The gifting side
of m-commerce may take off well before proximity payments themselves. In fact, one of the few big success stories in m-payment -- Starbucks -- is using Twitter as a channel for mobile gifting.
Announced by company head of the mobile effort, Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman, this “tweet-a-coffee” model allows a user to send a $5.00 Starbucks Card eGift to a friend.
Users have to link their own Starbucks gift card or credit card and relevant permissions to their Twitter account. But once this is done, Starbucks will read your tweets using the @tweetacoffee
handle and credit the gift to anyone you mention under their Twitter handle. The tweet can be personalized with a message as well. The recipient of the tweet will receive an email message from
Starbucks with the $5 gift card that can be redeemed from their smartphone.
To encourage the new model, Starbucks was also giving $5 gift eCards to the first 100,000 customers who tweet
a coffee to a friend.
Person-to-person payments are being seen by some m-payment players as an entryway for consumers to become accustomed to mobile commerce models. Square recently
launched a Square Cash product that transfers money between parties via email.