Man offers his Starbucks card online to everyone.

This an entirely COPY of Aug.11, 2011  TORONTO STAR newspaper article by Kenyon Wallace:

Mobile-app consultant Jonathan Stark is allowing anyone with Internet access to use his Starbucks card to buy a coffee. For everyone two people using it for a free coffee, he says, one person is actually adding money to the card.

JonathanStark.com

Man offers his Starbucks card online to everyone.
Is it for real?

You’re on your way to work and realize as you start dozing on the bus that you really need a coffee.
You stop at Starbucks to get a caffeine hit, but then you angrily discover you just spent your last buck on your bus ticket.
Fear not, coffee lovers. A new social experiment launched by Providence, Rhode Island-based mobile-app consultant Jonathan Stark aims to clear out those early-morning cobwebs even if you don’t have the cash.
Stark has made his Starbucks card available to anyone who has access to the Internet, and is inviting people to have a coffee on him. Or, if you’re in a giving mood, you can go online and add a few bucks to the card so that other sleepy-heads can give themselves a much-needed jolt in the morning. It’s just like the “take a penny, leave a penny” concept common at convenience stores.
All you have to do is go to Stark’s website, download the image of his card’s barcode, and give that to the cashier to scan when you order your coffee. (The scanners must be the hand-held type; the Star attempted to use the card and found that regular scanners don’t work.)
Since Stark launched the project last month, more than $9,000 in anonymous donations has been added to the card. A Twitter account linked to the card announces any balance updates every few minutes, so you can check before you order that venti that Jonathan’s card has enough on it to pay for it.
While more than 1,000 people have been enjoying free coffee courtesy of kind strangers, as with any Internet-based project involving a large brand name, Jonathan’s Card has encountered its fair share of skepticism. Bloggers are accusing Stark, a vice president at the mobile technology company Mobiquity, of duping users into participating in a viral marketing campaign on behalf of Starbucks.
“That’s just absurd,” Stark told the Star. “I’ve never taken a dime from Starbucks, and neither has Mobiquity. The thing that really bothers me is that the mere suggestion that this is some kind of scam could potentially could ruin the good feeling people were having, by making them feel like a sucker. That is really upsetting.”
One blogger in particular, Andrew Hetzel, a coffee-business consultant, brought readers’ attention to the fact that Mobiquity’s website used to feature a Starbucks logo on its clients page. That page has since been taken down as his company’s site is redesigned, Stark said.
Gina Woods, a Starbucks spokesperson, told the Star the company had no knowledge of Stark’s plan and has no relationship with him or Mobiquity.
Hetzel also points out that Stark’s idea is reminiscent of the Starbucks’ chain of cheer in which the company gives away cards, usually around Christmas, on which customers can enter the names of people for whom they wish to purchase coffee.
But Stark says the project was inspired by completely different reasons.
“Initially, I was just investigating mobile-payment solutions that were already in the marketplace, and the Starbucks app was one of them,” he explained. “At the time I began doing this, Starbucks did not yet have an app for Android phones, so I thought, ‘What if I just took an image of my Starbucks card, emailed it to my Android phone, and used that image to pay for coffee?’ Well, it worked and it just blew my mind.”
He posted the image to his blog, loaded $15 to the card, and encouraged others to do the same. Before long, the balance was zero, as people started using the image of the barcode.
But then the unexpected happened: On Saturday night, Stark checked the card’s balance. It had gone up. Someone had discovered that you can go online and reload other people’s Starbucks cards.
“As soon as I saw that, I thought, whoa, this is a gigantic change. By early the next morning, I posted a website that gave people instructions that told people how to put money on the card, and I wrote a little program that checked the balance of the card and posted it to a Twitter account called Jonathan’s Card,” he said. “It has just taken off from there.”
Asked what the results of the experiment say about human nature, Stark says, apart from the fact that it’s obvious a lot of people like free coffee, people are not only happy to pay for things with their phones, but they also seem to enjoy giving to others when the mode of delivery is relatively easy. The ratio of the number of people using the card to get free coffee versus putting money on it is about 2-to-1, he says.
“It gives a frictionless route that’s just personal enough, but not too personal, that allows people to easily make someone else’s day.”

  http://jonathanstark.com/

Twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard