A little over two years ago, a small team within Google called Niantic Labs introduced Ingress, a game that adds a virtual reality layer on top of the entire world, which you can claim, defend or destroy for your cause - depending on which side you've chosen. And while I tested early versions of the game while it was developing at Google, and dabbled with it just after launch, I put it aside before jumping back in with both feet two months ago, when a pair of colleagues on my new team couldn't stop talking about it. And now I won't stop talking about it either.

Simply put, in my view, it's the most well-designed, intelligently deployed concept I've ever seen for an immersive experience on mobile, which encourages you to get off your butt, explore the world around you, and find new people to help you achieve goals together. Every facet of the application, even while it seems mysterious, is designed to help you get out of house, to explore new crannies of your neighborhood (and beyond) and discover people on your faction who need your help to achieve what would be impossible alone. I've never seen anything like it.


As you know, I've been an avid wearables and personal fitness tracking nut for the better part of more than two years. Fitbit has been counting my steps and Moves has been showing where I go. But while Fitbit only counts my activity, it doesn't provide direction or give me a specific mission. Ingress does - making my steps matter, as they are pulled toward each new destination, and seemingly every turn provides yet another opportunity to take down an opponent, power up or build on my own space, or hack away and get new equipment to make me stronger. This combination has accelerated my near-constant walking and movement into personal record highs, consistent leaderboard domination, and I've fallen way behind in any regular TV watching.

There are many other sites dedicated to the gameplay of Ingress, so I won't go too deep, but at its heart, Ingress is a battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In the storyline, the Earth has been seeded with exotic matter (XM), and you either believe this XM will enlighten us all, or you will resist it. So from the very begining, you choose a side: The Resistance (blue) or The Enlightened (green).


Once you pick a side, you then have three primary functions, much like other multi-player games. You can build sites for your faction, you can destroy the opposition, or you can continually farm for new equipment to make you stronger. This is done by visiting sites, known as portals, which consist largely of landmarks across the world, from water fountains to murals, sculptures, churches and standing structures. If it is something that can shape your mind and appears exotic, there's a good chance it's a portal.


As one friend of mine tastefully said, you can't play Ingress "from the comfort of your own toilet." You have to move. And in especially dense places with plenty of landmarks, the next portal can be just another block or less away. So if you find yourself out to build, farm, destroy or explore, the only limit to how much you participate is your own time, and how long your phone can hold a charge. That's led to something of a cottage industry for Ingress players lugging around external phone battery charges so playing doesn't stop short at the worst time.

Now that Ingress has you out of your house, and walking with specific destinations, with the next stop just a little bit further away, you're being stretched. Stretched to find new places in your community you hadn't previously seen, new spots in other cities you've never visited, and it sets you up to be territorial, knowing that particular portals are valuable to you or your side.


But if you really want to have an impact, you can't just go it alone. Even the most experienced Ingress player can't build a portal up much more than halfway to full strength, thanks to features in the game that limit your ability to power up portals. It takes two players to take a portal to 75%, three can take it to just over 80%, and in order for a portal to reach 100% strength, it take contributions from eight individual players. So you can deploy and hope, or you need to find people on your side who are often more than eager to help and build, destroy or hack together - spurred on by built-in communications in the app, or augmented through dedicated communities on Google+, Hangouts and other chat tools. There, people will arrange times to meet, secret build or teardown events, or provide updates about activity in their neighborhood.


I recently heard somebody say you either go deep into Ingress or you don't go at all. And it's probably true. I originally didn't get the attraction, as a low level player. But now I've seen things I build at midnight before heading home get taken down at 1:30 in the morning, or by six a.m. the next day. I've started to recognize and greet players on both teams, and you learn the patterns of the game, as one faction gains control over a geography, or specific people just refuse to ever give up, and seemingly play around the clock. And once you go deep, it really becomes a numbers game, as every activity is counted. Every hack. Every deployment. Every link from portal to portal. Every field. Every destroyed opponent portal. The more numbers you get, the more abilities you have and the stronger you are against the competition, and the more they need to be prepared for you.

Joining the Enlightened on Ingress has brought destinations, goals and missions to the activity I was already doing with Fitbit. It's dramatically reduced (even further) my idle sitting time, it's made me see and enjoy experiences I hadn't yet gotten to around town and in neighboring cities, and I'm getting new relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds, who all hold at least one thing in common - that we're playing Ingress, and working to expand the minds of humanity. It's more than a game. It's the true reality. I hope you do check the game out, and see what it does to your daily routine. And while I don't mind more competition, it'd be awesome if you saw the world in a new light by joining the Enlightened.

