Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and listener Charlie Kniehouse
Speaker 1: tweeted to the show a couple of weeks back, asking
Speaker 1: that I do an episode covering the company Niantic, which
Speaker 1: is arguably most famous for bringing the game Pokemon Go
Speaker 1: to the world. And that's a great idea. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's so good that it's going to be two episodes.
Speaker 1: This is just episode one. Now. I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 1: tech Stuff way back in the day covered Pokemon Go
Speaker 1: when it first came out, But there is a lot
Speaker 1: more to talk about now. Plus now I actually know
Speaker 1: what Pokemon's are and as they say, you got to
Speaker 1: get all of them. But I kid the millennials, This
Speaker 1: old Gen X podcaster is gonna die into the story
Speaker 1: of Niantic, the games that has produced, and the tech
Speaker 1: that makes it all possible. We'll talk a bit about
Speaker 1: augmented reality, GEO location and combining online in real world experiences,
Speaker 1: and in the next episode will also cover stuff like
Speaker 1: micro transactions too, because those will also come into play,
Speaker 1: and they're incredibly important. But first, let's learn the history
Speaker 1: of the company. Our story begins in eighteen forty nine. Okay,
Speaker 1: not really, but I do want to cover the origin
Speaker 1: of the name, which actually comes fairly late in our story.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk about the origin itself first
Speaker 1: because it's a neat story that I did not know
Speaker 1: until I looked into this, you know topic. So back
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteenth century, the gold rush was in
Speaker 1: full swing out in California, and it brought people from
Speaker 1: all over North and Central America and beyond, and nearly
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty fortune hunters from Panama boarded a ship
Speaker 1: named the Niantic. Now the Niantic was originally built in
Speaker 1: Connecticut and was quickly finding that this would be a
Speaker 1: very lucrative business transporting people to California. So this ship
Speaker 1: was originating out of Panama bound for San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: the ship made it to San Francisco safely, and all
Speaker 1: the passengers jumped on out to search for gold, and
Speaker 1: shortly after that most of the crew left as well.
Speaker 1: In fact, each day that passed more crew were deserting
Speaker 1: the ship, and the crew were just convinced they had
Speaker 1: a better chance of making their fortune if they looked
Speaker 1: for gold rather than, you know, try and sail on
Speaker 1: a boat. So they the owners had a couple of choices.
Speaker 1: They could try to recruit a new crew, but that
Speaker 1: was hard to do. Everyone wanted to go search for gold.
Speaker 1: Or they could just say, yeah, how about we look
Speaker 1: for gold too, So they made the decision to beach
Speaker 1: the vessel at the corner of Clay and Sandso Streets.
Speaker 1: Now these days that intersection is about five blocks away
Speaker 1: from the piers at San Francisco. However, back in eighty
Speaker 1: nine they were part of the shoreline for the city.
Speaker 1: The Niantic became a store for a little while. Then
Speaker 1: it was built into a hotel, like you had the
Speaker 1: front of a boat sticking out of this hotel. But
Speaker 1: the Great Fire of eighteen fifty one burned the ship
Speaker 1: down to the waterline, along with much of San Francisco.
Speaker 1: The city rebuilt, and they used a lot of the
Speaker 1: debris and rubble to create a landfill, and they built
Speaker 1: the shoreline out. It extended out several blocks from where
Speaker 1: it had been, and the remains of the Niantic were
Speaker 1: buried underneath the new Land. So under that intersection there
Speaker 1: are the remains of the ship Niantic. What does this
Speaker 1: have to do with the company, Well, it's you know
Speaker 1: where the name came from. But otherwise I admit that
Speaker 1: this was a tangent. However, I thought it was way
Speaker 1: too knee to pass up. Why should Nolan Ben get
Speaker 1: all the fun over at ridiculous history? The story of
Speaker 1: the company itself, you could argue, would begin with Google
Speaker 1: right around twenty ten. And I should add that there
Speaker 1: are a series of articles on tech Crunch written by
Speaker 1: Greg Komparek that were absolutely pivotal for my research. Komparek
Speaker 1: did an amazing job and I'm just gonna lightly skimmed
Speaker 1: the surface of some of the stuff he covered, So
Speaker 1: I highly recommend checking out those articles if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more. They are behind a paywall, but you know,
Speaker 1: good content is worth paying for anyway. I also should
Speaker 1: add I don't have any affiliation with him. I don't
Speaker 1: know him, never met him, but I really like these articles.
Speaker 1: Let's get back to it. The Google of twenty ten
Speaker 1: was a bit different from the Google of today. It
Speaker 1: was well on its way to being a mega corporation
Speaker 1: that was already in the cards. It had already launched Android,
Speaker 1: it had already released Google Chrome, it had purchased YouTube,
Speaker 1: but Eric Schmidt was still CEO back then, and the
Speaker 1: company had incentives in place to encourage employees to innovate
Speaker 1: and work on things outside their normal work projects. In fact,
Speaker 1: until Google had an official policy that said employees could
Speaker 1: use up to twenty percent of their work hours to
Speaker 1: work on their own projects, many of which would evolve
Speaker 1: into official Google projects or get incorporated into existing ones.
Speaker 1: The company also encouraged employees to come up with startup ideas,
Speaker 1: turning Google into a sort of incubator for startups. It
Speaker 1: gave employees who had ideas the support they needed to
Speaker 1: experiment and see if their concepts could be viable businesses,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, it kept them at Google. They wouldn't just,
Speaker 1: you know, leave to go and do it themselves. One
Speaker 1: of those employees was John Hank, who, spoiler alert, would
Speaker 1: go on to found Niantic. And Hank's story is a
Speaker 1: bit more complicated than just saying he was a Google employee.
