(Reuters) – Venture capitalists are wary of the secondary markets that have soared in popularity with investors looking for a piece of action in private companies like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

The secondary markets, which enable the exchange of shares in privately held companies, are a black hole because private companies are not required to disclose financial information.

“It is scary and I would be very careful before doing any such deals,” Axel Bichara, a partner with Atlas Ventures, said during the venture capital panel at Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday in New York.

Bill Maris, a managing partner at Google Ventures, said secondary market trading creates all types of market forces

France Telecom is in talks to buy a 49% stake in French video sharing site Dailymotion, a company which is backed by venture and private equity firms including Atlas Ventures and Partech, Reuters reported. The venture funds would sell a portion of their shares, Reuters said. France Telecom would pay 58.8 million euros ($80.29 million) for the stake.

Mangling the pronunciation of foreign languages is a longstanding American tradition, but many foreigners aren’t as blithely indifferent about their English-speaking skills. In fact, Alan Schwartz is betting that millions of young professionals abroad are keen to speak English as natively as possible. Enter his year-old Boston-area startup, EnglishCentral, an online language tutorial site that employs proprietary speech [...]