GOTTA CATCH ’EM ALL

Small businesses and digital advertisers take advantage of the Pokemon Go craze,

LOS ANGELES— The Pokemon Go craze has sent legions hiking around cities, battling with “pocket monsters” on their smartphones.

It marks a turning point for augmented reality, technology that superimposes a digital facade on the real world.

But the game’s popularity is also spilling unintended consequences into everyday life. Here’s a look at some of the Pokewinners and Pokelosers this week:

Winner: Small businesses

Some shops are exploring ways to use Pokemon Go’s digital “lures” to drum up business.

An Atlanta café owned by digital ad agency Huge turned out to be roughly 30 feet away from two prominent “PokeStops,” where players go to stock up on digital gear. So it spent about $40 in real money to add digital “lures” to the stops, refreshing them every 30 minutes. The lures increase the chance that rare Pokemon with names like “Starmie” and “Poliwag” turn up nearby — drawing players in turn.

In San Francisco, Kawika’s Ocean Beach Deli likewise set out lures and branded the store as a “charging station” for drained phones. (The game is notoriously hard on batteries.)

Given that the shop is bracketed by PokeStops on one side and a battle arena on the other, players “have no choice but to walk past us,” says owner David Nottage III.

Loser: Public safety

In St. Louis, police say robbers perched near attractive digital spots to rob players engrossed in the game. A man who lives in a former church says his home — now also a PokeStop — has become a digital magnet for Pokemon Goplayers, who sometimes block his driveway and passing traffic as they pull over to stare at their phones.

Phoenix police are telling people not to trespass while playing the game. New York’s subway is warning people not to jump onto the tracks to chase digital “Rattatas.”

Todd Richmond, a director at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, says a big debate is brewing over who controls digital assets associated with real-world property.

“This is the problem with technology adoption — we don’t have time to slowly dip our toe in the water,” he says. “Tenants have had no say, no input, and now they’re part of it.”

Winner: Nintendo

Stock in the company, which partly owns Pokemon Go, jumped 25 per cent on Monday, adding about $5 billion to its market value.

But Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal says that’s just the tip of the iceberg and now targets a share price of 30,000 yen, nearly 50-per-cent higher still. Nintendo is transitioning from console games to smartphone games, and “it has just started that journey,” Goyal says.

The game’s success on smartphones also could spur faster development from hardware makers — Microsoft with its HoloLens, the secretive startup Magic Leap, or Google, which could still revive its failed Glass headgear, says Timothy Carone, professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

“My guess is that a lot of developers have gone back to figure out how to take this approach,” Carone says.

Loser: Personal security

Adam Reeve, principal architect of security firm Red Owl, found that Pokemon Go— not yet officially available in Canada — required overly broad permission for those using a Google account to sign in.

Even setting aside the location data collected by the app, he said, the app is a “huge security risk.”

He noted the app, in theory, could allow Pokemon Go to read one’s Gmail, send email as you and access your Google search history.

On Monday, Niantic said in a blog post that it never intended to request such sweeping data access, hasn’t collected information beyond the user’s ID and email address and is working with Google to pare back the authorization.

Winner: Digital advertisers

It’s easy to imagine a developer selling ads within the Go game world to local merchants, or even auctioning off the promise to turn shops and restaurants into game destinations. “Location-based advertising should get a boost in augmentedreality gaming because of games like Pokemon Go,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jitendra Waral.

“It’s going to spur more intellectual property toward geo-tagging.”

Loser: The Holocaust Museum

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is a “PokeStop.” In fact, three different PokeStops are associated with various parts of the museum.

“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, said.

“We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”