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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I like the Wikipedia suggestion most of the time: assume good faith. He works with Starbucks at his day job. He decided to do a hack using an API he was exposed to there. This is not exactly nefarious, even to the severely-damaged-evil-meter version of nefarious which includes "intentionally and with forethought committing the sin of marketing."

I have often used work technologies/clients at play and play technologies at work.

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Just to clarify, he's not using a Starbucks API. He's scraping the data from the user page. The API the card uses (for Twitter, for others to check the balance, etc.) is one he created for the project.

A company he works for, in a completely unrelated capacity (application architecture != marketing) has in the past, at least, worked for or with Starbucks. Whether that's ongoing or not is between Starbucks and Mobiquity, but even if they are it's no indication of a professional or personal relationship between Starbucks and Mr. Stark.

Jonathan's a friend of mine, so I'll take him at his word on this one.

So the company happens to be unaffiliated with Starbucks now, but is showcased because it was a past client?

Sorry, my response was worded a bit poorly - I'll edit it. I have no idea if they still have a relationship with Starbucks or not.

I'd just like to point out that the application he architechts is for marketing, so it's not exactly unrelated. That said, I don't much mind either way.

>>This is not exactly nefarious, even to the severely-damaged-evil-meter version of nefarious which includes "intentionally and with forethought committing the sin of marketing."

I don't see marketing as a sin.

However, I do appreciate full disclosure and some level of honesty.

His blog post twice mentioned that it was "totally not affiliated with Starbucks.". However, if Starbucks had been paying his company for marketing, imo he would have been better off in mentioning this fact.

Agree, disclosure would have been better instead of "totally not affiliated with Starbucks". I checked the page again and see "I stumbled on the idea while doing research related to my work with Mobiquity related to Broadcasting Mobile Currency." Was it there before?

Yes, he stated that far before this story "broke."

Perhaps he would have been, but remember we're looking at this with the benefit of hindsight. It's easy for us to see people debating whether this was a marketing plow and think "why did he not prove his innocence in the first place".

But if you're just having a bit of fun doing something as a hobby, it doesn't neccesarily even occur to you that people might care what your link to Starbucks is. It's quite possible that the thought process in his head was "just in case anyone knows I've done work with Starbucks in the past, I should put up disclaimers that it isn't affiliated with them so there won't be any confusion", and not thought any more about it.

The catch here is if he was just doing this on his own, outside of work - then not being very explicit about it being separate could get him and/or his employer in quite a bit of bother.

There's still the question of why Mobiquity pulled their client list from the website. That's either an eyebrow-raising coincidence, or they're not cool with casual visitors knowing there's a business relationship.

The author of the blog post states that he had to go to Google cache to find the page in the first place, so there's no telling how long ago it was removed from Mobiquity's site. A past affiliation does not imply an ongoing one.

It would make no sense for them to remove the entire page when they could just remove the Starbucks logo, so it could ell just be a restructuring of the site.

Considering both Starbucks and Mobiquity are actively promoting Jonathan's Card, I'm inclined to believe the relationship is ongoing. (Frankly, this is the kind of thing that companies like Starbucks usually aren't cool with if they don't originate internally) But you're right, it is ambiguous.

I don't think it's unreasonable that they'd have responded by deleting the page, though. It's the fastest and easiest option, (perhaps the website admin isn't available) and excising the Starbucks logo alone would look awfully suspicious. Seems like exactly the thing someone would do on the spur of the moment during an "oh shit" moment when they realized a viral marketing campaign might be compromised.

It isn't at all something a company would be against if they didn't originate it - it's good PR with no downsides. They wouldn't care if every Starbucks coffee sold from now for the next ten years was paid for with one duplicated card, as long as somebody was paying for it all through that card.

Most companies like enthusiastic customers, so long as they aren't too enthusiastic. Marketers like customers who respond to campaigns, but they get very nervous when customers take control of the brand on their own initiative. It sometimes ends up taking the brand in a direction the owner would prefer it didn't go. (eg. Cristal, Burberry)

In this case, you've got multiple people sharing what should be an individual account and the potential for damaging mainstream media stories if people feel like they're doing a good turn for strangers, only to have scammers empty the card. Not to mention that if Jonathan's Card is genuinely unconnected to Starbucks, his use of their trademarks would make the lawyers uncomfortable.

This may not be a full-fledged viral marketing campaign, but I'm skeptical that Starbucks would be so enthusiastic about it if the guy responsible didn't have a preexisting relationship with their marketing department.

In my experience in marketing (tech and gaming related, so admitedly not exactly the same area), most companies I've worked with go to sleep at night dreaming of something like this happened.

Somebody who loves your company showing initiative and doing something interesting that creates headlines for your brand? And you're not paying the tens/hundreds of thousands that it would have cost to get some firm to think of this idea? Hell yes we'll take that.

It could be a move to have Starbucks disassociate themselves with Mobiquity. Perhaps Mobiquity didn't have permission to use their logo or name them as a client. If Jonathan's card brought it to Starbucks' attention, that could precipitate this kind of rapid rewriting of the web.

Assuming you've jumped from correlation to causation, trying to guess at the reasoning behind it is just that, a guess.

Jonathan is an executive at a marketing shop that launched in March. They list Starbucks second among 16 clients. Their chief strategy officer is a Wharton School senior fellow. When these guys launch a mobile equity -- er Mobiquity -- campaign it isn't a weekend project. From Mobiquity's homepage infer that Starbucks pays Mobiquity "to identify new revenue and ROI opportunities" and "capture real-time behavioral insights through analytics, profiling and modeling." Call me jaded, call you credulous. Either way it's brilliant publicity.

I would like to assume good faith but strange that Jonathan was so active on HN the day his card story was here but is nowhere to be seen on HN today/this thread.

He could have noticed the hits coming from here so he checked in to answer questions.

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