At the annual LeWeb conference in Paris today, Loic Le Meur interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about Square, the mobile payment system he launched in limited beta in November. While the demo didn’t quite work as expected – the Square dongle wasn’t able to read Loic’s credit card at first – we did learn a few more details about Square. Among other thing, Dorsey plans to launch an API in the future that will allow Square to connect to other financial systems and bookkeeping software. In addition, Dorsey announced that he plans to make the payment dongle available for free.
According to Dorsey, finance is one of two industries that is ready for a disruption. The other industry is healthcare, though Dorsey doesn’t expect that we will see any major technological disruptions in this business within the next two years.
According to Dorsey, one of the original ideas for Square was to use the iPhone camera to take a picture of a credit card and then use OCR software to read the data. As Square wants to be able to offer its service on multiple platforms, however, the team decided to use a dongle that plugs into an audio jack.
The team is currently working on the private beta and also working on building up its security team.
As we noted last week, there are still some questions about the viability of this business, though Dorsey is obviously quite upbeat about the future of its new venture.