Grab Ingress on Google Play for Android and on iTunes.

Disclosure: I work at Google, and the Niantic team works within Google.

While it's somewhat hard to imagine now, with Apple seeing incredible success, it was less than two decades ago when the company, facing a small market share, and minuscule developer interest, had to pull a rabbit out of its hat to ensure longtime survival. That surprise came from an unexpected partner - longtime nemesis Microsoft, who in 1997, not only gave the then-beleaguered company a much-needed cash injection of $150 million, but also promised continued updates to the then-essential Microsoft Office suite, required to keep Macintosh's hopes alive as a viable platform.

Amid the shocked faithful, who responded with boos over making Internet Explorer the default browser for the Macintosh, instead of the arguably more Mac-like Netscape Navigator, CEO Steve Jobs said the unforgettable phrase easy to forget in an environment where it's commonplace to pit technologies against one another:

“If we want to move forward, and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” (Source: YouTube)

Turns out, as with many things, he was right. Microsoft, despite the company's many challenges, still is worth more than $300 billion, and saw income of more than $16 billion in the most recent quarter. When it comes to operating system choices, usually one picks Macintosh or Windows (and not both), or mobile OS choices, one could pick iOS or Windows phone (and not both), but both companies have managed to have significant places in the tech world for the last two decades.

Rarely does the winner take all.

Fast forward from Steve's words in Boston in 1997 to today - a world where big companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and others command significant visibility and influence - but comparably younger companies like Twitter, Dropbox, Tesla, Nest (pre-acquisiton), Uber and others manage to also carve out interesting opportunities and become big companies themselves.

It's often assumed that if one "wins", another has to "lose". If Facebook wins, does Twitter lose? If Android wins, does iOS lose? If Amazon wins, does Google lose?

As a user of these technologies, and someone who watches the market closely or writes about these technologies, I see lines forming - not just of people who prefer one technology or one company relative to another, but of people who also display an equal and opposite reaction, to strongly dislike the company or technologies less preferred.

Those decisions have odd echoes. It's assumed that if you like the iPhone, then you must prefer Apple Mail over Gmail. If you like Windows Phone, you must also prefer Bing search to Google search. And if you have a blog that covers the minutiae of Apple's comings and goings, that documenting any negative opinion about their perceived competition should be highlighted with equal or higher volume.

Simply stated: I disagree, and think we can do better. You can like one company's vision or products even if you purchase from another one. It can be possible that all the major players find a space where they are successful. And the best products are built when it's the users' values that are at the forefront, rather than a false battle started to strengthen the position against another player.

Larry Page, Google's CEO, addressed this point at Google I/O last summer, when he said:

"Every story I read about Google is 'us vs some other company' or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress. Most important things are not zero sum, there is a lot of opportunity out there."

Recently, The Verge wrote a great in-depth piece about being a fanboy, asking "Have you ever loved something so much it hurt?" showcasing a number of examples of people so consumed about making sure people knew which side of these battles they were on that they were unforgiving in their tone with anyone else who disagreed. I believe you can have a strong preference, and can evangelize a product or platform, like I do often with those I enjoy, without having to cut down alternatives or those who've selected a different way.

The world is a very large place. There are many millions of people who haven't yet purchased smartphones, tablets or PCs, let alone decided on their favorite OS or apps. There is room for many small companies and big companies alike to innovate and do incredible things. There's room for us all to intellectually choose to be fair and review each new product on its merits and stand for those things we believe and like without needing to tear down alternatives. It might be fun, but we can do better.

Disclosures for transparency's sake: I work at Google, which makes some of my personal favorite products, like Android, Gmail and ChromeOS. It can be assumed Google occasionally competes with other market participants like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

(Images via Dreamstime, which is an excellent resource)

By the end of last month, Verizon was regularly sending me updates on how close I was to reaching the top of my 4 gigabyte data cap available in the plan I share with my wife. A little over two weeks in, I had used more than two gigabytes, after three weeks a third, and by the end of the billing cycle, I could have hit maximum capacity, had I just left my favorite Spotify playlist on play and asked all my apps from Google Play to update simultaneously.

