Twitter Cofounder Takes On the Credit Card Biz | Magazine: Speaking of Twitter, it started as a way for people to tell one another what bar they were going to. Now it’s a mass communications network.
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.