It was 2014 when Google, the company who started the “Corporate April Fools Prank”, released the following video



Awestruck?!

Niantic Inc., spun out of Google in late 2015 with a pretty complex game in its portfolio ‘Ingress’ and a discovery app ‘Field Trip’, has made the 90’s kids nostalgic by launching a game featuring their favourite cartoon, yes you guessed it right. They converted Google’s April Fool prank to a reality.

The game hasn’t released in India officially but I am sure 60-65% of the Indian youth already have it on their smartphones. All this buzz has been created without any social feature in the app, just imagine the storm it will create when people will be able to trade pokemons with their friends, play friendly battles. A surprise for the Pokemon Go maniacs ahead, Read on.

People tend to hop on to everything which creates a buzz, uploading #Prisma pictures, catching pokemons, watching game of thrones. People tend to develop content or develop a product around the “buzzing” topic, like I am doing now. People become creative when they want to earn money, cab drivers are providing special rides for users to play PokemonGo wherein the driver will drive you around the city and the customer will be charged on an hourly basis. Can’t catch pokemons. We have a special mobile cover for you. It will make it easy, like it was difficult to catch them before.

“Pokemon masters” are being hired where a person will “walk your phone” to hatch the eggs and catch new pokemons. (You can hire me for that :P)

Pokemon Go Fans, your surprise is around the corner. People have started creating hacks and started making money of it as well. A developer wrote an open source code (read: code which is visible to all) which helps to get a list of all nearby pokemons, lures, items at pokestops and more. Monetizing it wasn’t very far, within 2 days a website came up with a Pokemon Locator which gives location of nearby pokemons and the time in which they would disappear, you can use it here: PokeVision. There is an android app for the same as well. ( Download Link – Download the latest app-release.apk from the above link)

The PokemonGo Servers are not performing well and people have taken advantage of that as well. Companies have also started marketing their services through guerrilla marketing. See what DataDog, A measurement tool provider, has done here:

Check out the website here: http://ispokemongodownornot.com/

Morph.ai, a bot creator, captured the PokemonGo buzz to promote their product, by creating a facebook messenger bot which answers questions to help you win battles, find the bot here.

Companies have also started providing discounts for PokemonGo rides.

It’s about how you can catch up the trend to leverage it to your potential. Have you seen something like this, share such instances in the comments.

Fact: A person has “Caught ‘em all”. Find out more here.

PS: I keep my promises. 😀

Share if you liked, provide feedback if you didn’t. Critics welcome. 🙂