Author: Paul

Hacking the Future of Pokemon GO

Today, on Episode 11 of the Edge of Innovation, we talk with Steve Miller about the amazing new world of Pokemon GO, and explore the questions raised by augmented reality, in terms of social dynamics, privacy, and business opportunities.

Show Notes

Produced by SaviorLabs. Click Here to Learn More About Us
How Pokemon GO is making Money
Pokemon GO is Helping Restaurants and Bars Make Money

Transcript

Sections

What is Pokémon GO?
A History Lesson
Gotta Catch the Target Markets
Augmented Reality
Takeaways for an Entrepreneur
Privacy and Authentication with Google

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection of between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

What is Pokemon GO?

Paul: Well welcome to the Edge of Innovation Podcast, I’m Paul Parisi and I’m here with our special guest Steve Miller, who is the director of Pokemon Go Theory and Evolution for SaviorLabs, the company we both work for.

Steven: Just recently promoted to Senior Director.

Paul: Yeah, Senior Director of Pokemon analytics? Or what was it- Pokemon-

Steven: Analytics and research, I think.

Paul: Analytics and research. So we’re getting you new business cards, but you know, we like to be responsive in the market, and we’ve seen Pokemon, and we’re shifting all of our resources to Pokemon.

Steven: To capturing Pokemon?

Paul: Yes, absolutely, cause it is so fulfilling. Steve is a twenty-something. You’re still a twenty-something?

Steven: Yeah, will be for a little while.

Paul: Well, I’m a fifty-something, and I was there, as we were joking earlier, when video games became video games, with Pong and things like that. I can remember when they came out so, hey ya little kids.

So we have this phenomenon of Pokemon GO that has just sort of blossomed out of nowhere. We just thought it would be interesting to kick around some of the ideas that are going on there, some of the technologies, some of the social changes, and really have a good discussion about that.

A History Lesson

Steven: Well, maybe before we go further, and let’s back up a little bit and talk about the basics of Pokemon GO, just in case some of our listeners are not aware of what’s going on at this point.

Pokemon, for those that don’t know is a cartoon series, a video gave, a whole industry, basically, that’s been around for about 20 years now. And it began, I believe, as a video game on a handheld game system. And the point of that game was your little avatar character walked around this virtual world and had to “Catch” them all, catch all of the Pokemon. The game was very open-ended. It was very free. You could go at your own pace. You could catch all or a few Pokemon, if you wanted. You could level them all up, or you could stop early. It was not a perfectly linear game. It gave you a lot of freedom and flexibility.

And so the game is iterated on top of that. It’s constantly. It’s been pretty similar formula. That’s what happens in the TV show. That’s what happens with even the trading card game to some extent. And so all of that has kind of grown and snowballed up till this point of Pokemon Go. I was actually, as someone who grew up on video games, was struck by the Pokemon advertisement during the Super Bowl. I don’t know if you saw that or not. It was really interesting, because it was clearly geared toward someone my age, because it shows these younger kids running around doing cool things, but then at the end, there’s a youngish dad with his child, and the child, they’re playing Pokemon together.

So, it’s all of a sudden, it seems like Pokemon is realizing that there’s this… They have two generations now that they’re targeting instead of one. And I think that Pokemon Go has kind of come in to fill that gap. And so, with Pokemon Go, we all of a sudden now have the old game fundamental of walking around in a world to catch Pokemon, except now it’s moved to your smartphone. And you, a real person actually moving in the real world, affects the Pokemon that you can catch.

And so the basics of the game are you open your phone, you flip it on, and you’re brought to a map overlay, and you can kind of see different things around you. You can see where Pokemon might be. You can see areas where you can get items. And it requires you to actually move and go get those things. And like the old games, it’s not perfectly linear. There’s no set end point. You’re not required to catch them all. You can kind of go at your own pace, and you can do what you want.

But they’ve moved it into the actual physical world of moving around. So, I’ll stop there. That’s a quick, a very brief history of Pokemon, but what are your thoughts?

Paul: Let me ask a question about that. In the old world, when they had the game, was there any collaboration with other people?

Steven: Yes. And Pokemon has traditionally encouraged getting together with other people. And so, the game boy, if you picture it, it’s a handheld video game system run on AA batteries. No near-field communication or anything like that. Actually, it might have had, the red infra sensor. I’ve forgot what it’s called.

Paul: Infrared.

Steven: Infrared. But you could interact with other people. You could trade the Pokemon that you’ve caught by connecting a cable together. And you could even train up your teams, and then fight other players with your Pokemon. But you had to be in the same room with a cable connected. And that’s evolved through different ways. You can do it purely over the internet now, but there’s still a strong encouragement to be near each other and trade Pokemons as you pass each other on the street. There were still things like that in the games before Pokemon Go.

Paul: So, it’s interesting. So, it sounds like the game that’s been released is really nothing more than the old game, except it’s mapped into an augmented reality.

Steven: It is. Yeah. And it’s gone back to some of the simplicity of the old game. I will not go into the technicals of Pokemon. But basically, when something iterates, like, it tends to get more complex. The iPhone has become more complex from the first edition to now.

Paul: Right. More features, more functions.

Gotta Catch the Target Markets

Steven: Exactly. Yeah. And so, they’ve taken a conscious step back and stripped it down to the old fundamentals, like you’re saying.

