101–110 of 185 posts
''We have only 4000 shares of Square left at $16.50. I believe Goldman is going to price the IPO well north of $25 and the $16.50 is less than the price that Square is granting stock options to employees!''
A good reminder that people are making (and losing) a lot of money behind the scenes of our industry.
Is anyone willing to give a contrarian take? I'll give it a shot: Square is an ambitious company with some great engineers, stellar UX and a giant total addressable market. Their business loans are interesting and could grow into something important. Square readers are a fashion accessory for hip businesses. No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb than its yuppie hipsters patr…
I'm not so sure about that. I'd agree that they all have "fancy" (for want of a better word) payment systems, but I don't think there's a reason they have to be the fancy ones made by Square.
But more importantly: the US is (finally) moving to chipped and tap-to-pay transactions. That means that pretty much all merchant hardware is going to need to be replaced over time, so the market the Square (and everyone else) currently has is up for grabs. If I were looking at investing in Square that would make me nervous.
I've always wondered - why was it so easy to replicate Square's scanning device? Seems like about 6 months after they really started gaining traction, PayPal came out with their copycat triangle one, and then a cascade of copycats. It went from not being a thing to there being tons of them overnight. I would imagine there would be somewhat of a barrier to entry, but it seems it's a fairly easy device to create?
"The Shakespearean model holds true today. Consider the Square card reader. Square was the first company to do mobile handset credit card processing right. It did the software piece and the hardware piece, and built a brand with the iconic white square device. Then there was a proliferation of copycat readers. PayPal launched one. They shaped it like a triangle. They basically copied the idea of a simple geometric-sh…
...I don't see why? PayPal is/was far bigger than Square. If the hardware is easy to duplicate, I'd rather be the larger company with an established presence.
With rumors about device to device payment talks[1], Square is in tough spot. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-in-talks-with-u-s-banks-to...
Is anyone willing to give a contrarian take? I'll give it a shot: Square is an ambitious company with some great engineers, stellar UX and a giant total addressable market. Their business loans are interesting and could grow into something important. Square readers are a fashion accessory for hip businesses. No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb than its yuppie hipsters patr…
Are people really going to care if their joint of choice changes payment providers? Do people care how cool their bank and credit card company is? Id almost certainly guess not.
Is anyone willing to give a contrarian take? I'll give it a shot: Square is an ambitious company with some great engineers, stellar UX and a giant total addressable market. Their business loans are interesting and could grow into something important. Square readers are a fashion accessory for hip businesses. No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb than its yuppie hipsters patr…
All that customers and shopowners care about is simplicity of payment. Square has got that spot on and has pretty good market share which will only grow.
Only tow things can hurt them
1. Existing device that works as card reader. Think of iPhone that can accept payments. 2. Some kind of government regulation.
I dont see that happening. Even Apple's pay p2p thing wont be a threat simply because it probably wont accept a physical card. [Correct me if I am wrong].
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great example. For contra-contrarian reasons: If your coffee is less than $7.75 (debit card) or $4.00 (credit card), square loses money (cf Starbucks).
Their contract with Starbucks is ending soon. Going forward their reader fees will be profitable to the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are magnetic stripe readers everywhere -- I can't imagine they're that hard or expensive to produce.
I don't imagine they are as straightforward as buying a magnetic reader and putting it in a shell. The interface is somewhat unique after all. It connects through the audio jack. The processing on the software side need to be somewhat custom as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't imagine they are as straightforward as buying a magnetic reader and putting it in a shell. The interface is somewhat unique after all. It connects through the audio jack. The processing on the software side need to be somewhat custom as well.
Yup, it's as simple as putting a magnetic stripe reader and putting it into a shell. These are a commodity on Alibaba now [1]. The idea of using headphone jack for data transfer has been around since the Commodore PCs [2] The software side is pretty standard too [3]. It's a standard analog to digital conversion. [1] http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/headphone-jack-magnetic-card... [2] http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub…