I was expecting controversy over this and the accusations that his project is just a Starbucks marketing thing didn't surprise me at all. Still, I see trusty people defending him on Twitter so let's see where this goes.

Really? What more would you have liked him to have said?

Clear up his professional associations with Starbucks.

> "The Jonathan's Card experiment was completely my idea, Starbucks had absolutely nothing to do with it, and until recently, I was scared to death that Starbucks might sue the crap out of me."

What part of that is unclear?

Believe or disbelieve him, but the statement is unambiguous.

The accusations were specific - he works for a company that provides mobile solutions for Starbucks. They pulled their clients page from the web after this blew up. I'd expect something along the lines "I'm not the Jonathan Stark who works for Mobiquity" or "I'm him, but the idea was still solely mine and my employer pulled the clients page for reasons totally unrelated to the whole affair".

Update: Mobiquity has spoken up and said it was indeed a coincidence.

Considering his statement did not address the key provably true/false questions: Is Starbucks a client of his company, and, why is his company's clients page down...it's hard to not closely scrutinize his word choice here:

> Starbucks had absolutely nothing to do with it

It's possible that Jonathan started this as a hobby project and as a bonus, he'd be helping out a client indirectly. PErhaps later on Starbucks did give some sort of buy-in. But even if it still has nothing official to do with the project, the question remains: how truthful was this statement on the project homepage:

>this site is totally not affiliated with Starbucks.

Frankly, if he had not written that and just not mentioned Starbucks corporate at all, I don't think there'd be any indignation. But that was the very first line of his project page.