Square Raising New Round, Joining Billion Dollar Valuation Club | Hacker News Reader

Square Raising New Round, Joining Billion Dollar Valuation Club

techcrunch.com

33 pointsrjvir9 comments

Sorry, but Square Register really cannot replace 99.999% of cash registers out there. The article is inaccurate in claiming that it can.

Why not? Could you provide some explanation to your claim?

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Of-Round-Pegs-and-Squar...

Disclaimer: I'm biased, as I am behind FaceCash Register (https://www.facecash.com/register.html), but it means I also know what it took to build it.

This makes me think that Square may be a "leapfrog" innovation. The best example of leapfrogging is cell phones and landlines. In the US, you might have briefly had people saying things like "cell phones will never replace landlines because there are sometimes you reallly need reception." In developing countries, no one bothered to ever wire landlines.

Here's the only article I could find in a ~1 minute search that explains in more detail the concept: http://www.article13.com/A13_ContentList.asp?strAction=GetPu...

I agree that the square dongle probably won't take over the world, and square register can't take over the world's PoS market, as it is now.

I'd happily bet that the Square team, and the evolution of the Square payment products, will.

I think of the square reader as the mailed dvd is to netflix. I suspect Square feels the same way. Their customers love them, they are disrupting a very non-innovative industry, and they've gotten customers fast enough, and sustained growth long enough, to have hit escape velocity.

(I don't work for Square, unfortunately; I did work for some NFC payment stuff in the past, and tried to launch an ecash system in the 1990s.)

Whatever you think about Square: They are a profitable business, which seems to be rare in the world of web companies going for their IPO.

I'm excited to see how PayPal responds to Square in the future.

Where do you get the impression that they are profitable? They are not even close to profitable at $3million transaction volume per day.

They barely make much at all at the moment: http://www.quora.com/Square-company/Can-Square-make-money-wi...

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