Get A Coffee / Give A Coffee - Starbucks card publicly usable from smartphones

[Thorin]

So first this guy Jonathan Stark made his Starbucks card publicly accessible via smartphones: http://jonathanstark.com/card/

This is basically a social experiment: you show an image of the card to the scanner and get your coffee paid by the card; the idea behind this is to see what strangers will do with the card.  Lots of people have used money from it, and lots of other people have put money on it.  Kinda neat that people are willing to put money on a card that some other stranger will use for free.

The balance is updated in the card's Twitter feed (yes, the card has its own Twitter account).

Then along comes another guy Sam Odio who has figured out that you can also buy gift cards with this money, and who wrote a script that watches the card's Twitter feed to let him know when the balance is high, at which point he'll go and buy a gift card from the counter at Starbucks: http://mashable.com/2011/08/12/jonathans-card-hacked-starbucks/

Interesting reaction some of the commenters on that second story have - they call Sam Odio an outright thief, even though Jonathan Stark makes the balance on the card publicly available and usable.

I agree that Sam Odio isn't playing by the originally-suggested social contract (get a coffee, give a coffee), but I don't see specific rules anywhere that spell out exactly what is and is not allowed.  For instance, what if I don't want a coffee, but I want a tea and a scone?  Is that against the implied rules simply because I'm not "getting a coffee"?

[Lazybones]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/12/

[Darren Dirt]

I skimmed the Twitter and WOW that card is getting some serious activity! It seems it gets a $15 deposit from someone, 2 or 3 transactions soon after, lather rinse repeat (at one point it had more than $30 on there).

I guess there's plenty of generous folks out there.

[Thorin]

Yes, Penny Arcade is how I learned about it.

News from comics, and all that.

[Darren Dirt]

dang, high probability it's a planned viral marketing campaign thingie with SB as the client :disappointedifthatsthecase:

http://www.coffeestrategies.com/2011/08/08/starbucks-and-the-starkbucks-jonathan-card-viral-marketing-campaign

Though far from the smoking gun that proves Starbucks is behind the promotion and paid Mobiquity and its employee Jonathan Stark to invent and deploy the campaign to dupe media and its readers into visiting a Starbucks, this should be valid cause for any serious journalist to spend at least a minute out of his or her day researching the story before declaring it fact rather than paid advertisement.

Unfortunately in the world of electronic communication, no one seems to care anymore what is real and what some company is being paid to make the consumer masses believe and feel.

UPDATE AUGUST 9, 2011 7:30AM HST: The Mobiquity Inc ?Client? page cache has been deleted from Google; clearly someone is following this post and cleaning up loose ends on the Jonathan?s Card scheme to make it appear more organic. Don?t worry boys, I got screenshots.

...then again, maybe it's just a marketing guy with his own solo idea?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/the-vast-starbucks-conspiracy-jonathans-card-wasnt-faked/ (found via http://mobiquityinc.com/2011/the-vast-starbucks-conspiracy-jonathan%E2%80%99s-card-wasn%E2%80%99t-faked/ -- lol )




btw I visited Penny Arcade (first time in maybe 6 months) and wow anyone else notice this new project of theirs?
http://trenchescomic.com/about

[Mr. Analog]

My hope is that hobos and drifters pick up on this...

[Darren Dirt]

http://jonathanstark.com/card/

Jonathan's Card

The time has come for this wonderful experiment to make a transformation. Starbucks has informed me that they will be shutting off the card at 10pm ET tonight (Friday, August 12, 2011).

We believe this is the start to a bigger more glowing picture. In the last 5 days or so, we've received hundreds of stories of people doing small things to brighten a stranger's day: Paying for the next car at the drive through. Sharing a pick me up with someone who has had a rough time. Charging up a phone card and sharing it with strangers at the airport. The list goes on, and on, and on...

So, tonight we lose our barcode. But of course, we never needed it in the first place.

We will continue to maintain the facebook page as a place for all of us to share our moments of kindness.


Keep paying it forward everyone!

Jonathan & Erica