Starbucks? There's an app for that.

Congrats, caffeine addicts. You could soon purchase your Starbucks with your smart phone, thanks to the Starbucks Card Mobile App. It’s like having your Starbucks Reward card without the plastic.

Starbucks in the middle of the trial run for mobile payments, paying for coffee on your smart phone, at 300 participating locations in NYC and Long Island. That would make sense because you literally find a Starbucks on every corner in NYC and Long Island.

Absolute technological brilliance if you ask me…paying for a product without paper or plastic, but technology.

“In addition to the payment capability, customers can also keep track of their My Starbucks Rewards status and reload their card while they are on the way to Starbucks or in line,” said Brady Brewer, vice president-Starbucks Card and Loyalty. “Expanding our mobile footprint gives our customers a new way to connect with Starbucks on the go and transforms the way customers experience their Starbucks Card through the mobile app.”

This week in IT, we studied the case of Frito-Lay and how executives made changes in company-wide infrastructure. One key reason executives made this change is because they realized the correlation between quick decision making and the need for information. Starbucks executives obviously recognized this correlation when they created this app. Baristas need the information quickly to speed up orders, and if they get the payments and order ahead of time, efficiency increases. IT achieves it goal; another massive organization changes based on technology.

What will we think of next?

If you're going to steal, by all means, be ethical!

So obviously in Sweden, ethical standards are pretty high.

Here is the IT scenario:

A professor at Sweden's Umeå University has his laptop stolen. I'm guessing this laptop has a good bit of important stuff on it, especially since this professor teaches at Umeå University, the seventh best college to go to school, according to this website.

Anyway, the laptop is stolen and a week later, the Swedish professor receives a USB stick in the mail with ALL of the data from his laptop. So, a perpetrator steals his laptop, but mails him all of this data. Unbelievable.

A local paper quoted the Swedish professor saying "this story makes me feel hope for humanity." Well, why steal the laptop in the first place?

According to the article, "This [scenario] is the best possible argument against those fingerprint-scanning laptops we're bound to ever hear."

So, without the help of some nifty IT software, this victimized Swedish professor would have lost a good bit of data. We as a society are leaning more and more on technology to store some of our most precious possessions, which in these days is now coming in the form of information.

I would love to know your thoughts on this one. Is this an ethical argument? Does this prove that IS and IT are not only vital in a firm at all organizational levels, but also to us on a personal level?