Can A Startup Live Inside Google? Niantic Labs, Creators Of Field Trip And "Ingress" Try

Thinking about future products isn't easy when you already have millions of users to keep happy. That's why Google's Niantic Labs plays by different rules than other product teams. “A mysterious cell phone, and a 911 emergency call. That’s what got me looking. And when I started looking, I started finding.” Google does not usually get this dramatic during its product announcements. But when the company’s massively multiplayer augmented reality game, Ingress, launched in November, there were no Google executives preaching its greatest features from a podium. No corporate blog posts. No clean white videos with step-by-step instruction about how to use the game. Instead, a mysterious website and Google+ page began posting clues, which included “classified” documents, incomprehensible posters, and amateur-style videos with a hint of the supernatural....