Speaker 1: He actually worked for a different company that got fired
Speaker 1: by Google several years earlier. In fact, let's spend some
Speaker 1: time to learn about Hank. He was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: and he grew up in Texas. He attended Cross Plains
Speaker 1: High School. He enrolled at the University of Texas at
Speaker 1: Austin to get his undergrad degree, and a few years
Speaker 1: later he enrolled in grad school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker 1: That's where he earned his m b a. He also
Speaker 1: worked at three d O as a producer for a
Speaker 1: couple of years. I did a full episode about three
Speaker 1: d O last year titled The Tragedy of three d OH.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to go into a full rundown
Speaker 1: of what happened at that company here, However, I'll give
Speaker 1: you a quick overview the three d O. The console
Speaker 1: was really more of a set of specifications, which meant
Speaker 1: that the company behind it created the design for how
Speaker 1: the console would work from a functional standpoint, but then
Speaker 1: they licensed that out to manufacturers who would then make
Speaker 1: their own version of that console. Ideally, this would mean
Speaker 1: you could buy I in a version of the three
Speaker 1: d O console form you could buy it from like
Speaker 1: LG or Pana Sonic or whatever, and each version would
Speaker 1: have its own look to it based on what the
Speaker 1: manufacturer made, but they should all be able to play
Speaker 1: the same games that have been made for the three
Speaker 1: D O platform. Unfortunately, this business approach failed to catch on,
Speaker 1: and not long after Hank joined the team, the company
Speaker 1: was all but extinct, but Hank co founded a new
Speaker 1: company called The Big Network and served as its chief
Speaker 1: operating officer. The Big Network served as sort of a
Speaker 1: nexus of casual games online stuff like you know, puzzle games,
Speaker 1: card games, trivia games, that kind of thing. It was
Speaker 1: meant to appeal to a wide spectrum of people, not
Speaker 1: just those who refer to themselves as gamers. The company
Speaker 1: aimed to create an interactive online space where people could
Speaker 1: get together and play these games. Not long after they
Speaker 1: founded The Big Network, another company came around with an
Speaker 1: acquisition offer. That company was e Universe, a retail company
Speaker 1: that mainly sold music and video media. The company would
Speaker 1: go on to become Intermix Media, Incorporated, which would arguably
Speaker 1: be best known for being part of one of the
Speaker 1: worst acquisitions in tech history. That would be when Rupert
Speaker 1: Murdock's News Corporation acquired Intermix for more than half a
Speaker 1: billion dollars around two thousand five, and that was mostly
Speaker 1: because Intermix happened to own a little social media site
Speaker 1: called MySpace. But of course we know that deal didn't
Speaker 1: work out so well for dus core, but this isn't
Speaker 1: a story about them. And anyway, the e Universe acquisition
Speaker 1: of Big Network meant Hank, as a co founder, came
Speaker 1: into a decent amount of money. His next venture was
Speaker 1: to co found a new company called Keyhole, and even
Speaker 1: that is oversimplifying things a bit, as Keyhole itself grew
Speaker 1: out of a separate company called Intrinsic Graphics. And I
Speaker 1: know stories are complicated, all right, So Intrinsic Ethics existed
Speaker 1: independently before John Hank got involved. It was a pre
Speaker 1: existing company and the company's main goal was to create
Speaker 1: a cross platform video game engine. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it would be an underlying technology that would allow game
Speaker 1: developers to create games on top of it, and those
Speaker 1: games could run on different types of machines like Mac
Speaker 1: and PC and game consoles, which would mean that game
Speaker 1: developers would be able to create games, or at least
Speaker 1: the foundation of games that would then be able to
Speaker 1: run on all these different systems in a more efficient
Speaker 1: way than just contracting the job out to some other
Speaker 1: company to make a port of their video game. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things that Intrinsic Graphics made was a
Speaker 1: demo in which you could see a zoom dealt view
Speaker 1: of the Earth and then you could zoom into it
Speaker 1: like a lot. You could go from an orbital altitude
Speaker 1: to a satellite view of your home. And the demo
Speaker 1: was a really big hit. In fact, it was big
Speaker 1: enough that Intrinsic Games decided to spin off the demo
Speaker 1: as the cornerstone of a new company. That company would
Speaker 1: be Keyhole, the one that John Hank would join right
Speaker 1: at the start in two thousands, so he was a
Speaker 1: co founder. Though he came into the team, he was
Speaker 1: not part of the Intrinsic Graphics group. So Intrinsic Graphics
Speaker 1: made tools that could work on multiple platforms, but that
Speaker 1: tool was really expensive and it was ahead of its time.
Speaker 1: Other companies would later make this their core business, but
Speaker 1: at the time in two thousand it was really untenable,
Speaker 1: and Intrinsic Graphics faltered and shut down in two thousand
Speaker 1: three and sold off its assets. But the leaders at
Speaker 1: Keyhole were able to spin off from Intrinsic Graphics and
Speaker 1: they were able to keep things moving by themselves. However,
Speaker 1: it wasn't easy. The company was not generating a ton
Speaker 1: of revenue, and from the sound of things, was flirting
Speaker 1: with following in intrinsic Graphics footsteps and shutting down prematurely.
Speaker 1: Keyhole landed a few contracts that kept things moving, including
Speaker 1: one with the US Central Intelligence Agency or c i A.
Speaker 1: But it was really touch and go for a while,
Speaker 1: and then Google decided it just had to have Keyhole,
Speaker 1: and Google pounced on it in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and that is how John Hank became a Googler. He
Speaker 1: went along with Keyhole to Google. Now. According to Hank,
Speaker 1: he thought he would be at the company for about
Speaker 1: six months, and it turned out it was more like
Speaker 1: a decade. Keyhole would become the core of the Google
Speaker 1: Earth product, and Hank, over time would go on to
Speaker 1: oversee Google's GEO products, so stuff like Google Maps and
Speaker 1: Google Earth. And that brings us back up to the
Speaker 1: year twenty ten. That was the year that Google CEO
Speaker 1: Schmidt announced that Marissa Meyer would shift her focus from
Speaker 1: the search division at Google to the GEO division, and
Speaker 1: Hank felt like he was in a bit of a squeeze.