Another thing that I find interesting about the target audience, specifically, like I said, it’s targeting two different generations. And just kind of a quick story… The games haven’t just iterated in features but also in the number of creatures or Pokemon that you can catch. This game only includes the first wave of Pokemon currently. And even the kind of like mascot Pokemon for the teams and the things you can do to connect with other people, those are also from that first generation. They’re the legendary Pokemon, is what they’re called, that I know from growing up as a kid. They’re the first ones I was introduced to. There’s nothing that really reaches past that first generation point currently.

So, when I walk around at night in my town, and I see people, I’m seeing a lot of people my age out there catching Pokemon on their smartphones. And it’s just… It’s bizarre.

Paul: Let’s go back a little bit. What prompted you to download it? Was it the buzz? Was the buzz overwhelming, so that you just said, “I’m going to download this.” Or was it that you evaluated it before you downloaded it?

Steven: I, personally, was very driven by going out to do it with friends.

Paul: Okay. So, hold on. How did you become first aware of it?

Steven: I think through the internet. Yeah. It was…

Paul: The internets?

Steven: The internets. Yes, the plurals.

Paul: So, the Google or the…

Steven: The Googles.

Paul: So, you read something about it, a post about it, that, “Hey, there’s this new thing”?

Steven: I would imagine. Yeah, I kind of keep in the loop with video game news–

Paul: Alright, so, when was that? That was like Friday, right?

Steven: It’s been known that it’s been coming out for a while before that. It came out on Thursday. I was aware of that.

Paul: So, you were aware that it was coming on Thursday.

Steven: I think probably because my social media friend groups were aware of it as well.

Paul: Did you download it before the explosion happened or after?

Steven: I mean, in internet terms, I was late, which probably means I downloaded it a day after it released it or something like that. But I’ve been playing it over the weekend on and off.

Paul: Well, what I’m interested in is trying to tease out why people downloaded it. Was it they were anticipating it? I mean, there wasn’t a lot of detail about it beforehand. So they didn’t know what to anticipate, except there was this new thing coming out. Was augmented reality a known thing? Did you know that augmented reality in Pokemon was coming?

Steven: I did. It circulated! There’s a lot of good writing within games, and a lot of good engagement with it. And I’m just someone who is interested in this.

Paul: Okay, so you were generally aware of it.

Steven: Yes. But I think it was mostly within the game circle until the weekend when it actually released. So, as someone who consumes game related media, I was aware. But the average person was probably not until it blew up.

Paul: So, some of your friends.

Steven: Yes.

Paul: Would you characterize those as game-aware people or not, that have chosen to download this?

Steven: Yes. Some of them are. Some of them are not. Some of them caught onto the wave. They saw other people playing it and downloaded it.

Paul: And were the people that… Let’s just think of one of those people that caught on to the wave. They weren’t game people, but downloaded it as a follower, basically. Were they aware of Pokemon, and they understood the context of Pokemon? Or was it just, “This is a neat new game”?

Steven: You know, it’s a mix of some. I think that many people my age are at least aware Pokemon exists, even if they didn’t play it or not. But I have a friend, apparently, he learned about it because a number of people at his company were walking around catching Pokemon during the day, during work. And the company is in a central city location. Some of them were even able, from their desk, to pull out their phone, and say, “Okay, I’m going to catch this one that’s near to me right now.”

And so he, actually… I don’t think this friend ever grew up playing Pokemon, but he rode that wave of external hype at that point. So, he’s not a read-up-on-games that are coming out. He’ll play casually, but yeah.

Paul: That’s interesting, because what I’m trying to get to is what is the trigger that caused them to download it. Is it the wave of use? Or is it the knowledge beforehand of saying, “Gee. The new Star Trek movie is coming out. I want to go see that because I like Star Trek.”

So, I’m a Pokemon person. I like that. I’m going to download this whether it’s good on not. And it sounds like there’s a mix. Certainly the ones in the culture knew it was coming. But then it had enough — which I think is really intriguing about this — is it has enough social juice where it became collaborative for a common experience, which I think is really wild. Because we don’t see that in games. You know, Angry Birds doesn’t have that. None of the real games out there. And I’m not a gamer, so you might say that there are other examples. Are there any other examples that perpetuate a social engagement like this?

Steven: There are examples that exist. A lot of them are more fringe, I think. One that might be interesting for the discussion of this podcast and seeing things that come together is this game actually has a predecessor that it’s built off of called Ingress, which I only learned about after this game come out, came out. But from what I understand, it was a very similar concept, just not with Pokemon. But you walked around, and you found locations, and you captured things or gained levels or whatever it was with that specific game. But it was augmented reality. They actually pitched it as, “Ingress, something is coming into your world.”

Paul: Interesting. Good marketing.

Steven: Yeah. Absolutely. I had never heard about that before. I think that it had same sort of social interaction, walking by people.

Paul: What’s interesting is Ingress doesn’t have the stored up value of Pokemon. And so, it doesn’t have the connection. I’m pontificating here. I’m saying does… It didn’t have the initial stickiness or any… There was no handle on it, that somebody that wasn’t involved in it, to be able to grab on to it. Whereas, almost everybody on the planet has heard of Pokemon, regardless of your age.

“Oh, what’s that about?” And you might have it in the context of a game or cards, whatever it was, or a movie. But that additional handle really changed the value proposition for an Ingress. So in some ways, you know, I’m very fascinated to hear the interviews that come out with the team to see if they had any notion that it would have this type of viral effect.

