The Real Deal about Jonathans Card
facebook.com
facebook.com
Let us assume that Jonathan is deceiving us and that this is a marketing ploy... what does it matter? We haven't been conned into spending our time or money on anything. The card still works in the same way.
Now, if Jonathan is telling the truth then it sucks for him to be treated in this way. It seems to me that there is nothing to lose by believing him.
Sure, it sucks to be misled and I'm sure it hurts some people's pride to think that they are prone to being tricked but ultimately we don't lose anything!
For me it comes down to a nice example of how generous some people can be. And if Starbucks are actually the ones topping up the card then yay, free coffee!
Here's a screenshot of the cached clients page: http://i.imgur.com/PgccX.png
Nothing wrong with free coffee, or sponsored free coffee. And not that much wrong about doing a hobby project that relates to a professional client. But appearing to hide evidence of that relationship seems to be what has caught people's interest:
>Mobiquity has no professional affiliation with Starbucks. As a young company launched this past March, Mobiquity had initially included on its website the logos of companies with whom members of our team had worked with in the past, as we stated on the page. Mobiquity took down the l page in late July as part of an ongoing site redesign – complete coincidence, not conspiracy. Jonathan Stark was not the Mobiquity team member who had previously worked with Starbucks. But he does admit to liking their coffee. If you read Jonathan’s original post on the subject on July 14th, you’ll see he was as surprised as anyone else that his experiment in “broadcasting money” (by taking a screenshot of his Starbucks card barcode via his iPhone and emailing it to himself to use on his Nexus S) was successful. Jonathan’s exact quote was, “I bought a coffee with a picture.”
On the Internet, it's very easy to wear a tin-foil hat and persuade others to do so.
Why does every other thing have to be a conspiracy?
What part of that is unclear?
Believe or disbelieve him, but the statement is unambiguous.
> Starbucks had absolutely nothing to do with it
It's possible that Jonathan started this as a hobby project and as a bonus, he'd be helping out a client indirectly. PErhaps later on Starbucks did give some sort of buy-in. But even if it still has nothing official to do with the project, the question remains: how truthful was this statement on the project homepage:
>this site is totally not affiliated with Starbucks.
Frankly, if he had not written that and just not mentioned Starbucks corporate at all, I don't think there'd be any indignation. But that was the very first line of his project page.
I don't think it really matters in this case whether it was sincere or not, but I guess people don't like to feel like they've been played.
And this could still be the case while a marketing team at Starbucks has decided that this card is a great tool that they can sink a couple thousand dollars into slowly to get people in to Starbucks.
Like you say, it is pretty tempting to assume the worst because nobody wants to be the last person to know they've been duped.