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chailatte

What do they need that much money for? It's a simple contact sharing app. And how will they make money?

Foodspotting also got 3M today, for a simple photo sharing app that has no revenue model.

This bubble is very close to bursting. Too bad for those pension funds and university endowments.

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" This bubble is very close to bursting. Too bad for those pension funds and university endowments. "

Not even close.

As someone who lived through the very end (and hence the worst of it) I think this does mark the return of the bubble. Bump is a nice idea but they've now raised $3 per active user and still have no real path to revenue. That's bubble mentality.

BUT at least Bump is a good idea. Good ideas that VCs over estimate is the beginning of a bubble not the end of it. Its when ideas like ecommerce stores that just sell pet food or devices that allow web sites to smell start popping up. That's when its about to burst

Yes, during normal times. However, we're in a global economic recession, where most countries are bankrupt and overnight any country/US state can default on their debt, causing massive failures in many markets. Any other bubble bursting (education, real estate, stock market, government debt) can cause the other bubbles to burst right away.

Most countries are very far from being bankrupt. We haven't been in a recession in a quite some time (more than a year ago). While there are lingering concerns over a couple of specific countries, economic news has been mostly pretty bright for quite some time.

Jobs, particularly labor jobs, continue to be a really big issue. Lets not be hyperbolic, however.

Also, lets keep this in perspective. The amount of money totally invested in startups is (in the scheme of things) pretty small. So yes those endowments and pension funds stand to lose, but not a lot (they tend to be well diversified).

Not all bubbles are the catastrophic crash of the housing market or the general tech bubble that began last decade. Those both saw huge amounts of money invested by millions of individuals dry up overnight. This is very different.

The first bubble came at the end of a recession too. Beyond that VCs are in the business because they have money where others don't and they want to get in on the ground floor of investment opportunities.

I doubt it's just a contact-sharing app, I think they've branched out (or always intended?) to creating a generic platform for exchanging information with people standing next to you.

Indeed, you can now share with any other user you are friends with, whether or not you are physically near each other.

Check out the post for some of their plans. They're looking to become a platform for helping businesses/bands/venues connect with patrons.

This bubble is very close to bursting.

I'm sorry but the bubble banter seems to have gotten a little out of hand. Yes, there seems to be a rise in startups receiving high profile investments. Yes, the flow of acquisitions has increased lately. But this talk of a bubble seems little more than fear mongering to me. Concentrate on the things that truly matter and if there's a bubble, you'll likely weather it in one piece.

There are way too many content sharing apps out there attracting attention right now, even though Stumbleupon or Facebook or even Twitter can just overtake the entire market overnight. That to me, along with the overvaluation and lack of revenue models, tells me this is a bubble, and it will not end well.

To raise that big of a round from Sequoia AND Horowitz, Bump must have clearly shown them their numbers. Sharing alone is not the single most valuable part of Bump. Bump could very easily replace the paper anything for a lot of stuff - event tickets, p2p payments, etc.

The use cases can go on and on. From what I'm guessing based on their trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if Bump used iOS's safari browser's accelerometer to implement in-browser Bumping. Go figure!

you could say something similar about twitter not so long ago. It's a lot about expectations of what can possibly be.

That sentence sounds precisely like "bubble-talk" to me.

When expectations matter a lot more than actual revenue is when we start to be in trouble.

I don't know if twitter is making money or not yet. Youtube is barely providing profits for Google. Digg didn't make money for yahoo. Facebook we don't have real numbers yet. (rumor says they are profitable).

FB finances leaked in the Goldman deal. They did something like $2BN in revenue and $400MM in ebitda in 2010.

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