Steven: Yeah. That’s a great question. Thinking from the point of our typical topics on the podcast of business and technology, talking about kind of that, bringing in the marketing, everything behind it, kind of the stickiness, like you were saying… It kind of feels like when Facebook released messenger. It’s, you know, Facebook owns the internet in many ways. And messenger, if I recall correctly, wasn’t that great of an app when it first came out. It just existed. But we all had to use it, because we were all Facebook already. And so messenger is successful, not on its own merits necessarily, but on the merits of Facebook.

And I’m wondering if there is… I mean, I’m not signed up to Pokemon, per se, in the same way that you’re signed up to Facebook. But there is a carryover of merit, so that, okay, Pokemon has moved to my smart phone now. I’m not used to this. It’s moved to walking around, but I’m interested, because I’ve been interested in Pokemon before.

And so, there’s that same kind of… This app has almost borrowed both technology and marketing from external sources. The tech’s already built. The marketing’s already built up. It’s just taking what’s laying on the floor almost and putting it together.

Paul: Well, and it also has the aspect, which doesn’t seem to be a mainstream aspect, of you being able to say, “Hey, have you seen this? Hey, we can go do this together. We can go walk around the real world and capture these fun little things.” So, to me, that was sort of the gee-whiz, wow, because it’s got people walking around together, socializing.

So, you know, we are critical — and I think in some ways, video games are very insular, you know. You sit in your own room. And you may be talking to people across the world, but you don’t go outside. And now, we have this video game that is compelling people to go outside, and it’s funner to do it in a group. Funner? Is that a word?

Steven: More funner.

Paul: More funner.

Steven: Yeah, grammatically correct. Yeah.

Paul: It’s more funner to go out and do it in a group. So, it’s just a wild twist to me that all of a sudden, we have something coming from this — you know, I’m always looking at my phone that is almost mandating that I go out with a group of people and enjoy this together.

Steven: Yeah. So, there are the Pokemon wandering around out there. You actually have to walk close enough to one to capture it, but your phone will give you an option to say, “Okay, as you’re…” And when you’re in the capture phase of the game, you have the option to turn on augmented reality, and all of a sudden, the Pokemon, that was just on your screen before with a kind of normal backdrop, is now placed into the real world using your phone’s camera. And so I have a goofy picture of me, for example, with a Pokemon sitting on my belly or something like that.

But that’s become part of the phenomenon, is people taking pictures of Pokemon in weird places. So, there’s this bird Pokemon just sitting on the floor in your kitchen or there’s just all these different kinds of aspects that have shown up. And so that augmented reality feature of it is another strange but good collision that’s kind of enhanced it. It’s that shock and awe, initial value of, “Oh, there’s a thing I know in a place it shouldn’t be,” almost.

Augmented Reality

Paul: Right. Well, there’s been a lot of talk over the past 20 years about virtual reality and how that was sort of the be all to end all. And, you know, something weird happened about a year and it half ago when Microsoft talked about their new product, HoloLens. And it was this thing, you know, you put on your face. You can still see, but it projects images out onto the wall or your refrigerator or whatever it might be. And so, people are looking at that and saying, “Gee, I really don’t know how that works.” You know, I don’t know how that feels. I get the idea of virtual reality because I’m in a place that I’ve never been in or am not in right now. And I can get up and walk around and touch things, or not really touch them but, you know, look at them and turn around and see somebody behind me. That’s virtual reality.

But augmented reality sort of caught us a little bit by surprise, at least it did me. It’s like, “What are you doing, you know, Microsoft? What the heck is it this thing? And I don’t need to see a spreadsheet on my refrigerator, I don’t need to see a Word document on my wall.” I might be cool, but… All of a sudden this comes out and shows us augmented reality done right. It’s just an incredible opportunity for us to see that, actually, I think that we thought virtual reality was going to be the be all to end all. But now we’re, I think we’re learning that augmented reality may be the be all to end all.

Steven: Yeah. That’s true. Google Glass received, for example, a lot excitement around when it first came out. We may learn… In the future, we may learn it may have been ahead of its time, which I’m not sure that works timewise.

Paul: That’s true. That’s true. I think… Yeah. It was a technology dying for an application. I think if we had the Pokemon Go on Google Glass, it might be a different acceptance rate.

Steven: So, many people would be injured and dead right now if that’s true.

Paul: You’d have to wear big bumpers.

Steven: Playing Pokemon Go right now, please do not disturb.

Paul: So, one of the initial questions was that it’s all free. How do you earn money? As it’s emerging, you can buy different things in the game, what are some of the things you can buy, Steve?

Steven: Yeah, so within the game, basically, it follows somewhat the trend of normal, mobile games. You can do everything without paying. But if you want to accelerate the speed at which you play the game, if you want to make it easier for yourself, you don’t have to walk as far. You can buy abilities to have more Pokemon appear closer to you. Or you can buy extra materials that help you catch Pokemon, rather than having to travel around and collect them yourselves.

The game doesn’t have– It’s not what we would necessarily call pay to win, I suppose. There’s no wall point at which you can’t pass if you don’t pay.

Paul: Okay. So, there’s nothing preventing you from playing.

