/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast (Episode 12): Sean Boots

[music]

Chris Ronan: Hi everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I’m Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the 80 or so people who works at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Thank you for downloading our podcast. This is our first episode of 2018. Hope your year’s off to a good start. Hope you were able to attend one of the Australia Day Geocaching events a few weeks ago. There’s a lot more neat stuff coming up on the Geocaching calendar as the year rolls on. And as the year continues, we would really like to hear from you about what we should cover on the podcast. What questions do you have, what topics would you like us to dive into? Please email us, the address is podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching com.

CR: You can pause this right now. You can go to your computer or open up your smartphone. You can send me an email podcast@geocaching.com. I’ll wait while you pause and while you send your email. And then when you’re done, come back and we will continue. Whatever your question, I will do my best to find the right person to answer it. Okay, in this episode, we will hear from one of the longest tenured employees at Geocaching HQ. Sean Boots started here way back in 2004. You are certainly aware of his work, whether you realize it or not. He has done quite a few things in 14 years here that impact how we search for geocaches and how we play the game. He’s a very interesting person, I think you’ll enjoy hearing his story. So, here is me talking with Sean Boots.

[music]

CR: Okay. So let’s just start with, what’s your title and what’s a… Just in a nutshell, what you do at HQ every day.

Sean Boots: Cool. I am the manager for the web development team, basically, that does not constitute mobile. It doesn’t constitute IT. It’s a series… A bunch of like 15 people I think is what we have now, and it’s the front end developers, it’s the middle and back end developers of the company.

CR: So it’s the people that work on the website as opposed to working on the mobile apps, is that generally speaking?

SB: Yes. Mostly it’s the web all inclusive, but also the API and all of the services under the cover. We kind of provide the business logic for the web and the mobile applications, but we also do we web stuff themselves. We also do some internal tools and we’re responsible for pager duty, and we’re the ones who, when things go wrong on the website, it’s us and IT who come to the rescue.

CR: You’ve been… So this is 14 years, is that right?

SB: I’m coming up on 14 years, August. Yeah, it’s been 14 years. It’s amazing. And we’ve gone through so many different iterations, I think this is my fourth building. We started in a little dinky building downtown Seattle. It was before Amazon had sort of taken over that whole area. There was a Whole foods, it was like a hole in the ground. And it actually was being built in front of us as we were in that building. And there was seven of us, I think, when I started. We ended up staying in that building for a couple of years. And I think there’s only like two people, other than me, three people total that are still actively working here. It’s changed a lot since then. Yeah. We moved to downtown and then we moved to this area and there are two different buildings in this area, so we’ve been there ever since.

CR: And to give some perspective, seven people then and now it’s around 75 or 80. It’s grown by about 10 times. That’s pretty amazing.

SB: It’s crazy. Yeah. I mean I have… It’s interesting because when I first started, I was very green. I was hired to basically supplement work that Jeremy was doing. I was the first developer other than him. Well, they had had a couple other people do that job, and then they had already left. And from my perspective, I was being hired to supplement Jeremy.

CR: And Jeremy being, for people that don’t know, Jeremy Irish.

SB: Yeah. Sorry. Jeremy Irish.

CR: One of the co-founders of the company.

SB: Yes. The Ray Kroc of Geocaching.

[laughter]

CR: I wonder if anybody’s ever called him that.

SB: Well, I have.

CR: Have you?

SB: I’ve done it for years. [chuckle]

CR: I could see Michael Keaton playing Jeremy in a movie.

SB: I think that’d be awesome.

CR: The founders.

SB: Yeah. They look just like each other.

[laughter]

CR: Who would play Bryan? I don’t know who would?

SB: That’s a good question.

CR: We’ll have to think that one through.

SB: Probably Robert Downey Jr.

CR: Al Pacino. Like a young Al Pacino. Oh, and I like that.

SB: Al Pacino might be a little old at this point.

CR: That’s true. Obviously, that’s why I say… I was thinking like Al Pacino in the Godfather could play Brian but…

[chuckle]

SB: Yeah. That’s it.

CR: But no, I like the Downey Jr idea. Okay, you’re doing that work, supplementing some of Jeremy’s work. Going back to then 2004, what were you doing at that time and how did Geocaching kind of come into your life? How did this opportunity come to you originally?

