Jack Dorsey: On the web, companies use things like Google Analytics to learn how people are interacting, what people are driven to, and why. People use that data to build their businesses. But offline merchants, who still account for 94 percent of commerce in the world, have no real way to capture that kind of data. Square can tell merchants how many cappuccinos they sold for the day. And then they can start mining that data. Like what percentage of people that bought cappuccino also bought biscotti? What happens when it rains? What are my busiest hours? That is critical data that most small businesses just don’t have.
While Dorsey still talks about focusing on micro-businesses such as dog walkers, his vision of using data to figure out the busiest days of the week and average prices of a cup of coffee suggest that Square may be looking to move up market to small businesses that have more infrastructure and traditional methods of card acceptance. It could be the signs of new markets to come for Square.
Read the complete interview here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/mf_qadorsey