Takeaways for an Entrepreneur

Steven: Exactly, but you can make it easier to play, basically. I do have some numbers here, speaking of the prices. It’s projected to hit $58.2 billion this year.

Paul: That’s just for people seeking to do something more in the game. Not changing the game experience, but helping them with the game. Fascinating. And they’re going to go to $76 billion in 2017, which is actually a drop, because 58.2 for half a year would be 116 billion for the total year. So, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I mean, this is data gathered by Statista, I don’t know what their metrics or methodology was there.

Steven: Dartboard?

Paul: Yeah, it’s, it’s, fascinating. It’d be interesting to see what their current revenue is. But it is, I think, showing us that all of the technology that we’re talking about here, all of the branding — everything existed. So, for an entrepreneur, you might sit there and say, “Gee, there’s nothing new to do. I don’t know what to do.”

Well, these people took, obviously a good brand — which helps enormously, and I’m not discounting that — but they took a good brand, and they threw it into augmented reality, and they’ve got this wild, successful — hopefully — hit on their hands. Certainly viral. Many times, when we as entrepreneurs look at something, or non-entrepreneurs approach something, they’re saying, “Well, you know everything that has been invented has already been invented I can’t invent something new.”

And I think this is a really great example to show you that that is just so wrong, because there are so many things that can be invented. Not that this is an invention, because they just took conventional pieces and put them together. And it’s a delight to see this and it not be, you know, something weird or terrible but accessible by the full spectrum of people all over the world. You know, whether you’re six or you’re 60, you could use this game and enjoy it.

Steven: Yea, so the game has gained both money. It’s also gained extreme traction in terms of number of users. I believe that it surpassed Twitter already in daily active users, which is pretty incredible, considering it is not even released in every country yet. It’s still, I believe, the United States and Australia.

Paul: Right. But Twitter is a very vertical product. It’s not a general interest. So, I think it is incredible traction. I mean, if anybody can get the traction that Twitter has, they’d be delighted. So, for this to do that, just really establishes that it’s a great idea.

Steven: Yeah. Absolutely.

Interlude

Privacy and Authentication with Google

Steven: I have an important question for you.

Paul: Okay.

Steven: Have you caught them all?

Paul: No. No, I actually can’t figure out how to get it installed. No, that’s not true. I just didn’t have my Google password with me. I thought it was interesting that they chose to use authenticate with Google.

Steven: Yeah, did you read about the Google authentication with iOS?

Paul: Well, I heard you tell me about it. But I didn’t read about it yet.

Steven: Yeah, so apparently, Google was taking all of your information on iOS, or rather, the app was. It was requesting full permissions from Google, which is something only Chrome and Gmail use.

Paul: Right. Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot to talk about with this, and, I think there’s a lot of societal things, there’s a lot of technical things. But, you know, it points out that humans are driven by engagement. They want to be engaged with whatever is going on and what’s interesting. And that’s… I mean, if a million people find something interesting, it’s probably interesting.

So, when they went and installed this in the rush to participate, they, you know, could easily bypass, or not ask that question, “What exactly am I giving up in this exchange here?”

Steven: I’ve only actually ever had one app that said, “This does not require permissions.” It’s my favorite app, probably, just because of that.

Paul: Which app is that?

Steven: It helps you pick cards for a game called Dominion. It’s an open source app, and I smiled when I saw that. I was like, “Wow. You guys are smart.”

Paul: Yeah, it is very interesting. I mean, you know, when you look at the different rights or permissions that are asked, even across the platforms, iOS and Android. You know, Android apps tend to ask for everything. IOS, because of the App Store and the overruling of the Apple god, they don’t ask as much. But one of the things that you have to realize, that when you opt in or you sign up with Google, you’re giving Google access to all of your information — not just the app maker, but Google as well. So, critical things there to think about. We do live in a different world. So, you know, when you’re sharing that information, you’re sharing it with a broader audience than you might think.

Steven: Yeah. That’s a good point.

Paul: You’re not only giving the app the ability to authenticate you, but you’re giving Google whatever information that app shares with Google. So, you know, Google knows everything. We’re just giving them more and more and more and more and more and more. So, for example, let’s talk about this.

There are going to be trends that emerge from your playing this game. And Google can predict where you are, you know. And who you’re with.

Steven: That’s a good point.

Paul: You know, so now we have clustering. You know, we have the fact that Steve and Bob tend to go on Thursday afternoon for a walk in this area. Now, you know, who can do good or bad with that? You know, I mean, Google with use it, I’m sure, to sell advertising locally. You know, real, brick-and-mortar advertising. So, we know that there’s this many people walking by this spot. This is a good place to put an ad, as opposed to one street over where they traditionally sold the ads, but they don’t… Nobody walks by that, especially for urban settings.

So, this big data, again, when it’s… When big data is used in a non-threatening way, it’s a good thing. You know, we’ve talked about the fact that, if, as advertising, matures, let’s say that you’re…we have digital advertising in the future. So, when you’re walking by it’s going to show you ads that are relevant to you. Same thing with the radio and things like that. So, as I express myself in the real world, I give Google more opportunities to target me, because now I know where you are. And so I can change the billboard there to be… Oh, I’ve got 10 people, and they’re all interested in the Celtics in Boston. I can put a Celtics ad up. And I can sell that to them to say these are some people that are looking at it.

