card on his blog with about a thousand visitors per day. As an experiment. About twenty-five people copied the code, and from that moment on could pay with this shared card. The next day the card was empty, which taught him that it technically worked. But half an hour later there was suddenly money on it again, even though he himself had not topped it up. Someone else had done that, via the app. And that started to happen more often. At that moment Jonathan started receiving emails from people who wanted to know what the balance on the card was when they were in Starbucks. Answering those emails quickly - because otherwise there is no point - became too much work.
So Jonathan wrote a script that read the balance, and tweeted the balance via @jonathanscard when it changed. That way, everyone in Starbucks could see if there was still a balance. With a link to his blog that still had the card details. Then Twitter went crazy. People blogged about it, it was on Techcrunch , Time, Guardian, national television and more. In those days, a balance of thirty dollars was gone within a minute, and a hundred dollars could just as easily appear a minute later. So in Starbucks you could sometimes pay, and sometimes you brother cell phone list couldn't. 'Just try again', the cashier would say.
At one point, people thought he was taking the money out himself and putting it in his own account, someone else was trying to sell the card, and Jonathan was accused of the whole thing being a Starbucks campaign. If you Google " lying corporate stooge ," he still comes up at the top. Stark wrote a nuanced response about it on Facebook .
That was about the time Starbucks pulled the card and terminated the account. That message is still on his blog: 'Today we lost our barcode, but of course, we never really needed it in the first place.' What do we learn from this? That unexpected parties and systems are emerging in the payment field. This was an experiment, but it proves in an unexpected way Priebatsch's keynote yesterday.