Speaker 1: He was already overseeing that division and felt that there
Speaker 1: really wasn't enough room from a leadership standpoint for both
Speaker 1: Meyer and himself. And one of these days I'll have
Speaker 1: to do a full episode about Marissa Meyer, because she
Speaker 1: is a very important person in technology. She's been involved
Speaker 1: in some pretty massive stories, some of them really rocky ones.
Speaker 1: But I should also add that Hank never criticized Meyer.
Speaker 1: He said he actually thought she was a really good leader,
Speaker 1: a good boss, and he liked her. But his concern
Speaker 1: was that her job and his job would overlap so
Speaker 1: much that he would largely be made redundant, like there
Speaker 1: wouldn't be enough work for the two of them. So
Speaker 1: Hank announced in January eleven that he was going to
Speaker 1: depart Google and the GEO division. So his original plan
Speaker 1: was to resign from Google and concentrate on creating some
Speaker 1: sort of new business. Larry Page Over at Google didn't
Speaker 1: want to see Hank leave. Google never wants to see
Speaker 1: people leave if they can help it, unless it's on
Speaker 1: Google's terms, So the two set down to talk things over.
Speaker 1: Hank spoke about an idea he had that would marry
Speaker 1: two of the things he had worked on in the past,
Speaker 1: gameplay and geolocation features, so this conversation would include elements
Speaker 1: that would ultimately find their way into the game. Ingress
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about that in a little bit.
Speaker 1: Page convinced Hank to do that work to create geolocation
Speaker 1: games with an element of augmented reality to them. Within
Speaker 1: Google itself. The company would create the environment within which
Speaker 1: Hank could develop his idea. So Hank agreed to stay
Speaker 1: on with Google. This coincided with work being done by
Speaker 1: others at Google who had been trying to create that
Speaker 1: incubator program I mentioned earlier. See Google had this problem
Speaker 1: with developers leaving to go and do their own thing.
Speaker 1: After a while, people would get experience, they would build
Speaker 1: up some wealth at Google. Then they would resign and
Speaker 1: go found startups so that they could do whatever it
Speaker 1: was they were passionate about, and they would be totally
Speaker 1: independent from the old company. And losing talent is always tough.
Speaker 1: The vacuum that's left behind is hard to fill. So
Speaker 1: Google had a vested interest in creating ways for people
Speaker 1: to pursue startup ideas without you know, actually leaving the company.
Speaker 1: Hank's project would be one of the early ones. Hank
Speaker 1: got a budget, and a deadline of two years to
Speaker 1: bring his startup idea to fruition. The parties agreed eventually
Speaker 1: to a contract extension, so it went out a little
Speaker 1: beyond two years, and Hank made certain that when the
Speaker 1: time was up, when this expired, no matter what state
Speaker 1: his startup might be in, he would be the one
Speaker 1: who would have the authority to say if the group
Speaker 1: we're going to stay with Google, or if it would
Speaker 1: spin off to become its own thing. He was able
Speaker 1: to get that assurance. His project included people who had
Speaker 1: worked with him way back in the Keyhole days, but
Speaker 1: it also included lots of other people as well, people
Speaker 1: who found the idea of creating a company that may
Speaker 1: games that mixed augmented reality and geolocation applications together to
Speaker 1: be really compelling. So Nanti Labs came together, but it
Speaker 1: did not have that name yet. One of the earliest
Speaker 1: projects the team worked on was a proof of concept
Speaker 1: game they called Battle s f As in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and the idea was that you would go visit physical
Speaker 1: locations in the city of San Francisco, and you would
Speaker 1: use this game to link your physical location to your
Speaker 1: in game location, and you would use a virtual military
Speaker 1: force to try and take over the area you were in.
Speaker 1: Your physical location determined where within the game you were,
Speaker 1: so after a successful attack, you might walk a few
Speaker 1: blocks and try to take over that neighboring region. Other
Speaker 1: players could try to take over your territory, so you
Speaker 1: had to revisit locations to defend yourself or shore up
Speaker 1: your forces. As a game, it was fairly bare bones,
Speaker 1: but it was really interesting and the team felt reas
Speaker 1: heard that they were onto something. But Battle SF was
Speaker 1: far too limited to be a viable public release. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just checked. Uh. It turns out that there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people, um most of them, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, they don't even live in San Francisco. But
Speaker 1: the group was just getting started. I've got a lot
Speaker 1: more to say, but let's take a quick break. One
Speaker 1: fun story that compart It covers in his piece about
Speaker 1: Neantic is that the internal gain that Battle SF also
Speaker 1: gave rise to neantics first cheater, and the story goes
Speaker 1: that one employee figured out how to trick his phone
Speaker 1: into thinking he was at a different physical location than
Speaker 1: his real one. It's called spoofing, or it's a type
Speaker 1: of spoofing. There's actually lots of different types of spoofing.
