The "data-mining" is occurring on the POS-side (not the restaurant-side). I suspect the idea is that an analytics firm will do the data work and convert it into reports/products/services/api's that are sold to restaurateurs.

As far as whether or not this constitutes "big-data", it might if they can hook into enough POS-systems.

At one point I was working on a POS proof of concept that would offer the software for free to restaurants to use with the caveat that we could sell their anonymized patron data as reports to restaurateurs looking to gather intel on viability of new restaurant locations. I got bored of it and stopped before I validated the market for it, but I think there is space for this. This was before vendors like square had their products for small businesses, however. At the time, my potential competitors were the NCR Aloha's of the world.

Yeah, wherever there's money, there's valuable information.

POS' are a goldmine if you can acquire data from huge numbers of them (unfortunately that's hard).

That's definitely true. I would have had to operate at a loss for a while until I could enough data to sell. I never did the math to see how long that period is, but I'm pretty sure it's worse than my back of the napkin calculations.

I worked at a fast food place that has that capability in 1994. It could correlate patterns for upsells.

Iirc it was an NCR XT based system.

Growing up a popular Chinese restaurant in my hometown had a system like that. Their main business was phone orders for pickup. After a while when I called they would ask if I wanted what I got last time and if I would like to ask anything. Occasionally they would put an extra item in my order and then next time ask if I enjoyed it. Great place, but for whatever reason they eventually fell out of popularity and closed.

It's putting spin on old technology. This all sounds like something that could have been done in the 70s, and was mainstream in the 80s.

The dashboards are probably way prettier now though.

Shoot, I'd bet money it's been done for decades if not even longer by good waitstaffs.

I know that I've been recognized by employees at places I go to frequently, and media depictions of people being asked if they want "the usual" seem to predate widespread computers.

Slightly dystopian in that regard: let's take something that used to be part of being good at your job and building a rapport with your customers, and outsource it to a machine.

Googling for restaurant notes yields a bunch of relevant news stories about such information management.

Here's one in the New Yorker, from 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/dining/what-restaurants-kn...

Here's another from May of this year: http://nypost.com/2017/03/30/the-incognito-way-this-restaura...