Steven: Yeah. Going even further than big data, maybe toward the conspiracy theory realms, we’ve got a couple of articles already that have come out saying, you know, is Pokemon Go basically a way to get big brother everywhere now that we’ve got people literally sticking their cameras in places and they’ve got all your geospatial data. Even your Pokemon are tagged as to where they’re caught. So, you don’t even have to be watching live. You could just see where people trend to be.

One person was saying, you know… This is a really funny, interesting idea. A user said, “What if that local church is a mosque?” — Talking about an area where Pokemon might be — “they suspect terrorist activity and they want photos of it or photos of the cars around it and their plates or photos of the people coming in and out. Meaning, that should the director of the FBI need eyes somewhere, all he has to do is tell the game to stick a Pikachu in the room, and some unassuming schlub will send him a photo in no time.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s some implicit walls built between private and public. So, that may be difficult to happen in the open, but it can happen on the backend, or sly, if you will. But also it gives corporations information that government might not be able to have because of the laws. So, it’s going to be fascinating. One of the things that, you know, there’s an article out that talks about a company called In-Q-tel, and they were interested… We had talked to them about one of the companies I had, about them buying some of the technology. And these are CIA, that type of NSA, CIA people. It is a government organization. And, you know, this is the kind of stuff that makes them salivate, you know. This is just have interesting stuff.

To your statement, to say, what about that, or what the article was asking, that is a reality right now that could be happening right now. The only thing that’s a control there is can the agency, the government agency, delegate Pokemon to say, “Put something here.” There’s the only thing that has to happen. And I would imagine they’d find a way to do that pretty easily. It wouldn’t be difficult for us to probably figure out how to do that from social engineering and all sorts of stuff.

Steven: That’s a good point. Yeah, so maybe taking a step back and just talking about the issue of privacy as a whole, what are maybe some practical steps listeners could take to prevent this kind of collection or to be careful with it at least?

Paul: There isn’t. There isn’t anything you can do. I mean, you’re giving, you’re giving your presence and tying it to a geolocation, you’re also giving your friends- I can correlate that. So, if I don’t like people that like you. So, if want to know who’s Steve’s friends are, this is going to give it to me. And it’s going to tell me where they are all the time. And that’s reality. Anybody can say, “Oh, we’re not using it for that.” But they have it all stored. It’s all there, you know.

It would be interesting to see what their data anonymizing policy is. But fundamentally, it has to be tied to you, and you can go back right now, I think, and see where you picked up every, every Pokemon.

Steven: Yes. Correct.

Paul: So, alright. I gotta take, I gotta slice that whole feature set out to make it, you know, to make it privacy aware. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

What’s fascinating here is that, you know, Nielsen Rating Company has always rated TV shows for how popular they were. And they went through a lot of trouble to have a person used to fill out a diary. They would actually write down or check off what they watched. And they would say, “How many people were in the room?” And that worked for a long time. Now then, they moved to an electronic device which would monitor who watched what. I don’t believe it got down to the who, but that there were people in the room, and it was watching a TV, as opposed to an empty room.

Now, we have this… One of the things that the internet is really great, and it’s the Holy Grail for advertising is, if I’m browsing the web, and I’m logged into Google, Google knows who I am, and they can push ads to me that I’m interested in. This does it even better. I mean, the cellphone, you know, if you think about it, the smartphone could be a clandestine attempt to just be about to enable tracking of individuals. That’s really, you know, that’s really what it’s really well, is a byproduct of its design, at doing.

So, my son has his own cellphone. My daughter has her own cellphone, so that cellphone is inextricably bound to that person. So, you know, it’s unusual that we’re without our phones. That’s a notion of the past. You always have it with you. So, understand that just by using those devices, you’re giving that information away.

So, let’s say you have a Gmail account. It’s logged in to your phone. And you, Steve, has a Gmail account. Google, can tell that we’re this close to each other, you know. That we’re in the same room. So, this is just another example of that. It’s not like, “One, two, run,” and say, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t use a phone from now on.” That, that ship has sailed, I guess.

Steven: Wow. I know we had mentioned earlier about business possibilities, you know. Inventions don’t require brand new things. Sometimes they require just putting things that exist together, and Pokemon Go is an example of that on a very large scale.

Possibly another example is learning to test or dry run ideas before they actually happen. And there’s a bit of a theory going on right now. I don’t know if you saw the April 2014. It was the April Fool’s Day “prank” of Google, was actually very similar to the Pokemon Go idea. It was they placed Pokémon on Google maps all around the world. And I don’t think you actually traveled. You just looked at your map, as far as I remember. But you could actually, if you found enough, you could send it into Google and say, “I found these 25,” and Google sent you a certificate and said, “Dear Pokemon master, congratulations.”

And so productivity dropped strongly that first week of April. No… But that seems like- there’s a theory going around now. They started development in early 2014 of this game. And it’s kind of oblique. The game uses the Google maps’ API system. And Niantec, which is the developers of the game, they used to be part of Google. And so, there’s all this…

Paul: Conspiracy theory?

Steven: It’s literally just missing the brick that would say, “Oh, yeah. We used this as a dry run.” I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that.

Paul: Well, it could be. I think that the most difficult thing in the web… I’m reading a great book which we’re going to do a special podcast on this book coming up. But it’s about how we design and the way we think. And it’s a lot of the psychology behind that. And as I’m reading through it, there’s all these techniques to talk about trigger points or calls to action or this or that or all these different things. But the thing we don’t know is what people will like. And how we can get them to share it in a viral way. That’s what we can’t predict.