Speaker 1: It all involves tricking technology and to think you are
Speaker 1: somewhere or someone else than you really are, and this
Speaker 1: would be something that Meantick would have to deal with
Speaker 1: further down the road. It's a common issue with games
Speaker 1: that involve geolocation elements, and there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways to do this, to use tricks that convince
Speaker 1: your device that you're actually somewhere other than where you
Speaker 1: really are. In fact, I even did this myself way
Speaker 1: back in the day. It was so that I could
Speaker 1: participate in a game connected to the J J Abrams
Speaker 1: Star Trek reboot. That game required you to visit real
Speaker 1: world locations in places that were, let's say, inconvenient to
Speaker 1: my home in Atlanta, So I cheated because I wanted
Speaker 1: to see what else the game had to offer. Otherwise
Speaker 1: I would have had to travel out to California a lot,
Speaker 1: and while I like California, I don't like it enough
Speaker 1: to jump on intercontinental flights multiple times if I don't
Speaker 1: have to do it. Anyway, this employee was spoofing in
Speaker 1: order to play the game late at night, but not
Speaker 1: actually going to location, so this person wasn't getting up
Speaker 1: at one in the morning to go across town. They
Speaker 1: were just using different tricks to have their phone think
Speaker 1: they were across town. And that was an early queue
Speaker 1: to Niantic that this could be something they would have
Speaker 1: to keep in mind in the future. Next on the
Speaker 1: timeline was a game project called field Trip. This idea
Speaker 1: was to locate places that might be interesting. Perhaps they
Speaker 1: could be an art installment, or it could be a
Speaker 1: historic building. You know, it could be anything that is
Speaker 1: worth looking at and knowing about. But they would be
Speaker 1: kind of like hidden gems, stuff that you might not
Speaker 1: be aware of because you never happened to look that way.
Speaker 1: And then they wanted to map that data against users
Speaker 1: typical routes. So let's use my typical route as an example.
Speaker 1: So when I go into the office, which admittedly I
Speaker 1: don't do nearly as frequently these days, but when I
Speaker 1: do go in, I walk there, and it's a three
Speaker 1: mile walk from my house. Takes me about an hour
Speaker 1: to go there. One way. My walk takes me through
Speaker 1: a pretty funky part of Atlanta called Little Five Points,
Speaker 1: and then I end up connecting to a big pedestrian
Speaker 1: and cyclist path called the belt line, and I take
Speaker 1: that up the rest of the way to Pont City Market,
Speaker 1: which is where our office is. So to go home,
Speaker 1: I just walked that same path, but in reverse. Now
Speaker 1: there's some interesting things to see along my pathway, but
Speaker 1: there could be a lot of other stuff that I
Speaker 1: would find fascinating or enriching that might just be a
Speaker 1: block out of my way, or maybe down an alternate
Speaker 1: path that would still get me to work more or
Speaker 1: less at the same time, but it would bring me
Speaker 1: through areas I otherwise wouldn't see. That was the goal
Speaker 1: of Field Trip, to create a product that would encourage
Speaker 1: people to explore a bit off their normal beaten path.
Speaker 1: The team partnered with a publishing house called Arcadia to
Speaker 1: create a database of interesting locations, but then they needed
Speaker 1: to geo tag those locations. It was one thing to
Speaker 1: know about them, it's another thing to link them too
Speaker 1: physical locations in the world and have that represented within
Speaker 1: the app. Ultimately, they had to manually geo tag these
Speaker 1: locations after attempts at automation fell short. That actually limited
Speaker 1: how much they could do because it is hard to
Speaker 1: operate at a global scale when it's falling to manual tagging.
Speaker 1: But it was in this process that they learned about
Speaker 1: the Niantic, the ship I talked about at the top
Speaker 1: of the show, so that's when they took their name
Speaker 1: from that ship, and they officially became known as Niantic Labs.
Speaker 1: Field Trip would launch as a smartphone app in although
Speaker 1: originally it was supposed to be a Google Glass app,
Speaker 1: but Google Glass obviously did not take off quite in
Speaker 1: the way that people had hoped, so they were able
Speaker 1: to pivot and make it a smart phone application. However,
Speaker 1: the user experience wasn't um It wasn't particularly well designed
Speaker 1: because users found that as they were just trying to
Speaker 1: go from one place to another in their daily lives,
Speaker 1: their phone notifications kept going off to say things like, hey,
Speaker 1: you should really go this way a couple of blocks,
Speaker 1: and that became more disruptive than interesting. So while people
Speaker 1: thought the idea was cool, the actual experience became something
Speaker 1: of an irritation, and folks would tend to turn the
Speaker 1: app off after they lived with it for just a
Speaker 1: little bit. But this was a learning experience for Niantic.
Speaker 1: Field Trip, like I said, launched in twelve It was
Speaker 1: by most estimates of failure, but the team learned a lot,
Speaker 1: and they realized that by combining elements of Battle SF
Speaker 1: and things they had built into Field Trip, they might
Speaker 1: make a compelling game that reaches beyond San Francisco. So
Speaker 1: the idea was that it would be a real world
Speaker 1: multiplayer game played through smart phones. The game would have
Speaker 1: two factions, and players would have a choice of joining
Speaker 1: one or the other and try to swing control of
Speaker 1: regions in the real world to their own faction that
Speaker 1: would be represented in fiction through the smartphone, so both
Speaker 1: an augmented reality and an alternate reality style game. The
Speaker 1: control points where you would actually try and do this
Speaker 1: would center around interesting places in the real world, kind
Speaker 1: of like Field Trip. So in other words, the real
Speaker 1: world exploration elements of Field Trip would match with the
Speaker 1: regional control gameplay of BATTLESF. And the result was a
Speaker 1: new project of the group titled Ingress. The plot behind
Speaker 1: Ingress sounds like it comes from a Neil Stevenson novel.
Speaker 1: A research institute discovers a new kind of matter called
Speaker 1: exotic matter, or XM. The two factions have a fundamental
Speaker 1: disagreement about exotic matter. One side, called the Enlightened, wants
Speaker 1: to exploit XM to Humanity's advantage right away. The other side,
Speaker 1: the Resistance sees x M as a potential existential threat
Speaker 1: that could lead to humanity's extinction and does not want
Speaker 1: to go down that path, at least not immediately. And
Speaker 1: when I played, I played as enlightened. These days, I
Speaker 1: might actually side with the Resistance anyway. That was the
Speaker 1: basis for the game, which launched in late twent Gameplay
Speaker 1: centered around in game sites called portals, which were anchored
Speaker 1: to real world points of interest. I remember walking to
Speaker 1: work and I would play this game. I would interact
Speaker 1: with portals along the way and try to take them
Speaker 1: from the Resistance. As I made my way to the office,
Speaker 1: my trip takes me past a lot of murals and
Speaker 1: street art, much of which had been tagged and put
Speaker 1: into the game as portals. Controlling portals would give one
Speaker 1: faction more control over a region than the other faction had,
Speaker 1: and I saw control shift several times, though I played
Speaker 1: the game for a few months before I kind of
Speaker 1: fell off of it. The original version of Ingress is
Speaker 1: no more. Niantic sunset it in September two, nineteen, but
Speaker 1: an updated version with a slightly different backstory launched in
Speaker 1: this one's called Ingress Prime, and the story of the
Speaker 1: game actually incorporates the original Ingress game into it as
Speaker 1: part of its own canon. So, in other words, Ingress
Speaker 1: Prime says, there was a game called Ingress, but that
Speaker 1: game was really a cover for what's really going on.
