Could someone please explain to me why this is such a big deal?
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!
It's not that big of a deal. I wish he would just say whether or not his company has a relationship with Starbucks, and if it does, why he made such a strong claim of no-affiliation-whatsoever to Starbucks on his project page?
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.”
A remarkably empty statement. I already didn't think it was a marketing ploy, but if I did then reading this sure as hell wouldn't have changed my mind.
I was expecting controversy over this and the accusations that his project is just a Starbucks marketing thing didn't surprise me at all. Still, I see trusty people defending him on Twitter so let's see where this goes.
> "The Jonathan's Card experiment was completely my idea, Starbucks had absolutely nothing to do with it, and until recently, I was scared to death that Starbucks might sue the crap out of me."
What part of that is unclear?
Believe or disbelieve him, but the statement is unambiguous.
The accusations were specific - he works for a company that provides mobile solutions for Starbucks. They pulled their clients page from the web after this blew up. I'd expect something along the lines "I'm not the Jonathan Stark who works for Mobiquity" or "I'm him, but the idea was still solely mine and my employer pulled the clients page for reasons totally unrelated to the whole affair".
Considering his statement did not address the key provably true/false questions: Is Starbucks a client of his company, and, why is his company's clients page down...it's hard to not closely scrutinize his word choice here:
> 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.
That's all well and good, but removing their Clients page and the Google cache of it is pretty damning. Why cover your tracks if it was all above board?
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.
It could simply be Starbucks didn't want to be associated with the project, or they never gave Mobiquity permission to use their name as an endorsement. This stunt could have caused them to notice.
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.
The comment thread under that looks super fishy as well. All positive comments, on the internet? Yeah right. And most of them are well written? Maybe my bs detector is set too high, but I smell shenanigans.
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!