So, you know, they may have done this to see if there was any traction at all there. But it would be very interesting for me to see the demographics on how the uptake came. So, in other words, why did it break through the gamers, you know, and not just stay in the gamers’ space.

Any business you’re going to launch, whether it be a website, a product, or whatever, is going to be successful based on the number of people that know about it and choose to take an action about it. And that’s really the Holy Grail, is trying to get people to be aware of it, and then to make an action, a commitment. What’s interesting, is there’s a group of people called Foursquare which are kicking themselves right now.

Steven: That’s a good point.

Paul: They have been working on this for five, six years. And this thing just came out and took it away from them. I mean, now they could… You, they could literally put Pokemon and Yelp into this and sell, socialize it around Pokemon. And that is highly leveragable.

The Craigslist Killer

On Episode 8 of The Edge of Innovation, we talk about how digital footprints make finding a killer almost too easy.

Show Notes

Open-Source License Plate Tracking
Preventing DNS-Based Data Exfiltration
A DNS Root Server Attack on Target?

Transcript

Sections

The Craigslist Killer’s Boot-prints
What is Done with Boot-prints Today?
Hacking a Corporation and Who Receives Damage
Where are the Flying Cars? Entrepreneurial Possibilities Beyond Bitcoin
Ads as a Necessary Evil?
Jeff Jonas and Data Fuzzing

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection of between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

The Craigslist Killer’s Boot-prints

Jacob: So, Paul, we’ve been talking about anonymity in the last couple of podcasts, and what does it take to become anonymous in the digital age, and with our digital technology, and with the technology and how it tracks us and fingerprints. You were involved in one way or another with the Craigslist killer. So can you talk us through what that was, how technology caught up with him, and what exactly your part in that was?

Paul: Yeah, certainly. Well first of all, I wasn’t the Craigslist killer, and I never met him or know him.

Jacob: Thank you for clarifying that.

Paul: But at the time, I was CTO of a technology company that was basically allowing, produced tools to help people understand how things moved about the internet and what IP addresses were doing what and all these different things. At the time, you know, this stuff is growing exponentially every year, this technology that we’re talking about. But one of the things that this person did was use Craigslist. And they got IP addresses, and they got lists of who accessed IP addresses and looked at what ads and things like that, and got that information, and then used some of our tools to help pinpoint where these IP addresses were.

Now we didn’t invent technologies that like the geolocation stuff, but our tools made that easy to use. So you could go and type an IP address and then find out where that was.

Most IP addresses are fairly static. Now, you know, with a mobile IP address, it’s a little different, because you, you’ll have a cell tower attached to it, you know. And that doesn’t really help anybody. But your cell provider knows which IP address you had and when.

So, when you take all that and put it together, they could find out where this IP address was, and over a few weeks, they were able to determine where it was and what it was doing. And most computers that are doing something are controlled by a human and it happened to be that person. And that allowed them to identify that person. So, you know, it’s not terribly difficult to correlate these things. If you think about movies we watched as kids, where you would see the tracker in the forest tracking somebody, and they’d see the footprint, and it matched the boots the guy was wearing in the murder mystery. Well, that’s all we’re talking about now, is we have the IP address, you went to this, you read this ad, you were at this location where your phone checked in with the cell tower, and you were there at the time the person was allegedly killed.

Well, that’s really hard to argue with. And then we have this history of your web browsing based on Craigslist’s IP addresses and all the different things, and you looked at this ad, and you looked at this ad. 50 years ago, if you got in your car and drove downtown and did something, people would have seen you. Usually people lived in a small town. They’d observe you. “Oh, yeah. That’s Jacob’s car. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know him, and I saw him walk into the building, and, you know, somebody was killed in that building in the same hour that he walk into it.” Well, it would certainly make you a suspect.

What is Done with Boot-prints Today?

We just have a lot more footprints now. You know, and we might have seen your footprint, you know, walking through the wet cement. Okay, we have Jacob’s boot print there, you know, and the fact of the matter. But your boot print is one thing, an eye witness is better.

I have these boot prints with all this internet data that give me the ability to understand where you are and what you were doing.

You know, I hope that it’s not there’s some clandestine, you know, government agenda to wipe out all the people who don’t like basketball or whatever silly thing you want to say. But you know, there’s all these conspiracy theories and ideas and different things like that. And I would like to think that it’s all pure and milk and honey kind of stuff going on, that they basically just want to sell you things.

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: Get you to give us more of your money. And that, I think, is true. They definitely want to give us opportunities to spend our money. That’s why advertising works. That’s what the whole thing makes Google go round is advertising. And some can say, as I’ve said before, and I have a friend who’s interested in boats, and he loves to see boat ads and boat related material ads, as opposed to, you know, lawn mower ads. Well, what do I want to see a lawn mower ad for?

Jacob: Right, right, right.

Paul: I live in an apartment.

Jacob: I live in the city.

Paul: What’s the deal, you know? So, that is a benefit, but there is that underlying undercurrent of saying, “Well, nothing you do is anonymous nowadays,” and you know, when somebody commits a crime, can we get that data to help us prove that they did that crime? That’s a real interesting question.

Jacob: So, in the case of the Craigslist killer, you guys were able to do that, right?

