Facebook Competitor College Tonight "Goes Public," Raises $1.6M

College Tonight, one of a group of startups that is trying to win over Facebook’s core college membership, has raised a $1.6 million round of financing. Oh, and they went “public.”

This isn’t really going public, though. They’ve merged with a barely alive public entity called Simex Technologies (SMXT), which is trading at $0.49 per share on the Nasdaq pink sheets. Simex, which had been delinquent in its annual and quarterly reports for some time, is now current and has changed its name to College Tonight, Inc.

This is a common way for startups to get liquidity fast, and it rarely ends well. When Nasdaq companies get delisted into pink sheet purgatory, they will occasionally get picked up.

A subsidiary of Simex called Remote Business, Inc. used to be “engaged in the design, installation, servicing and monitoring of digital surveillance security systems for business and industry” — hardly anything related to social networking.