Speaker 1: There are layers within layers and the illuminatis behind it all.
Speaker 1: I tells you, Okay, not really, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of that that flavor. But getting into the fine
Speaker 1: details of all the game stuff would require numerous episodes
Speaker 1: to explain that plot, and I'm not sure I can
Speaker 1: really follow all of it, and none of it really
Speaker 1: matters as far as explaining the evolution of Niantic and
Speaker 1: the tech that the company used. So we're going to just,
Speaker 1: you know, jump past that. But let's talk about the
Speaker 1: tech for a second. So these early projects like Battle,
Speaker 1: sf Field, Trip, and Ingress all had elements of geolocation
Speaker 1: and augmented reality incorporated into them, and the a R
Speaker 1: stuff was a bit more subtle than what I typically
Speaker 1: think about when I hear the term augmented reality. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but when I think of
Speaker 1: a R, I think about wearing some sort of headset
Speaker 1: or special glasses, and I think about looking at the
Speaker 1: world around me and seeing it transform in some way
Speaker 1: through digital overlays on those lenses that are acting like
Speaker 1: transparent displays. Maybe I get a data redoubt of the
Speaker 1: area around me. Maybe I'm seeing on screen directions that
Speaker 1: guide me to my next turn as I go to
Speaker 1: a different location. Maybe I'm seeing a list of businesses
Speaker 1: that are inside a particular building. Maybe I'm looking at
Speaker 1: a historic representation of what my surroundings would have looked
Speaker 1: like a century ago. You get the idea, I'm seeing
Speaker 1: some sort of digital augmentation of my view of the world.
Speaker 1: But if I take my glasses off, I just see
Speaker 1: the world as it really is around me. Stuff like
Speaker 1: field Trip and Ingress were a bit more subtle when
Speaker 1: it comes to augmented reality. In the case of field Trip,
Speaker 1: it was more about giving you digital information that would
Speaker 1: nudge you to explore your surroundings a little bit more,
Speaker 1: perhaps allowing you to come across an interesting location you
Speaker 1: otherwise would have just passed right by. It wasn't so
Speaker 1: much about augmenting your experience at your location, but rather
Speaker 1: inviting you to explore. Ingress would do a similar thing,
Speaker 1: but couched it in the form of a game. You
Speaker 1: would see within the app where nearby portals were, and
Speaker 1: once you've got to those physical locations, you could then
Speaker 1: interact with the portal within the game. But those physical
Speaker 1: locations were also the sites of interesting stuff, So if
Speaker 1: you took time to look up from your screen, you
Speaker 1: could potentially you appreciate something you might not otherwise have seen.
Speaker 1: It was an augmented reality, but it wasn't hitting you
Speaker 1: over the head with it. And it was all made
Speaker 1: possible by the fact that the Neantick team could geo
Speaker 1: tag locations and the users smartphones that how's the game
Speaker 1: had GPS capabilities. That combination of having a system that
Speaker 1: could detect where players are in the world and then
Speaker 1: guide those same players to interesting locations in that world,
Speaker 1: that was the heart of ingress, the story and the conflict.
Speaker 1: We're all window dressing. It was interesting and sometimes convoluted
Speaker 1: window dressing, but still window dressing all the same. And
Speaker 1: it might help if we think for a moment about
Speaker 1: how GPS works now. In the old days, before smartphones
Speaker 1: had GPS receivers, location information relied solely upon signals from
Speaker 1: cell towers, a phone would ping out to nearby towers
Speaker 1: and receive a response. And towers are stationary, having the
Speaker 1: established location, so those are anchor points. You know exactly
Speaker 1: where they are right. They don't move around, so they
Speaker 1: have actual, you know, location data associated with them. The
Speaker 1: amount of time it would take for a signal to
Speaker 1: go from a tower and arrive to the phone would
Speaker 1: give your phone an indication of how far away you
Speaker 1: were from that cell tower. If you get a pin
Speaker 1: from a couple of cell towers, you could have a
Speaker 1: rough estimate of where you were in relation to those towers,
Speaker 1: but it's not the most accurate way to determine physical location.
Speaker 1: It can give you a rough idea of where you are,
Speaker 1: but you might be off by a bit, like in
Speaker 1: some places like a city with tall buildings that interfere
Speaker 1: with signal propagation. A little bit could be a couple
Speaker 1: of blocks, which is not terribly useful if you're doing
Speaker 1: things like you know, using a ride hailing app. If
Speaker 1: the app thinks you're you know, two blocks west of
Speaker 1: where you are, you're not going to see a car
Speaker 1: stop for you because the cars stopping two blocks away.
Speaker 1: But what about GPS, Well, the global positioning system is
Speaker 1: made up of two dozen satellites, plus you know some
Speaker 1: standbys that provide a global coverage of service. The coverage
Speaker 1: means that any time your receiver is within the line
Speaker 1: of sight of four of those satellites way up in orbit.
