Mobile payments and the demise of the cash register

Here’s a grab bag of links to online coverage that I collected along the way:

• “Want a cup of coffee? Use Jonathan’s card – CNN.com”
• “‘Get a Coffee, Give a Coffee’ – Local News – San Francisco Bay Area, CA – San Francisco, CA – msnbc.com”
• “Jonathan’s Card: The Starbucks ‘Get a Coffee, Give a Coffee’ Social Experiment | Moneyland | TIME.com”
• “How to get more coffee than you can drink | Technology | The Guardian”
• “Skimming Jonathan’s Card For Fun And Philanthrophy – The Washington Post”
• “Want a cup of coffee? Use Jonathan’s card – Forbes.com”
• “Charting a High-Tech ‘Get a Coffee, Give a Coffee’ Experiment – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic”
• “Jonathan Stark wants you to use his Starbucks card – latimes.com”
• “Jonathan’s Card: Cool Social Experiment or Starbucks Marketing Stunt? | Adweek”
• “Jonathan’s Card: Free Starbucks Coffee Available Through Social Sharing Experiment | HuffPo”
• “Starbucks pulls plug on US social experiment | CIO Magazine”
• “Starbucks closes ‘Jonathan’s Card’ over misuse fears – CNN.com”
• “Free coffee: A social sharing experiment full of beans? – The Globe and Mail”
• “Want A Starbucks? Use Jonathan’s Card – The Consumerist”
• “Radical Sharing Works: This Guy Lets the World Use His Starbucks Card for Free (UPDATED) – Business – GOOD”
• “mental_floss Blog » Jonathan’s Starbucks Card Wants to Buy You a Drink”
• “Penny Arcade – The Tragedy Of The Commons”
• “The Vast Starbucks Conspiracy: Jonathan’s Card Wasn’t Faked | TechCrunch”
• “Jonathan Stark Posts Starbucks Card Online for Entire Internet to Use | Laughing Squid”
• “Lessons Learned from Jonathan’s Starbucks Card Experiment | RWW”
• “Want free coffee and got an iPhone? Use Jonathan’s Card | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog”
• “Starbucks Card Guy Solicits $8,700 in Coffees for Strangers | Mashable”
• “If you’re strapped for cash at a Starbucks, use Jonathan’s card – Tech Products & Geek News | Geek.com”
• “A Starbucks Karma-Based Social Experiment | ZippyCart Blog E-Commerce News”
• “Does the Internet Make Us More Altruistic? | Endless Innovation | Big Think”
• “Drink Up, the Java Is Free | Credit Union Times”
• “Finextra: Free coffee up for grabs in social payments experiment”
• “Jonathan’s Card Raises Interesting Ethical Debate: Who Decides Which Uses Of A Shared Resource Are ‘Right’? | Techdirt”
• “Jonathan’s Starbucks Card – Eater National”
• “Mobile wallet experiment means free coffee – CBS5 – KPHO – Phoenix News, Weather and Sports”
• “Socialized Coffee, One Smart Phone at a Time | The SunBreak”
• “Starbucks Gossip: Starbucks customers can now “pay it forward” on their cellphone”
• “Starbucks nixes Jonathan’s Card: No more free coffee? | Seattle’s Big Blog – seattlepi.com”
• “The ‘Free Coffee’ Starbucks Card Has Died. What The Social Experiment Really Meant. | Singularity Hub”
• “This guy wants you to use his Starbucks card for free — really | Seattle’s Big Blog”
• “This Mobile Developer’s Got Your Next Starbucks Coffee | PCWorld”
• “Twitter+Starbucks App Account = Social Coffee Experiment : Jonathan’s Card – SocialTimes.com”

The Web Ahead #7: Jonathan Stark on Mobile

The Developer’s Guide to Mobile Frameworks

Purpose, Commitment Vital for App Success

Web Storage variables (i.e., localStorage and sessionStorage) are available to any pages retrieved from the same origin. This means that a page can access the local and session storage variables set by any other page that shares the same scheme (e.g., http, https), domain (e.g., www.example.com), and port (e.g., 80, 443, 8080).

During my DIWD talk, I mistakenly told the audience that visibility to Web Storage variables was limited to the current page. There were two factors that led me to make this dopey statement:

• I typically use web storage in the context of single page web apps and didn’t have as much experience using them across an entire site.
• The dev tools in my fave browser (Chrome) only display local and session storage data on pages that reference them. You can have access to localStorage but if you don’t actually reference them on the current page, they don’t show up in the dev tools UI.

You can experiment with my test pages here.

NOTE: If you load the test pages in Safari, you might notice that multiple local stores are created for the same origin on each refresh but all are empty except one. I assume this is a bug and will eventually disappear.

My sincerest apologies to the DIWD audience!

Jonathan’s Card: Lessons from a Social Experiment

For future reference, the user agent string of the new web browser is:

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; SAMSUNG; SGH-i917)"

As you can see, Mango is running IE Mobile 9. So far, it appears to be a significant improvement over IE Mobile 7 with both performance and UI.

According to http://html5test.com IE Mobile 9 scores a 140, which is the lowest of the modern smartphone web browsers, but is up from a dismal 25 with IE Mobile 7. Amen for progress.

Overall, the entire UI seems snappier and more responsive. I’ve like Windows Phone since day one, other than the crappy web browser and general lack of apps so I’m stoked that the browser has gotten a nice upgrade.

What percentage of iOS App Store apps require a connection to the internet?

It took five hours before anyone answered correctly (BTW – thanks for all the replies and kudos to @Beyond_Deathday and @jeffreyisham for nailing it).

The percentage of iOS App Store apps that require an internet connection is 100. You can’t install iOS App Store apps without a connection to the internet.

Whether or not you think my question was misleading, the fact that installation occurred to almost no one is significant. This reveals an unfair bias in the way people perceive native apps vs web apps. Namely, that it is generally assumed that many or most native apps don’t need a connection to the internet, and that all web apps require one.

The reality is that both native apps and web apps require a connection at install time, and both can run perfectly well without a connection after installation. Whether it makes sense to run certain apps offline – be they native or web based – depends on what the app does. The point is that either approach is capable of running offline after installation.

Please note that I’m making no claims as to which approach (web or native) is easier. Making such a determination would first require knowing the specifics of a given app. It’s not the kind of thing that can be debated in abstract terms.

As Amazon, Google, and other large players choose to reject Apple’s terms, we are going to see more and more examples of what “installed mobile web apps” are truly capable of. Furthermore, wireless coverage is only going to get better. It’s going to take a long time, but eventually there will be no such thing as offline.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments here or in reply to the Twitter or G+ posts. Cheers!

UPDATE: As John Mark rightly points out in the comments, you can install iOS apps directly on devices without an internet connection if you have an iOS Developer Enterprise license and have physical access to the end users devices.