SB: When I joined, I think I was in the 200,000th of users or something like that. My account is… And I started right as I created my account, basically. And that we weren’t talking about millions of people, we were talking hundreds of thousands. And it was just kinda starting to blow up, and I was really green. It was my first coding job. I had worked for my father for 10 years as a warehouse manager prior to that, and I was a self taught coder who was looking to… I just wanted to get into that industry and so I tried really… I made a bunch of websites.

SB: And this is also the web is just getting started and so just trying to find contracting gigs with whoever I could find. My father’s company had a customer, I would ask them if they needed a website and then I would do it. When I finally decided that I was a good enough programmer, I decided I was going to spread my wings and I was gonna try to get a job somewhere else and I put my resume on monster.com just to sit there, I had no intention of like promoting it or actively doing anything about it, I just wanted to see what would happen if I did it. And so I put all these gigs that I’d done and I had this skill that I have now and I swear it was like within a week I get a email from Jeremy. And he’s like, “Hey it looks like you have a skill set that’s similar to what we’re looking for, can I call you?” I’m like, “Yeah, absolutely that would be kind of cool.”

[laughter]

SB: I mean he’s like, “Yes,” so he calls me literally after I sent the email back, he calls me.

CR: And did you know about Geocaching at all?

SB: I had not, no I had never heard of it. So that was actually my… That moment was my introduction to Geocaching and it was really… That was like, “Hey, this thing exists and there’s an actual job waiting that I could possibly… ” It was kind of interesting. So of course I… He asked me a few questions like wanted to know what my skillset was and it was basically like he and I did the same kind of thing and so it was like a good fit. So he invited me to come in for an interview and then of course I did the whole due diligence let me go and Geocache, and figure out what this is about. I’m gonna find my first cache and I’m gonna be prepared and so then I was able to go into the interview and we kinda just like had a couple of ad-hoc conversations about like, “So you do this technology and this technology?” and I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Okay, cool. So I hear you’re in a band.”

[laughter]

SB: Alright like just do I like you, kinda talk. And so…

CR: Right, right. Okay so you talk to Jeremy he kind of explains what he’s looking for and…

SB: Right. So he offered me the job after that conversation. Alright, this is a good fit and so went home… He calls me, “we got a position for you” and so then it was kind of like, “How do I tell my dad that I’m leaving?”

CR: Right, ’cause you’d been there what? For like 10 years you said.

SB: Yeah, 10 years.

CR: Wow.

SB: And I know and in hindsight he was like, “Why are you still here?

[laughter]

SB: “Will you just go get a job please.”

CR: So I opened up the internet Wayback machine.

SB: Oh yeah, oh this is awesome.

CR: And a look at… And maybe I’ll post this on the podcast page but if I don’t people can go and look at the Internet Wayback machine and just put in Geocaching.com and look in 2004 and so this is what the website would have looked like when you first showed up here.

SB: This is exactly what it looked like. Yeah there’s no denying, this is exactly what it looked like yeah.

CR: So what comes to your mind when you see this now?

SB: My first thought is that, “Well, we’ve come a long way.” And that despite I still have misgivings about where we are, I still wanna keep moving us forward and getting better and making us look prettier and be in a better place. But sometimes you forget like where you came from a little bit, so this is kind of exciting to see that and we’re way…

[laughter]

SB: It’s way better now yeah. So it also reminds me that I actually didn’t work on the Geocaching website in my early part of my career. Actually, the first thing I did was put a Geocaching search functionality into REI kiosks, which for me was really exciting to work with a big partner and do something kind of neat in a visible arena. And so that was really fun and exciting a good first project, but ultimately my job was to figure out with Jeremy a solution for virtual caches and location-less caches which were causing like enormous problems on the website. People were placing really terrible virtual caches and exploiting that concept and we weren’t getting very good quality and reviewers were ready to revolt.

