If you drive around America's hi-tech heartland, you may see a bumper sticker saying, 'Please God, Just One More Bubble.' According to the New York Times, the prayer has been answered. 'Silicon Valley is starting to feel like 1995 - the year Netscape went public - all over again,' it claimed. London's Observer agrees. 'Dotcom frenzy is back. Blue-chip investment banks are queuing up to explore multibillion-pound flotation opportunities and investors are champing at the bit to back technology businesses,' it said. The new dotcom rush supposedly started last year, when Tom Online bought Indiagames for US$18 million and - more notably - Google floated, raising US$1.67 billion. Events such as these brought it all back. Recall how, at the start of the first dotcom rush, every aspiring alpha male decided to launch a start-up he thought destined to rock the bricks-and-mortar world of traditional business. Invariably described as 'bullish' and 'gung ho', the entrepreneurs stocked their offices with football tables and exercise balls. Fired by caffeine, they whizzed around treating lunch and sleep like an aberration. The weird thing was that everyone knew that most of the moguls and their curiously abstract online enterprises were doomed. Analysts routinely branded the boom a bubble. They pointed out that even Amazon.com was struggling to turn a profit, and referred to 'tulipomania' - the tulip craze that gripped Europe in the early 17th century when a single bulb could fetch as much as 4,500 guilders, plus a horse and carriage. The doomsayers duly started to look convincing. 'In the middle of the dotcom bubble,' a business blogger writes, 'I was approached by the folks at TheLaw.com to become one of their academic columnists ... After signing the 'consulting agreement' and receiving my grant of stock options, I wrote one column and the company tanked.' When the market peaked on March 9, 2000, the Dow Jones Internet Composite Index had soared by 810 per cent since January 1, 1998. As the millennium unravelled, meltdown began, sparing only the likes of Google, AskJeeves, Amazon, eBay and Lastminute.com. The losers wound up in that gallery of failure called f***edcompany.com, which, ironically, remains a going concern. The bust became a paradigm for the triumph of arrogance over substance and normal service was resumed. Once again, your boss was older than you. Capitalists no longer needed to be referred to as 'angels'. Words such as 'qualifications', 'experience', even 'moderation' meant something again. Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Millard announced: 'Co-operative relationships are in and the 'my way or the highway' attitude is out. The customer is in and arrogance is out.' But has the new economy made a recovery or has it just returned from rehab spouting fake optimism? My instinct is to dismiss the notion like an e-mail sent by a phisher that asks me to divulge financial information. The theory might merely rest on the assumption that boom follows bust. Much of the analysis supporting the theory focuses on image. A typical report reads: 'Folly.com no longer looks like a play den but a bank. The staff, all of whom are married, wear pinstripes and disapproving looks only prone to be replaced by thin-lipped smiles when an innovative suggestion is duly slapped down by senior management. Chartered accountants outnumber 'creatives' 10 to one [the company recently made its resident futurologist redundant].' Lack of flair now apparently equates with professionalism. That said, there is solid ground for optimism, not least the rise of the mobile phone content industry. The industry is on a roll, proving that, after all, money can be made from frivolous tulip bulb-like material. Think Jamster, the German-owned company that bought the rights to the Crazy Frog character last year. A year later, the firm was bought by American Internet giant VeriSign for ?152.5 million ($2.14 billion). In May, news surfaced that European mobile content company iTouch had been sold to a Japanese rival, For-side.com, for ?180 million as the Japanese firm jostled to grab a slice of Europe's estimated ?34 billion mobile content market. This month, one of Europe's biggest mobile content providers, Monstermob, announced it had made underlying earnings of ?2.2 million in the four months to April 30 on net revenues of ?8.4 million, a sign of 'strong' trading across the business. Apparently intent on world domination, Monstermob recently also bought a stake in a content provider operating across Southeast Asia - Malaysia's UnrealMind Interactive for US$3.22 million. And it is considering entering the mainland market. Further positive news comes from London. For one thing, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, employment in the Golden Mile business district should reach 325,000 in 2006, beating the pre-crash millennium peak of 324,000. For another thing, Gibraltar-based PartyGaming's flotation on the London Stock Exchange this month is set to make its four founders dotcom billionaires, netting US$10 billion, according to analysts. The message is clear: we are in the midst of some kind of revival. Only it seems somewhat modest and is free from the fever that characterised trading last time round. If you believe the bubble has arrived and are toying with buying stock, play it cool. Obtain a valuation of the company that piques your interest. If the share price easily exceeds the valuation, think twice before committing a cent. Repeat: do not be gung-ho; do not get ripped off.