Hacking a Corporation and Who Receives Damage

Paul: Yeah. Well, it wasn’t us doing it. They used our, some of our tools on our products. Some of the investigators used those tools, to get an understanding of where he was at what times. It’s sensational, but it illustrates the fact that the data is out there. And with a warrant, you can pretty much find out anything about somebody.

It’s fascinating what you can find out, or if you want to break the law. You know, if you’re willing to break the law, you can find out anything about somebody. There’s this shift over the past few years of the majority of hacking that’s done is criminal hacking, to get access to people’s personal information so that they can steal money from them or use that money, use that credit card and all. Fraud, basically.

And those aren’t attacks on a person. Those are attacks on a corporation’s database. So, you know, you’ve given Amazon your credit card numbers. Now, Amazon is like over-the-top on security, and they say that they’ve never been hacked. Some people say, “Well, they’ve never disclosed that they’ve been hacked,” but regardless, you’ve never heard, you know, like the Target breach or the Verizon breach or the Sony breach, or you know.

You’ve never heard anything like that about Amazon, but the fact of the matter is, is that there seems to be this “Oh, you know, don’t use the internet. You’re going to get hacked.”

Well, all of the credit cards I have, all the bank accounts I have, have insurance on them that is provided with them. I didn’t have to go buy it, that I am not liable for any fraudulent charges. So, what’s the problem? What’s the problem? Just last week, I tried to use my Discover Card out for dinner, and it came back declined. Well, that’s weird. You know, I pay my bills right on time. So, I paid with another card and called Discover, and they said, “Oh, there were 100 168 authorizations attempted for a dollar apiece over the past day.

Jacob: Huh. Yeah.

Paul: And it was through PayPal. So, somebody had gone to a PayPal form, not logged in, but since you can become… You know, you can join PayPal and pay with your credit card, typed in my accurate credit card number and tried to get it authorized. And I don’t know what happened, but it either failed or it went through or it didn’t. But I talked to Discover, and they looked into it, and they immediately canceled the card, and they said, “Oh, don’t worry. You’re not liable for any of the fraudulent charges.” So, somebody either got that credit card number or guessed it. I mean, it’s only 16 digits, you know, and the first eight are usually the same. You know, so it’s not that terrible to figure out that I could guess it.

Discover did their job and locked the card.

Jacob: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You know, so, what am I out of? What’s the problem here? Yeah, I was inconvenienced, but in the you could say, “Gee, they stole that from Amazon.”

Well, they might have. Or they might have just guessed the number. Because they didn’t use my name. They used  Sandy Simpson. They typed that name in to try and activate. And they used that over and over and over again. I don’t know what they were thinking. So, it  was probably some sort of bot doing it.

Jacob: Sure. Yeah.

Paul: Now, if they had used my name, it would have been evidence that they stole it, because that correlated piece of information rather than just guessing the number.

So, I don’t, I don’t understand that. And you know, and make sure you go to a bank that you say, you know, if somebody gets my bank account number and withdrawals all my money, what happens? Understand that before it happens. And if, if that bank doesn’t have a good answer, there’s a bank next door that probably has a better answer.

Where are the Flying Cars? Entrepreneurial Possibilities Beyond Bitcoin

Jacob: For entrepreneurs, are there any avenues or frontiers for the anonymous category of user interfacing with the internet that are unexplored or possibilities to be explored?

Paul: Well, I think one of them, you know, BitCoin was sort of represented as a way to use anonymous spending and money. As it turns out, it’s really not anonymous because of the way the blockchain is, and you can just trace things back. In some ways, with BitCoin, you need to say so where’s the flying cars?  I mean, it didn’t happen. There are other proposed cryptocurrencies that may solve that problem of truly anonymous things.

Jacob: We talked about those in previous episodes.

Paul: Right. You know, remember. Cash is relatively anonymous. You know, they could scan the money and find out that you were the source of it by recording the serial numbers they give you, but you could give it to somebody. And they could give it to somebody, and they could give it to somebody, and they could give it… Immediately it becomes very difficult to trace.

So, entrepreneurial opportunities. There is a lot of opportunity in providing a semblance of anonymity, of what one might think is anonymous. But it’s largely all smoke and mirrors.

Jacob: So, it’s largely an elusive category.

Paul: It is. It is. There are people who want to do all these things. Like, you know, in the web browsers you have this private browsing.

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: All that does it doesn’t sustain cookies between sessions, practically, is really what it does. But it still presents your fingerprint. Now, an opportunity would be to have something that would skew the fingerprint. You know, just lie and say, “I’ve got all these fonts. I’m using this browser. I’m using all these different things.”

So, I think there’s some opportunities there. And there was a clever idea where these guys were really upset with ads showing up on websites. So, they built a browser that in the background, clicked on every single ad. That is brutal is because, up until now, clicking on an ad was either a mistake, you just randomly clicked, or it showed some interest that could correlate to your fingerprint, let’s say.

Jacob: Well, and I’ve heard that the reverse of that is if you, by having an ad block on your web browser, it’s presented as an ethical concern because ads are how the website is paying for itself to exist in front of your face.

Paul: Right.

Jacob: And so, you’re ethically violating the terms of the website. But I’ve never heard that before, that basically they reversed it. Rather than blocking the ad, they clicked on all the ads.

