service LivingSocial has been confirmed, all eyes will inevitably be turning to Google, as it nudges closer to completing a blockbuster acquisition deal with the category leader, Groupon.

But, according to several sources, the Google-Groupon hookup still has roughly a half-dozen issues remaining.

Previously, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reported that Google has offered $5.3 billion for Groupon, which, with earnouts, would rise to $6 billion.

A deal of that size would be Google’s largest acquisition yet, so attention to details is warranted. Of course, negotiations could collapse at any time, but sources said the deal is currently on track.

Perhaps a major investment by Amazon, like today’s, might help clinch it.

The next order of business will be to examine whether these hefty price tags are all worth it.

Half-jokingly, LivingSocial’s two-week-old CFO John Bax said today at Business Insider’s Ignition event that valuations are not overinflated: “I think [Google is] getting a steal, I think they are underpaying…[Groupon] should hold out for $12 billion or $18 billion.”

LivingSocial has said it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to ring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2011. Meanwhile, Groupon has raised about $170 million in venture funding, and is booking roughly $50 million in monthly sales, according to some estimates.

But, if the space is truly a golden opportunity, why aren’t others rushing in? So far, we haven’t heard about these deals becoming a competitive bidding process, and Microsoft and eBay have been silent on the matter.

Today, eBay made a comparatively small purchase of Milo, which catalogs the availability of millions of products in local stores so that they can be searchable by consumers online.

In just two years, Twitter has raised roughly $155 million in venture capital, including $135 million this year. That’s a staggering sum for a revenue-less company that operates on the Web where capital-efficiency is underscored and technology costs are falling.

It’s even more unbelievable when you look at where Twitter ranks in the annals of venture funding.

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