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Comment by Pheter | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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?

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:

FWIW, Mobuqity has made a statement to TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/the-vast-starbucks-conspira...

>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.”

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