Speaker 1: That's good because you need three satellites to find your
Speaker 1: position on the Earth's surface. These satellites rely on atomic clocks,
Speaker 1: which keep time with incredible precision. They also have to
Speaker 1: factor in the effects of relativity. To get into all
Speaker 1: of that would require another episode, And in fact, I've
Speaker 1: done episodes about satellites and the effects of relativity, So
Speaker 1: I'll just say that stuff like gravity and the speed
Speaker 1: at which you're moving relative to some other body affects
Speaker 1: the relative passage of time between those bodies. Getting more
Speaker 1: into detail would require another episode. So these satellites regularly
Speaker 1: send out little signals to Earth, and each signal includes
Speaker 1: the time stamp at which it was sent out by
Speaker 1: that satellite. So the GPS receiver in your phone gets
Speaker 1: a signal from satellite number one, it's got a time
Speaker 1: stamp attached to it that tells your phone when that
Speaker 1: signal was sent. The signal had to travel a really
Speaker 1: good distance to get to you. So by the time
Speaker 1: it gets to your phone, your phone's clock, which also
Speaker 1: has to be really accurate in order for all this
Speaker 1: to work. Your phone's clock sees how much time has
Speaker 1: passed between when the signal was sent and when it
Speaker 1: was received. You take that difference in those times and
Speaker 1: you multiply that by the speed of light, and while
Speaker 1: you now know how far you are from satellite one,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't give you a location, It just gives
Speaker 1: you a distance from that satellite. So now you get
Speaker 1: data from satellite too, and that tells you how far
Speaker 1: away you are from satellite to Knowing how far you
Speaker 1: are from these two satellites creates a range of locations
Speaker 1: that you could potentially be on the surface of the Earth,
Speaker 1: but you need a third satellite to reduce that range
Speaker 1: to a specific point on the Earth. Technically speaking, there
Speaker 1: are two points where you could be in relation to
Speaker 1: those three satellites based on this data, but one of
Speaker 1: them happens to be out and outer space, so we
Speaker 1: can just discard that one for most of us. Most
Speaker 1: of us are not astronauts, so we just ignore that
Speaker 1: and we only focus on the location that actually makes
Speaker 1: contact with the surface of Earth. It's through comparing the
Speaker 1: data of how long it took the signals from these
Speaker 1: three different satellites to get to your phone that your
Speaker 1: phone is able to figure out where you are, which
Speaker 1: is pretty nifty stuff. When we come back, we will
Speaker 1: continue to learn about Neantic's story, but first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. So Neantic launched Ingress and it saw
Speaker 1: some modest success, and it seems weird for me to
Speaker 1: call it modest. The app had more than twenty million downloads,
Speaker 1: but when we look ahead and we look at Pokemon Go,
Speaker 1: that number seems quaint by comparison. Neantic even began to
Speaker 1: crowdsource potential locations for portals within the game. Remember, those
Speaker 1: portals were linked to physical locations in the real world,
Speaker 1: and they were supposed to be once that had some
Speaker 1: sort of cultural or social significance. So users who had
Speaker 1: good standing inside the game could submit a location as
Speaker 1: a potential portal, and usually that included a GEO tag
Speaker 1: and a photo of the location. Neantics team would review
Speaker 1: the submissions and determine if they fit the criteria to
Speaker 1: be a portal, and if they did, they added it
Speaker 1: to the list of locations. Tied to the game world,
Speaker 1: and now you had a new spot where you could
Speaker 1: battle the other team for dominance. The Neantic team also
Speaker 1: did some real groundwork when it came to getting player feedback.
Speaker 1: They would organize little real world events to attract players
Speaker 1: to specific locations, and then they would just talk to
Speaker 1: those players and find out what they liked or didn't
Speaker 1: like about the game. Gradually, Neantic would build these events
Speaker 1: up to go well beyond just user feedback. They became
Speaker 1: in game events that could affect the actual game itself,
Speaker 1: and they took place in the real world. It would
Speaker 1: bring together the community of players, and the company would
Speaker 1: use this same data in its next big project. But
Speaker 1: it was around this time that Neantic was closing in
Speaker 1: on the end of that agreement with Google, the one
Speaker 1: that would prompt a decision about whether the team would
Speaker 1: stay on with Google or they would spin off to
Speaker 1: become an independent company, and the future was uncertain in
Speaker 1: either direction. At that point, Neantic wasn't really making any
Speaker 1: money Ingress was not a huge revenue generator. They did
Speaker 1: use some ad revenue, and I'll talk more about that
Speaker 1: in the next episode, but it wasn't exactly raking in
Speaker 1: the big bucks, So there was a chance that if
Speaker 1: they stayed with Google, Google might just shut down the
Speaker 1: project or incorporate bits of it into the work of
Speaker 1: other Google products. That kind of stuff happens all the
Speaker 1: time at Google. I've done episodes about projects that Google
Speaker 1: launched and then later shut down, so that was a
Speaker 1: real possibility. However, spending off would mean that the company, Niantic,
Speaker 1: would need to get investors on board to help cover
Speaker 1: initial costs. Plus there was the question of how to
Speaker 1: deal with the patented technologies that Niantic had developed while
Speaker 1: it was part of Google, because Google was listed on
Speaker 1: those patents. So in either case, either option was, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a little scary. But then people at Niantic
Speaker 1: had a killer idea, the idea that would not just
Speaker 1: make Niantic a viable business, it would turn Niantic into
Speaker 1: a true phenomenon, a breakout success, a multibillion dollar company.
Speaker 1: And it all had its roots in a joke, an
Speaker 1: April Fool's joke in fact, so back in the Google
Speaker 1: Maps team launched their April Fools gag. If you're not familiar,
Speaker 1: Google over the years has done multiple April Fools goofs
Speaker 1: and jokes, and the Google Maps teams in particular tend
Speaker 1: to have some really good ones. There was one year
Speaker 1: where it turned Google Maps into a game of pac Man.