SB: The location lists concept was a great idea, but it was implemented incorrectly because it treated basically, like geocache type locations, were basically being created in the logs. And then there was no way to log the logs and so it was a mismatch despite it being a really cool idea. And so Jeremy and I… Well it wasn’t just Jeremy and I but like the whole group at the time Nate and Bryan and all the people, you know Elias, all these… All of us were talking about what could we do? What’s a good idea, how can we fix this whole problem and ultimately the idea of Waymarking came about, which was to take these location-less caches and created their own website, so categories would become the cache and then the logs would actually be on the same level as caches and then we would actually be able to log the logs at that point. So you’d be able to log the waymarks. But anyways for many years probably five years, that was my core responsibility was to build the Waymarking site from scratch and to add features and keep it maintained and try to get it into a better bigger place.

SB: I mean Nate and I, Nate was kind of like the the product manager for that project and I was the sole developer, and we sort of hashed ideas out together and we pushed features as fast as we could. The community of location-less owners was the root of the beginnings for that site. We asked them all to create categories and we gave them this new site and they all seeded this website with all their location-less caches. Anyhow so the Waymarking was my primary job and at some point we sort of as a company made a decision that we really wanted to focus deeper on the core offering. So Geocaching was our bread-and-butter, it was the piece, it was… The place where community was continuing to develop at a great pace. Waymarking was still doing well, but not nearly at the same level as the Geocaching. And so, we sort of made a decision that we needed to put all our resources on Geocaching. And so, that’s when I started being tasked with doing things for the Geocaching site instead of the Waymarking site.

SB: And for a long time, we tried to build things in the engineering department that would work with both. Like you build one thing for Geocaching and then Waymarking could kind of piggy back off of it. But at some point, we ended up building this monolithic website that we were… It’s basically a solution of code that is… We jokingly call it Tucson. It’s just all of the Geocaching website, all of the Waymarking website, all of everything that we ever did was just put into this big place, and it got to be unwieldy and it became hard to move in any kind of pace, and we decided eventually that we should start splitting those things out into their own projects. And so, Waymarking eventually was pulled out and Geocaching was left, and that ended up being where most of the effort was going. And ever since then, we’ve been progressively getting more professional and just improving all of the performance of that site and the look of it and all that kinda thing.

CR: So as the years have progressed and you have worked your way through various positions, what are some of the things… You talked about Waymarking, some of the other stuff that… Some of the highlights for you over the time that you’ve been here?

SB: We’ve done some major… I mean, that’s been really, really great and terrible things that have happened throughout those years. I think the big… I mean, Waymarking, I would argue, is a highlight for me. I still, I’m actually proud of the work that was done with that. I actually think it’s still a viable idea, and I think it has possibility. So from my perspective, that is still a source of pride. We’ve built full search functionality under the covers. We have separated our accounts and our payment into services. We’re currently making large strides with the maps. We’ve had already made large strides with the maps compared to what had been in the beginning. Where I go is a huge experiment. That actually was the thing… That was like secret project when I was first hired. Like it’s the killer idea. We’re gonna do awesome stuff with this. And to this date, I think that that idea is an amazingly good idea, and I think it’s probably something that we’re not done with, but it’s something that we have to really think about it.

SB: And another moment of huge success for us was, when we embraced the mobile world. The iPhone came out. I kinda have a story about that, ’cause there was a guy that worked as our front desk person. He was very, very eager to get the new iPhone when it came out, when the announcement came out. It’s gonna cost $600 for phone, which seemed like insanity. And I remember myself talking with one of our developers about there’s no way I’ll pay this much for a phone. There’s just no way. I just don’t see it. Like I’ve got my Sony Walkman phone. That’s all I need.

[laughter]

SB: I mean, come one. I just plug a headset in and I got my music here. It’s pretty awesome. But anyhow, I think obviously, the iPod had already been out. But when the iPhone came out, it was like a… Obviously, life-changing… Grand change of how society works, and many of us were just kind of like rolling our eyes at it thinking it was like, “Ah. Here we go. Another thing.” But this guy, and also Jeremy, I give Jeremy… He was on it, too. But they saw it immediately and basically, immediately pivoted the company towards like, “We gotta get going on this, because pocket PCs are not cutting the master for this. We’re gonna start building a mobile app, we’re gonna start hiring API developers, we’re gonna start doing this.” And so, Jeremy, I’ve gotta give him a lot of credit. And I wasn’t in any kind of senior manager position at the time, so I honestly don’t know if it was all Jeremy or if it was… I don’t how, who is responsible for those decisions at the time, but I always attributed it to Jeremy just because like having a foresight to get on that quickly and moved out forward. That was really a good thing.

