It would be cool if something like this could be done for cheap microprocessor boards so people who can't afford to start with embedded development can be helped by others.
Jonathan's Card
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Re: Jonathan's Card
#12There's no money on the card? http://jonathanstark.com/card/api/latest
There's $46.88 now, it fluctuates a lot.
Re: Jonathan's Card
#13This is a really cool experiment. Coffee seems like the perfect use case since it's awkward to exploit, in that you're not going to buy $100 worth of coffee, just because the card has $100 on it. But what about other physical goods, like Barnes & Nobles, HEB, Home Depot?
Re: Jonathan's Card
#14It would be really fun to combine this kind of point of sale reward with games or puzzles or tasks, sort of like mechanical Turk combined with OKCupid or wufoo.
Cash prizes are less interesting for this kind of thing. (various studies)
Re: Jonathan's Card
#15Such a simple and wonderful idea; it brightened my Sunday. (Edit: I wonder how soon it will take SBX to decide that this is a vulnerability in their mobile app and change something that will break this.)
Re: Jonathan's Card
#16As somebody else mentioned, it's unfortunate that one bad person could ruin it for everybody else.
Is it possible to restrict the card only to coffee (to prevent huge catering orders)?
Re: Jonathan's Card
#17Although the bit about paying it forward and social sharing is a great idea on its own, I think I'm a tad more excited that he actually made an API for this. That's seriously awesome.
Re: Jonathan's Card
#18Whenever I go through a toll bridge, I frequently pay the toll of the person behind me. I've sometimes wondered if it propagates backward at all. For the Starbucks card, I would love to live in a society where this could work. Unfortunately it's one of those things where one anonymous bad egg will ruin (i.e., drain the account) for everyone else. Some way to restrict it to a community with less anonymity would help (…
For a more practical membership-share or coffee-club type of set up restrictions make sense...but in this case I think the anonymity of it all is the interesting part — seeing the behavior patterns emerge naturally and anonymously will be very telling.
Re: Jonathan's Card
#19As somebody else mentioned, it's unfortunate that one bad person could ruin it for everybody else. Is it possible to restrict the card only to coffee (to prevent huge catering orders)?
I don't believe you can, since Starbucks lets you use your card for any purchase. That said, even if you could, why restrict it? He mentions that the point of this is to be "an experiment in social sharing of physical goods", so making it something purely built on trust makes the experiment exciting and worthy. If someone does abuse it, then that's just a data point in the experiment; but, if it continues to be replenished, that's a neat observation and a certain +1 for human nature.
Re: Jonathan's Card
#20Interesting experiment in that the image is public with no signup/restriction to get at it. You would need to have a continuous stream of new "pay-it-forward" users to add money on the card, no? There are lots of coffee drinkers in the world... Wasn't there something in the news not too long ago about an investment firm that ran this way? :)
> Wasn't there something in the news not too long ago about an investment firm that ran this way? :)
Only if there's also a continuous stream of people who are drinking without paying. If, out of a sense of community responsibility, people pay in close to what they drink (or a little bit more), then this system works.