Boom - Square : disrupting the payments market by sidestepping entrenched lock-ins (verisign terminals, merchant agreements, etc)
Bubble - Pets.com : doing the same thing somebody else does execept with a Web UI.
A couple of examples that stood out for me.
But to answer your question more directly, a 'boom' is a durable growth in value due to measurable productivity and revenue gains. Typically rising revenue/employee and net-income/per-customer are good indications of 'boom'. A Bubble is often characterized by an increase in value without significant change in the fundamentals of a company (either revenue/employee or income/customer). The latter is speculation that in the future the company will be worth more than it is now, the latter reflects that the company is actually worth more now than it was before.
Loved the graphic too, it was a good characterization. I think there is a tremendous amount of trepidation about the possibility of being 'caught' in another bubble. So much so my Dad asked me if he should move his remaining 401k balance from equities into gold because he was worried the tech bubble was going to 'crash the stock market again.' I suggested that the thing that is going to crash the stock market is the AAA debt crisis.
Has Square made any money yet, enough to put even a dent in their $169M funding? Trotting out companies that haven't validated their product with the public and haven't made much money seems like something that would happen in a bubble, not a boom.
I don't think they have publically announced anything. TechCrunch reported 1M$ in mobile transactions per day [1] which they didn't deny. If they were a 1% transaction fee business that would be $10K/day in revenue, $300K/month. At 2% that would be $600K/month.
Having seen first hand with the hassle of what it was like to take payments before them I understand their value proposition better than I did the one for pets.com (and I do have a dog so presumably was in the pets.com target market)
Of course the whole NFC thing could crimp Square's growth but that is more along the lines of yet-another-disruptive-payment scheme rather than the old system was good enough.
Comments
Boom - Square : disrupting the payments market by sidestepping entrenched lock-ins (verisign terminals, merchant agreements, etc)
Bubble - Pets.com : doing the same thing somebody else does execept with a Web UI.
A couple of examples that stood out for me.
But to answer your question more directly, a 'boom' is a durable growth in value due to measurable productivity and revenue gains. Typically rising revenue/employee and net-income/per-customer are good indications of 'boom'. A Bubble is often characterized by an increase in value without significant change in the fundamentals of a company (either revenue/employee or income/customer). The latter is speculation that in the future the company will be worth more than it is now, the latter reflects that the company is actually worth more now than it was before.
Loved the graphic too, it was a good characterization. I think there is a tremendous amount of trepidation about the possibility of being 'caught' in another bubble. So much so my Dad asked me if he should move his remaining 401k balance from equities into gold because he was worried the tech bubble was going to 'crash the stock market again.' I suggested that the thing that is going to crash the stock market is the AAA debt crisis.
Has Square made any money yet, enough to put even a dent in their $169M funding? Trotting out companies that haven't validated their product with the public and haven't made much money seems like something that would happen in a bubble, not a boom.
I don't think they have publically announced anything. TechCrunch reported 1M$ in mobile transactions per day [1] which they didn't deny. If they were a 1% transaction fee business that would be $10K/day in revenue, $300K/month. At 2% that would be $600K/month.
Having seen first hand with the hassle of what it was like to take payments before them I understand their value proposition better than I did the one for pets.com (and I do have a dog so presumably was in the pets.com target market)
Of course the whole NFC thing could crimp Square's growth but that is more along the lines of yet-another-disruptive-payment scheme rather than the old system was good enough.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/02/square-now-processing-1-mil...