CR: You’ve mentioned API a couple of times, and for people that might… I don’t think I understood it very well at all before I came to work here just as a geocacher, I heard the term but I wasn’t a software guy, so I didn’t… So for people that might not know what API is, could you just give a brief summary, so people might have a little bit better understanding that might not know what it is.

SB: Sure. So API is… The name is Application Programming Interface. It’s basically a way to connect an application like a website or an app to underlying functionality. We would basically build this underlying business logic. How the game is played, you basically… We present this to our mobile device, and then from outside of their… In the world that that device will call the API and that’s how it has access to our data. Our website does the same thing. Internally, it’ll actually call the APIs and get the data that way. And so, the mobile and the web are sharing the same code and the same data underlying. And it actually is really nice, because when you code one thing in one place and the rules apply to both places. We also have a partner program which allows… It’s currently kind of on hold, but we have partners that we work with that are able to access our data similarly to our own devices and websites through this interface. We provide them with methods, like log a geocache, or get the geocache data, or search for the geocaches, or whatever. But whatever we can provide for them.

SB: They would be able to program their apps such that they can call into our interface, our data and use the data that… So they can have an app experience that either enhances the Geocaching. Like something that GSAK might be doing or actually, is a similar experience, like what Cachly does. So both of those are using our APIs to run their businesses or whatever. Some people, and I will mention names, like CGO, tend to use… They are not actually using our API, they’re actually scrapping our website. And a website can behave like an API, in that you can access it in a similar way and you can actually… You basically parse the data that’s on each page and try to pull it down and aggregate it in your own way. And then you can represent that data a certain way. And so, that’s considered usually, to be a kind of a rogue activity, but it’s also a way that you can access data with less security measures and… So it’s sort of a frowned upon thing. But some people do it and it’s hard to get around people doing that but it’s a big job to actually do that because the data and the underlying website constantly changes. And so you’re gonna have to play kind of a Whac-A-Mole game. With the API you’re sort of ensured that the signatures, which are the… It’s hard to explain.

SB: But the structure of the calls that you’re gonna make always remain that way. And if they change, you will get notified that we’re making that change so you would… There’s sort of a contract aspect to it, where we get to decide what this contract is, you’re going to agree to call in that form and then we can move. And you have an allotted amount of calls that you can make or you can’t go too crazy or we’ll throttle you. The idea is that we create this place where we can partner with people and then they would give us… They will work with us to try to create a premium prop value that is consistent across the boards. So the Geocaching experience for somebody who uses Cachly and somebody who uses our app, and somebody who uses GSAK, is very similar, that’s what the hope is. It isn’t always work like that in practice but that’s the goal, is to make it more close to that. When somebody like a CGO does it through scrapping the website, it’s a little bit harder to understand how they’re using it. A lot of times they end up giving away features that are for free and so things that people, premium members are paying for us to provide these services for them.

SB: It’s basically, you’re providing that… You’re making CGO be able to exist too because they’re riding on the backs of the premium members. So it’s a little bit frustrating to have that kind of a situation happen and we would love to have somebody like CGO actually use our API, so that we would be a partner as opposed to… It’s a more of a parasitical, sort of a… Not necessarily symbiotic relationship. So there’s… We don’t know how to solve that problem and we understand that a lot of our community uses CGO, so it isn’t necessarily in our interest to just shut them down but it does constantly undermine our program with other well meaning partners.

CR: So outside of your work stuff, I noticed that last year was your best year for Geocaching. You found…what did I write down here, 134 caches last year. So what got into you last year? I gotta know.

SB: Well, I will say it’s a little embarrassing that I haven’t found more caches than I actually have but that’s part of the answer is that I was moved into this job and I felt like I needed to take it seriously and so I should learn the product a little better than I had. I also was inspired by a program that we have internally, it’s called the Geo Guide program. Kind of set up a series of achievements, and goals, and incentives, and rewards to help us to have a reason to go do stuff. And so there’s things like streaks, which I got a 60 geocache streak last year which I was pretty proud of before I finally… I don’t know what it was that stopped me, but I think it was that… I was starting to run out of places around my neighborhood and I was finding myself in like supermarket parking lots at 10:30 in the night.

