There was a time when I didn’t give a ‘phuck’ about Candy Crush and the people who used to send me request. But then after 3 years, this game i:e ‘POKEMON GO’ came into the market and destroyed all the reputation that the previous legends created for themselves. Just within 2 days, the number of user of this viral game ‘Pokemon Go’ went exponentially high breaking all the past records.
According to data obtained by SimilarWeb ( An Analytics Firm), the number of user of Pokemon GO has surpassed the number of users registered on Tinder since it’s existence ! !
Similar patterns have been observed in competition to website like Twitter
And just within 2 days, it has broken another record ! !
Now the stats given by us are good enough to tell you how big the game is becoming.
Now we had a young Zuckerberg behind Facebook, Jack Dorsey behind Twitter and Jan Koum behind the famous WHATSAPP.
But the app that defeated almost all of them is ‘Pokemon GO’ and the person behind it is John Hanke.
John Hanke is an entrepreneur and currently runs Niantic Labs, a company which explores experimental mobile, social, and local applications. The most famous one is ‘Pokémon Go’ which is right now burning every set of records.
Creator of Google Earth
Prior to joining Google, John Hanke founded and was the CEO at Keyhole Inc. which was a pioneering software specializing in geo-spatial data visualization applications. However Google acquired Keyhole in 2004, at which point Keyhole’s former flagship product was renamed to Google Earth. After this, John Hanke served as Vice President of Product Management at Google’s “Geo” division (Google Earth, Google Maps, Local, StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio).
Picking Up The Unconventional Route
After doing several google projects like ‘Google Street View’ Google Maps’ and Panoramio’, John Hanke in 2010 co-founded a small internal startup at Google known as NIANTIC LABS. Later on they spun out of Google as an independent entity in 2015. During his stay at Google, he did put together a team for the making of ‘Pokemon GO’.
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How Did He Get The Idea
According to an interview of John Hanke, he stated that before “Pokemon Go”, Niantic was best known for “Ingress”. Ingress is an Android and iPhone game that challenged different players to explore the world around them and claim territories. At its peak, “Ingress” did manage to count millions of players around the world.
‘Ingress’ was just a guinea pig for a much bigger experiment. They took the data feed from Ingress app and analysed it to learn about keeping players safe, to make “Pokemon Go” work and populate its world.
John Hanke also added that Ingress was made in an intend to show that Google and Niantic can together build a better virtual reality world. The success of Ingress indeed helped Goggle to trust on ‘Pokemon GO’.
The idea for building such a game came way back in 2014, when Google and The Pokemon Company collaborated for a short-lived but extremely viral game on April Fool’s Day. The game challenged players to find Pokemon via the Google Maps mobile application. People loved it and the game became a huge hit. Google Maps plus Pokemon was “like chocolate and peanut butter,” Hanke says.
Given the kind of quick popularity this game earned, ‘Niantic’ pinged the Pokemon Company. It turned out that Pokemon Company’s CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara was already a high-level “Ingress” player in Japan, which made the conversations much smoother and comfortable.
And thus the ‘IDEA’ came into existence and after an year later, came into everyone’s smartphone ! !
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THE BIG DAY ! !
John Hanke raised a whooping 25 Million Dollar from Nintendo, Google, the Pokemon Company and many other investors between the duration of Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 and started to prepare for the final launch. The team launched Pokemon GO on July 6th and the rest is all history. Shattering every record that any game had ever recorded in the history just within 2 days of its launch. The kind of popularity that this game is getting, it doesn’t seems like this is going to end too soon, after all ‘we gotta catch em all’.