Speaker 1: So if you pulled up a map of your location,
Speaker 1: all the streets would become pathways that you could guide
Speaker 1: your little pac Man player down and ghosts would chase you.
Speaker 1: It was really clever. But this year team was different.
Speaker 1: If you opened up Google Maps on April Fools, you
Speaker 1: would see Pokemon hidden throughout the maps, and if you
Speaker 1: clicked on the Pokemon, or if you were using a smartphone,
Speaker 1: if you tapped the Pokemon, it would add them to
Speaker 1: your collection. And if you collected all one fifty one
Speaker 1: of the little critters, Google would send you a business
Speaker 1: card with your name on it and the title Pokemon Master.
Speaker 1: To promote the joke, the team released a video that
Speaker 1: showed people in real world locations seeking out their Pokemons.
Speaker 1: It was a gag, but it was a gag that
Speaker 1: gave the Niantic team the inspiration to pitch the idea
Speaker 1: for a real life Pokemon game, one that would have
Speaker 1: players go out into the real world to seek and
Speaker 1: capture Pokemon. It wasn't long before Niantic put together a team,
Speaker 1: including a member of the Google Maps team who had
Speaker 1: actually worked on this April fool's joke, and they headed
Speaker 1: to Japan to meet with executives at the Pokemon Company.
Speaker 1: They pitched their idea and they also showed off Ingress
Speaker 1: to the execs to give them an idea of how
Speaker 1: the concept would work, and before a week had passed,
Speaker 1: they got word that the Pokemon Company wanted to pursue
Speaker 1: the possibility of making such a game. One thing the
Speaker 1: Pokemon Company really wanted, though, was a more streamlined and
Speaker 1: simpler form of gamel A Ingress got a bit dense,
Speaker 1: and that would possibly be a barrier to entry for
Speaker 1: new Pokemon players. And this was a decision that was
Speaker 1: probably for the best because the Niantic team was really
Speaker 1: leaning towards spinning off from Google at this point that
Speaker 1: had not actually happened yet. The Pokemon deal started while
Speaker 1: Niantic was still under the Google umbrella, and the process
Speaker 1: of splitting from the mothership was a complicated one, and
Speaker 1: it also meant the size of Niantics team was effectively
Speaker 1: cut in half because not everyone was ready to leave
Speaker 1: Google to join a startup company, especially a startup company
Speaker 1: that did not yet have a successful revenue track record
Speaker 1: behind it, and for very similar reasons. It was challenging.
Speaker 1: In fact, Niantic found it impossible to get enough investors
Speaker 1: on board to cover costs. Miraculously, the Pokemon Company executives
Speaker 1: did not pull the plug on the project once they
Speaker 1: learned that Niantic was playing thing to spin off into
Speaker 1: its own company and separate from Google. Heck, the Pokemon
Speaker 1: Company actually increased their investment in the project in order
Speaker 1: to help out, as did Nintendo, which itself had a
Speaker 1: substantial stake in the Pokemon Company. Niantics spun off from
Speaker 1: Google in October. That meant that Hank would have spent
Speaker 1: more than a decade at Google, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: good stretch from the six months that he had originally
Speaker 1: imagined the Pokemon Company. And Nintendo fronted twenty million dollars
Speaker 1: to Niantic in order to work on Pokemon Go, with
Speaker 1: another ten million dollars promised once the company hit certain milestones.
Speaker 1: So the Pokemon game largely focused on a few pretty
Speaker 1: simple ideas. Players could move around the world and find
Speaker 1: these little Pokemon monsters wandering around their physical locations, but
Speaker 1: they could do that within the game. It's not so
Speaker 1: magical that you can actually, you know, see these fictional
Speaker 1: critters moving around in your real world, but you could
Speaker 1: see them through the app of your game, and then
Speaker 1: you could attempt to capture said Pokemon. Capturing them would
Speaker 1: add the Pokemon to your collection, and Jim's g y
Speaker 1: M s that's the Pokemon's version of Ingressive portals would
Speaker 1: become places where the factions within the Pokemon world could
Speaker 1: battle it out in order to try and control the space.
Speaker 1: Many features were planned that weren't part of the initial launch,
Speaker 1: such as the ability to battle other Pokemon trainers directly
Speaker 1: in head to head contests, or to trade Pokemon critters
Speaker 1: maybe you captured one and your friend needs one you
Speaker 1: want to trade. That was not supported at launch, and
Speaker 1: some of the game features at launch would actually need reworking.
Speaker 1: But despite losing half the team once Niantics spun off
Speaker 1: from Google, the young company was able to launch the
Speaker 1: game less than a year later. Pokemon Go went live
Speaker 1: on July sixth, two thousand sixteen, kind of because then
Speaker 1: it crashed and came back up, then crashed again. You see,
Speaker 1: Pokemon is a pretty darn popular I p which is
Speaker 1: putting it mildly. There are numerous video games in the
Speaker 1: Pokemon franchise, all of which are on Nintendo consoles and
Speaker 1: handheld devices. There's also a trading card game. There are
Speaker 1: numerous toys and other types of merchandise, and all of
Speaker 1: these things sell incredibly well. People who grew up with
Speaker 1: a franchise frequently have a deep love and nostalgia for it.
Speaker 1: They also tend to be younger than I am, so
Speaker 1: I admit I don't totally get it. But demand was
Speaker 1: really high. In fact, it was too high. The crush
Speaker 1: of people trying to sign up for the game and
Speaker 1: get into the game and play the game overloaded Giantics servers,
Speaker 1: or more specifically, the servers that Giantic was renting in
Speaker 1: order to run this game. They were actually using Google
Speaker 1: Cloud services for this, so the company spent a lot
Speaker 1: of the early days just trying to get servers back
Speaker 1: online and adding more machines to the system in order
Speaker 1: to handle the load. According to Niantic, the demand was
Speaker 1: about fifty times higher than their worst case scenario projections.
