CardMe + Jonathan's Card

Jonathan's Card was a recent social experiment where Jonathan Stark made his Starbucks mobile payment image public to see how people would react to the opportunity to receive free coffee and/or "pay it forward" for a stranger.    To use Jonathan's Card to receive free coffee you would save the image to your mobile and then present the image to the cashier as payment when you purchased your coffee.

Purchasing with the card sounds simple enough, but there is a problem here that CardMe can solve.  We tend to take a lot of pictures with our iPhones.   As you take more and more pictures you bury the Jonathan's Card image in the middle of your camera roll making it harder to find at checkout time.  During the experiment, we used the CardMe location aware wallet to show Jonathan's Card at the neighborhood Starbucks.

This tutorial shows you how to configure CardMe to show a mobile payment image at your favorite Starbucks.  This assumes that you have an iPhone, you have already downloaded CardMe from the iTunes App Store, and you have saved the card image to your iPhone.

Step 1: Click the Add Card button, and drag the red pin to the location of your favorite Starbucks.   You can use the standard pinching gestures to zoom the map to a scale where you can find your  Starbucks.

Hint: The red pin starts at your current location, so if you do this steps at Starbucks, it is even easier.

Step 2: Click the expansion arrow to display the card details screen.  Type Starbucks as the place name at the top of the screen.  Then bring in the card image by tapping the camera button at the bottom of the screen and selecting Choose Existing to choose the image from your camera roll.  Then click Save.  Now you are all set.  When you run CardMe at that Starbucks it will show you the payment card in the main tab.

Troubleshooting:  Here are some tips to follow if the wrong card image is displayed on the main screen.    Try double-tapping the image to "wake up" the GPS and give CardMe another chance to display the correct image.  You have two options for browsing through your cards if that does not fix the problem.  On the main screen you can use the left and right swiping gestures to cycle through full screen images of your cards.   You can also use the My Cards screen to browse through a list of your cards.  Tapping the Starbucks entry on the My Cards list brings up a menu from which you can choose to View the image on the main screen.  

Hint: On My Cards you can choose to sort the cards by proximity to your current location or by name.  Sorting by name is a great way to find your Starbucks card when you are at a different location than the one you normally visit.
This tutorial showed how the CardMe location aware wallet was used to display a Starbucks  mobile payment card.   As more and more of your favorite vendors offer their own payment cards and apps, the location aware wallet becomes increasingly valuable, and hunting for the right payment app becomes increasingly inconvenient.