Starbucks today announced that it has processed some 26 million payments from its mobile apps since the beginning of the year, accounting for $110m in revenue. That's only a drop in the bucket compared to the $11.7b it did in revenue last year, but it still represents five percent of the total Starbucks card business for the year. Starbucks also sees this part of its business accelerating — six million mobile app transactions were processed in the last nine weeks, double the previous nine-week period. 

While plenty of banks and technology companies are hard at work on mobile payments, Starbucks' strategy of charging ahead by integrating its app onto the existing payment card system seems to be working — iPhone and Android users currently pay by just scanning barcodes, leaving the door open for a future upgrade to a more seamless transaction system.