Speaker 1: Let's let that sink in for a second. Imagine that
Speaker 1: you are an app developer and it's getting close to
Speaker 1: launch day, so you need to estimate the demand for
Speaker 1: your service so that you have the right assets in
Speaker 1: place to handle the workload. Now, you don't want to overestimate,
Speaker 1: because then you're going to be dedicating more assets than
Speaker 1: what you actually need, which means you're spending money when
Speaker 1: you don't need to, and spending money, by and large,
Speaker 1: is something that businesses like to keep a tight lea shan.
Speaker 1: I mean they'll do it, but like they're totally not
Speaker 1: happy about it. So you don't want to rent more
Speaker 1: servers than you need. For example, So you estimate how
Speaker 1: many downloads you think you're going to see within a
Speaker 1: given amount of time, like the first couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: and then you take that estimate and you pad it out.
Speaker 1: Maybe your app will make the news cycle, right or
Speaker 1: maybe it's going to be a featured app on an
Speaker 1: app store and you might get a boost that way.
Speaker 1: So you want to make sure you can handle any
Speaker 1: extra adoption. So you look to put in place more
Speaker 1: assets than you think you're actually going to need, but
Speaker 1: not by too much. That way, if it turns out
Speaker 1: you underestimated things, you've still got some breathing room. Niantic
Speaker 1: tried to do that, but they grossly underestimated the rapid
Speaker 1: demand of Pokemon fans. And by grossly underestimated, I mean
Speaker 1: that at peak demand, they were looking at figures that
Speaker 1: were fifty times larger than those worst case projections. Heck,
Speaker 1: even people who had never once played a Pokemon game
Speaker 1: like yours truly signed on to play this one. I mean,
Speaker 1: I had played Ingress and I thought that it was neat,
Speaker 1: but the idea of stumbling across virtual pokeman's out in
Speaker 1: the real world and being able to capture them really
Speaker 1: appealed to me. So I was an early adopter. So
Speaker 1: the company started to beef up the back end, and meanwhile,
Speaker 1: as they rolled out the service to other countries, they
Speaker 1: saw the same story. On repeat, demand was so heavy
Speaker 1: that servers would get overloaded and crash. It's almost a
Speaker 1: good problem to have, except it is a problem, and
Speaker 1: the longer it takes you to fix the problem, the
Speaker 1: more people you're gonna see drop off the service because
Speaker 1: of the experience they had or black thereof. So it's
Speaker 1: also a problem that ultimately takes care of itself if
Speaker 1: you're not careful, But it takes care of itself in
Speaker 1: the bad way, in the sense that, well, now you're
Speaker 1: not overloaded because nobody's using your service anymore. You don't
Speaker 1: want that to happen. So to solve this problem, called
Speaker 1: up his former workmates over at Google. The game was
Speaker 1: running on Google Cloud servers, and Google was a stakeholder
Speaker 1: in Niantic. When the company spun off from Google, Google
Speaker 1: retained a and a share of ownership, you know, a
Speaker 1: percentage of ownership in Niantic. So with some cooperation, they
Speaker 1: saw more core servers joined the project, and the game
Speaker 1: finally had enough resources to meet the demand from players.
Speaker 1: According to people inside Google, this was a really big
Speaker 1: project on their side too, and it was obviously this
Speaker 1: game was a huge initial hit. If you lived in
Speaker 1: a city, you likely saw evidence of this yourself. Maybe
Speaker 1: you were playing the game, in which case you probably
Speaker 1: encountered lots of other people who are also playing it,
Speaker 1: or maybe you just noticed that there were a lot
Speaker 1: more folks just kind of wandering around with their smartphones
Speaker 1: out and gathering in public spaces. They were everywhere. I
Speaker 1: remember my walks home included seeing a lot more people
Speaker 1: out and about, and sure enough, many of them were
Speaker 1: clearly playing the game. I remember back when I was
Speaker 1: still playing it that I was trying to take over
Speaker 1: a gem from my faction. When a group of hoodlums
Speaker 1: by that, I mean some nice people were probably ten
Speaker 1: years younger than I am. They stopped across the street
Speaker 1: and they clearly contested me for that same gym, and
Speaker 1: I'm happy to say that those jerks one anyway, it
Speaker 1: was also becoming something of a safety concern. I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole philosophy behind these games included that idea that
Speaker 1: you would get out into the real world and that's
Speaker 1: where you would, you know, interact with reality. You would
Speaker 1: see really interesting places, you'd get to appreciate art and
Speaker 1: architecture and history. But in my experience, it was far
Speaker 1: more likely that you would see people looking down at
Speaker 1: their screens and then just rushing from one place to
Speaker 1: the next without you know, looking up to see what
Speaker 1: they were actually at, including when it came time to
Speaker 1: cross the street, no joke. Some cities even took to
Speaker 1: writing along curbs to remind people to look up and
Speaker 1: pay attention to traffic, and some of them, like in
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, I think it was they even included
Speaker 1: Pokemon imagery in that those messages to remind people, hey,
Speaker 1: don't just step out into the street without looking, because
Speaker 1: people were being a little bit unsafe about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: The title was clearly a huge hit and there would
Speaker 1: be a lot of consequences that would follow. I will
Speaker 1: soon do a follow up to this episode to talk
Speaker 1: more about Pokemon Go and its impact and its revenue
Speaker 1: model and the other projects that Neantick has tackled in
Speaker 1: recent years, to talk about, you know, the other stuff
Speaker 1: that they have done and how they've become a multibillion
Speaker 1: dollar company. H A lot of that can be pointed
Speaker 1: directly at Pokemon Go, but we'll cover that more in
Speaker 1: the next episode. Meanwhile, if you would like me to
Speaker 1: cover a specific topic in a future tech Stuff episode,
Speaker 1: please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for
Speaker 1: the show is tech Stuff HSW. That's how we got
Speaker 1: these episodes. I love to hear your thoughts and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.