ReadWriteEnterprise

Last week the latest viral craze brought about the end of an experiment by a programmer, Jonathan Stark, who works for Mobiquity, who wanted to make it easier for folks to get free coffee. Over the course of several weeks, Stark shared a scanned image of his Starbucks stored-value card online, so that anyone could download the image and use it to pay for coffee at most Starbucks. He also set up a Twitter feed to report on the current value of the card, and showed the processes that he used to set the entire experiment up. Let's look closer at the whole situation, examine some lessons learned for corporate app developers, and also try to set the record straight. We have a Storify page that puts all the links in context if you would rather go there.