But I was nowhere near capacity for our shared voice plan. Not by a long shot. In fact, the month saw a record low in our actual voice usage, racking up less than an hour's time over 30 days, which averages down to less than 2 minutes per day, more than enough time to call home, say, "Are the kids fine? Do I need to get anything?" and hang up.

It's unlikely the activity seen in our own home is unusual. Where just a few years ago, one could see passersby talking on their phones as they jostled down the sidewalk, or ringing phones would be commonplace in cafes and restaurants, it seems more people are looking down at their phones to trade updates than picking one up for a quick call. At this point, it's likely most of us don't even know our best friend's phone numbers, but could rattle off a few hundred Twitter handles of mere acquaintances if it came down to it.

The story of how static land lines with inflexible phone numbers were rapidly diminished with mobile phone numbers that stuck with a person from plan to plan, phone to phone and more recently, carrier to carrier, is a well known one. Hotels can no longer expect you to rack up ridiculous phone bills for local calls and family updates, and hope they can instead get you to foot the bill for 24 hours of questionably high speed Internet instead. And the telecoms are no doubt praying that all of the youth addicted to texting stick with SMS and far away from the many different free services that connect people in real time.

When I was on a trip last month to Paris and London, I didn't even make an effort to ensure my phone worked in Europe after I had crossed the Atlantic. Where in years past, walking around with a less than functional phone would be crippling, and worth the extra quid to get a few megabytes and minutes, I replaced all that potential cost with daily Google+ hangouts to see the family face to face, and stuck near WiFi for everything else.
That's not intended to be a plug for Google+ hangouts (although you all know I work at Google and think hangouts are great), but a real clear example where traditional voice seems rather quaint. Instead of a voice relationship and fighting over the phone between my 3 youngsters, I could see them and their expressions, even to the point of making funny faces, from thousands of miles away.


What I did see, however, especially in London, was the availability of SIM cards with pre-paid contracts that were data only, with no voice attached. It's clear that in a world of apps, our mobile devices aren't expected to be held up against our ears, but in front of our eyes, ready for our hands' next command.

Voice calls now are the refuge of two major parties - the salesmen and the grandmothers, essentially. Receiving a phone call from a number you don't know, or a geography you don't visit is practically guaranteed to be a robocall or somebody wanting your money or your opinion. And grandmas get a pass because they've usually passed the point where they can learn new tricks.

Just like we passed a time where physical media made sense, becoming a clutter in our home, and practically all of us said goodbye to our landlines, I wonder how long it will be until we say goodbye to voice functionality on our phones, except in the event of an emergency. These devices won't cease to be communicators, as our primary point for email, social networking and photography, but voice is practically an also ran on the very devices initially created for that very purpose. It's very interesting to watch.

For many of us, our social networking connections have spun out of control. On sites like Facebook and Twitter, we measure our words as for the most part, every update we make goes to everyone. While Facebook has options similar to Google+'s Circles, only a small number of people takes the time to organize their friends, and then uses these setting to communicate in small groups. It's just too hard and too complicated. Katango, a small startup in Palo Alto, funded as part of Kleiner Perkins' sFund, hopes to take the pain out of this maintenance, and automatically make these groups for you, on the back of sharp artificial intelligence.

Yoav Shoman, a Stanford professor, hopes that Katango will help provide an experience that helps users interact with each other more efficiently with friends online. Yee Lee, vice president of product, formerly of SGI and Applied Materials, teamed up with Shoman and a few others to derive sense of the mess we've created for ourselves. They are starting with an iPhone app that mines your Facebook social graph for similarities and shared connections, and in seconds, shows you suggested groupings of your friends, which is extremely accurate and needs only small manual retouching - saving you hours of time that you probably weren't going to spend anyway.



   Katango Scans Your Facebook Social Graph to Find Connections Automatically

Like me, both Yoav and Yee found themselves pruning their Facebook social graphs because the mass had grown unwieldy and they ran into what they called "communication friction", solvable if the social graph could be accurately mapped, enabling you to send messages to a subset of your contacts with shared interests or links.

"We love Facebook, but we don't want to share everything to everyone," Yoav told me in a face to face meeting at their headquarters last month. "People are aware of groups and lists, but don't want to create them."

The goal, at least at the first pass, is to quickly organize your social life, and eliminate these friction points that have people reaching for the Unfriend button - essentially delivering a social platform for social algorithmics, simplifying your network.

