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I wonder if Niantic would ever open up some API's to gamify this by tying it into Pokémon Go.

Pokemon go already is based on OpenStreetMap. And yes, a few OSM-contributors started because a park was missing and they thus lacked a spawnpoint for pokemons.

But we've also head plenty of teens adding fake data to have pokemons in their front garden. To much gamification hurts.

Fascinating! Didn't know that Go was based on OSM.

This sounds like a really cool project. Thanks for your hard work.

Thanks! Niantec started as a startup within Google's startup incubator and thus used Google Maps in the very beginning. However, they got 'spun out' and when the price became to expensive, they switched to OSM anno 2017.

(I'm not sure about the details, but I think the spawn points were OSM based long before the map rendering was OSM based to). In either case, read their Wikipedia page for more details (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.) and our OSM-wikipage (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go)

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