Netizen: Location-based advertising

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Ingress Can Be Modified For Grassroots Organizing

Ingress (Photo credit: sukiweb)

Ingress could be modified or open sourced into a great grassroots organizing tool. Like on Ning you can create your own communities, on Ingress you should be able to create your own smaller action groups.

Google’s Ingress is more than a game, its a potential data exploitation disaster

looks incredibly interesting and was met with mass intrigue .... Google has created an elaborate ruse to convince (possibly hundreds of) millions of people to share far more location and behavior data with the company than has ever been the case before. ...... A potentially more nefarious use of the Ingress data would be to serve hyper-targeted, location-based advertising in a way that the proverbial lovechild of Foursquare and Highlight could only dream of. .... The augmented reality game is a truly novel concept and one that has tremendous opportunity as an “online to offline” entertainment experience. From what I can tell, the small team within Niantic Labs – a skunkworks-like division within Google’s LA offices – worked incredibly hard on the project, as the positive early reception has borne out.

The basic Ingress infrastructure could also be leveraged to build more complex games. Think of Ingress as Android. Android can be modified. Although there is something to be said of the pure Android experience.

Google Game Could Be Augmented Reality's First Killer App

Ingress ... will give the company even more information about your current location. ...... Ingress’s world is one in which the discovery of so-called “exotic matter” has split the population into two groups: the Enlightened, who want to learn how to harness the power of this energy, and the Resistance, who, well, resist this change. Players pick a side, and then walk around their city, collecting exotic matter to keep scanners charged and taking control of exotic-matter-exuding portals in order to capture more land for their team...... what it suggests about Google’s future plans, which seem to revolve around finding new ways to extend its reach from the browser on your laptop to the devices you carry with you at all times. The goal makes plenty of sense when you consider that traditional online advertising—Google’s bread and butter—could eventually be eclipsed by mobile, location-based advertising. ...... Portals are found in public places—in San Francisco, where I was playing, this includes city landmarks such as museums, statues, and murals. Resistance portals are blue, Enlightened ones are green, and there are also some gray ones out there that remain unclaimed.