In my testing at their HQ, as well as on their iOS app, which is now live on iTunes, the application's capability to distinguish how networks were grouped was tremendously savvy. It managed to separate church members who I attended with before I was married from those where I attended after I was married, thanks to their links and other clues such as listed hometown. It was able to divine which of my social connections on Facebook came after we had first met on FriendFeed, and even more amazingly, practically made a dedicated group in the application of the actual FriendFeed staff and their spouses - something I wouldn't even have considered.


   Katango Nailed The FriendFeed Team and Lets Me Update the Family

Surely, the app isn't completely infallible. It accurately found all members of my family with whom I share links on Facebook, but also added my best friends from high school and their significant others, who might be surprised to find they are now in my extended family tree. It also put a few top social geeks from external geographies as living in the Bay Area, when that's not the case. But in seconds, the app delivered something like 95% accuracy where I've been living closer to 0%, and from the iPhone app, I can now tailor messages and shares just to these groups on their own without hitting my entire network.

My 0% solution is pretty much the norm for most Facebookers, Yoav argued, comparing the gulf between what is and what could be to the early days of the Web.

"It's Yahoo! and Google all over again," he said. "Yahoo! was curating the Web by hand and Google made the algorithm. We are still in the manual phase of social."

Katango launches with the background hubbub around Google+ and its manual circles having launched just in the last two weeks. One of the service's major differentiators against Facebook is the option to group people and communicate against these smaller lists. Katango now reduces that gap, and might be a good fit inside a company that wants to help its users eliminate the manual process which has so far stopped most of them in its tracks.

You can find Katango on the iTunes store here. An Android app is surely coming, but they want a little love from Steve Jobs and team in Cupertino by being exclusive on iOS first.

As an over-extended digital device collector, I have my unfair share of tablets, phones and laptops strewn about my office. My kids are practically tripping over them, each one having its own use or unique operating system. As I use each of these devices, I find myself seeing gaps in the way different applications share data - keeping user information local to the device and locking it away so I lose information when I switch. While the Web and the buzzword-heavy "cloud" are helping matters, we've still got a lot of room to grow.

As I move from device to device, I'm doing so making decisions based on what applications and data I will find when I get there. By using my laptop, I lose access to games and apps that run on my Android phone and tablets. By using my phones, I lose the desktop apps. While some are looking to Apple to lead the way by merging the OS X concept with iOS, less talk has been made of bringing these iOS apps to a touch-screen enabled desktop. Maybe the idea is not happening because it's a bad one, but some smart app developers have thrown caution to the wind and brought their content to practically every screen.

Take the ubiquitous Angry Birds franchise for starters. I can play Angry Birds on my Mac from the app on the Mac App Store. I can play it on Google Chrome on the Chromebook. I can play it on my Android phone and tablets. I can play it on the iPad and iPod Touch. It's everywhere. The downside, of course, is that I have to conquer all the same levels again on every device, with no central record.

A little better is how Barnes and Noble approaches its NOOK eBooks. Purchases I make on my NOOKColor may initiate there, but I can also read the same books from my NOOK app on the Galaxy Tab (7 inch or 10 inch) and there's even a Mac client. I just have to sign in to my account and my library is right there. Very cool. If I'm connected to the Web, it will even know which book I am reading and open to the right page. That's the kind of integration I am really looking for.

You can also see smart integration of user preferences in the way Safari on iOS has the same bookmarks as on your computer, or how Chrome bookmarks follow you from Google Account-enabled machine to machine.

But most of the time apps are not behaving this way. Android's default browser is still not Chrome (and this baffles many), so the integration isn't there. Meanwhile, if I play 9 Innings baseball on my Galaxy Tab 10 and get through 81 games, starting the same app on my Galaxy Tab 7 starts at game 1. Even if I buy in-app enhancements to the game (and others like Home Run Battle 3D), those enhancements are device-specific.

Now that we can have Web-centric user profiles and can back up our user content, history and preferences, the very least we can do is be sure that our activity is matched across similar mobile devices. I recognize that often coding for desktop and mobile can be very different, but as the devices blur between smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, a screen is a screen is a screen, and I want to get the same stuff everywhere.

Defaulting to a Web-centric operating system like ChromeOS is a start, of course, but it's early days for that, and not everything has yet made the trip. I'd love Spotify on my CR-48 the same way it's on my phones and tablets and Mac, but it's a major hole until it hits the Web.

One practically has to make a mental matrix to remember what content and services are available on which devices, and what one loses when they choose one screen over another. I'd like to see more developers thinking about eliminating these gaps and giving users what they want no matter what screen they choose.