HN opinion: Square is a platform.
I think that Square is an exceptional business enabled by a novel piece of hardware, their headphone jack card reader.
It would seem - then, that the card reader and payment service could actually be seen as a platform play.
Platforms are technologies that are useful themselves - but enable far reaching, broader use cases in ways, that at times, can be unforeseen.
Square could enable a range of cottage industries by providing other applications built on their solution.
We have the ability for mobile payments, as it were, and thus we should see a need for dead-simple mobile business management apps; inventory, supply chain, vendor management, invoicing, product lists etc.
This leads me to believe that Square is a platform that through its deployment applications can be built upon it that will change the way commerce can happen on the individual level.
Further - it would seem that there is also a great opportunity for sales distribution here as well. A product distributor could reach out to and enable a mobile sales force providing all these applications to their sales force in the field on a single device - as the merchants sell product, it can be tracked in real time and supplies replenished.
This could work very well in connected, yet less-developed countries such as rural Philippines, China and other parts of Asia.
Couple this with prepaid charge cards -- and the ability to LOAD cards in the longer term, and there are some significant opportunities that can be built using square alone.