Paul: Right. Well, because then it becomes useless. Because now we don’t know what people are interested in or not interested in. And that’s nasty. I mean, you know, from a marketer, internet marketer, that’s a brutal thing to have happen to you.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And the systems are not designed to deal with that. So, the problem would be is it does make the data useless, but it would indicate that you’re really interested in a lot of things, because the systems aren’t built to deal with that. So, so, that’s an opportunity. You know, the ad blockers are an opportunity, but like you say, the point of the ads is so that the people who are presenting the data can get some compensation for that data.

Jacob: Yeah.

Ads as a Necessary Evil?

Paul: You know, there’s apps on the iPhone and iOS that have a paid version that take the ads out. I have a solitaire game like that. I had the free one for a year, and then I got tired of the ads, and I spent the dollar. You know, I spent the whole dollar in one sitting, and now I don’t have the ads. So it’s an interesting… It’s sort of a quid pro quo. You know, the ads are what you give. Your eyes have to process through that, and unfortunately or fortunately, our society requires money so that people can live.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And that is the ultimate arbiter of value is we attach it to money. What’s fascinating to me is that the ads are as effective as they could be. Because, if you look at the value proposition in most ads- and this has been proven in email marketing – the reason you get these harebrained emails is because they work.

And you’re like who in their right mind would click on this and do something with it?And they’re not scams, necessarily, but they’re like, you know, the flex hose. You know the hose that collapses, you know. And they were everywhere, you know, and it was an intriguing product, and it’s still out there and all that. And it has its pluses and minuses.

But boy, it was everywhere, and people were clicking on it and buying it and creating revenue.

I guess in some ways… I mean, you could sit there and say, you know, no more ads. And we’re going to government fund it all. And it just doesn’t seem to motivate people to be creative. You know, the reason Apple innovates in the iPhone area, is because they sell them and people pay for them. That’s why the iPhone 7 will come out and a bunch of people will go out the buy them, and they’ll be the people that will naturally attrite, basically, over time. Well, I’ve got an old iPhone 4. It’s time to get rid of it. I’ll get an iPhone 7. It’s going to be harder for people that bought iPhone 6s unless they’re geeks, and they love the new things. But they’re not going to see that.

But Apple will innovate. You know, Samsung has done some, you know… They’re advertising everywhere with their new Galaxy S7. It’s waterproof and it, you know. So, it’s like, “That’s cool.” You know, and, you know being in tech, we have these alliances with the technology, that I’m an iPhone guy, I’m an Android guy, I’m a this…

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: Most people look at it and say, “Oh that’s a new phone. It’s water proof. That’s a great idea. The next phone I get, I might do that.” They have no idea of this Apple versus Samsung environment or Google versus Apple, you know. It’s just not, not that. So…

Jacob: Yeah

Jeff Jonas and Data Fuzzing

Paul: I do think there’s an opportunity for an entrepreneur. They’re going to have to be a pretty heavy-duty one that can really win alliances. But what would be really cool is… There’s some work that a senior research scientist at IBM did. His name is Jeff Jonas, really cool data scientist. And it’s the way in which you can fuzz up data so that you can identify people who are the same people. So, rather than take Paul Parisi, and I might be listed in one database as Paul Parisi. I might be listed in one as P. Parisi. I might be listed as P.D. Parisi, or Paul D. Parisi. How do I fuzz that all up?

One might be 123 Main Street with street spelled out, and 123 Main St as my address.

And so, what they developed was a mechanism by which the database owner could fuzz that up and create a key that was basically a hash of these fields, once they were fuzzied. And we can apply that same algorithm to another people who own another database and fuzz that up. And then we can compare and say, “Do we have any that match?”

So, I could say to you, Mr. American Express, “I’d like to buy information on people I already have.”

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: Okay?

Jacob: I see.

Paul: So, how do I do that? Well, I give them your name. No, because you’re looking it up in a phonebook. No, I fuzz up my data, and I say this is people I already have.

Jacob: Right. This is a digital set.

Paul: Yeah. Exactly. And they say, “Well, we have an overlap there of a thousand or a hundred thousand. And we have their spending habits for the past year.” Okay?

So, they have that data, and I think there could be, I mean, it would be very interesting. There’s some really huge problems to overcome. But to have almost a registry of the data that companies are doing.

Now, how would you, you know, arbitrate who gets access to that? It works in big aggregates. But I could probably… It would become a privacy issue, because I could say, okay, I know Jacob Young, alright. It could be J. Young. It could be Jake Young. It could be J.S., so I could do all the permutations of that, and fuzz it up in the same way. And then I could submit a query to this national database and get all your information on that.

But there’s some, there’s something in there that I think allows us to sort of see what do companies know about me. Google does this. They will let you see everything they have stored and delete it. Well, that’s pretty good. I would like to see that more and more, so that we could almost have a…

So, somebody could come up with a system that you sell to companies like Amazon or Google or whoever it is, that says, “Here’s how your customers can see what you’re storing about them.” That doesn’t exist.  Google has spun their own up. You know, Amazon doesn’t show you… You can’t go and delete your purchase history or the fact that you browsed for pink underwear, you know, for yourself. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

To be able to interact in a standard fashion with a website’s data, I think, would be, is a huge economic opportunity, to be able to provide those services, that infrastructure.

Jacob: Yeah. Excellent.


Also published on Medium.

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