[laughter]

SB: I’m like, “I don’t know if this is really what I’m gonna be doing for the next six months or whatever.”

CR: Geocaching has a fantastic community, people all over the world and I know you’ve interacted with people all over the world, right? Over the course of your many years here, is that something that you’ve enjoyed, getting to meet people from different countries and getting to see how the game is played in different places?

SB: Oh for sure. I mean I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to travel several different places, I’ve gone to Austria, there was a caching festival there. It was amazing, it was beautiful area. I got to go to Munich, I was able to see Salzburg and so just that… Geocaching in those areas was just really, really crazy. It’s just so fun to see how it manifests elsewhere. This thing that we dreamt about when we were first starting this out and to see it just like it’s a pox.

[laughter]

SB: A positive pox that it goes out and spreads across the globe and then all of a sudden to actually see it. It’s so exciting to just… I don’t know, so it was really great. And so… Also I should mention that the treatment that a Geocaching employee gets when you go to a mega event it’s like… [chuckle] I sort of have a very tiny amount of experience with what the surface feeling of what it’s like to be a rock star. I’ve been in a band and we had a modicum of success but going to a Geocaching mega event as a Geocaching HQ employee is… For me, it felt more like being a rock star than being a rock star. You get put in front of 500 people to speak. It’s like, “I didn’t play for crowds like that, ever.” Here I am, put on the spot. They wanna hear what I have to say about this game that I don’t even play nearly like the way that they do. But because my experience is what it is, there’s something that people are interested in there. And I just feel honored I guess, that they treat us that kinda way.

CR: Well, I’m so glad you brought up being a rock star because that was my last question for you. I’ve gotta ask, I’ve gotta ask about the Sean Boots music career. ‘Cause it’s kinda legend around here. But we don’t hear the story as often as we should.

SB: When I was a kid, I was… My parents got me to playing piano and I got to be pretty interested in that. And I got into song writing and through my college years, I wrote a whole bunch of songs, and played with some kind of goofy cover bands, and had a little bit fun with it. But as I graduated, I ended up joining a band and we call ourselves, “The Amateur Lovers,” which is kinda hilarious because there’s now a genre on the internet that Amateur Lovers is, and you probably don’t wanna look it up. But we had no… There was no internet when we started this band. So that name was purely by accident.

CR: It’s an awesome name though.

[laughter]

SB: I know. And the funny thing is, we didn’t even start by… We were actually, “The Young Lovers,” was our original name. And we got sued by a band in Massachusetts called, “Young Love,” and they gave us a Seize and Desist letter. And so we’re like, “Ah, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna call ourselves?” And so then there’s… We had a song that was actually called, “Amateur Lover,” and so I’m like, “Well, Amateur Lover song, is like… There used to be a band that had an album called, “Living in a Box,” and they had a song called, “Living in a Box,” and their band name was, “Living in the Box.” And so was like, “Are we really gonna do this?”

[laughter]

SB: “Like we’re gonna be, The Living In The Box,” our album’s, “Amateur Lovers song, Amateur Lovers… ” Answer, No. So we took the name, we became, “Amateur Lovers.” We changed the name of the song to something called, “Grand Debut.” And then we didn’t name our album after that. But anyways, we had a little bit of a run where we played in the Seattle post-grunge scene, we played around town all the shows, we had good fortune to… We got to hook up with a couple of really talented engineer friends that got us some free time at London Bridge studio and they helped us to make a record. And they got that record put into front of some people of importance that had abilities to make things happen, and one of which was Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. And we ended up signing with his label. And then subsequently, signing with a couple of labels in Australia and in Japan. So we had a world wide distribution of our record, one record. And we were the kind of my heyday was to be basically they send us to Australia on a tour with Ben Folds Five, which at the time was my favourite band.

CR: That would be so cool.

SB: It was the most dreamy, crazy, yeah, it was crazy. And they were… So they brought us along, we played four shows, we made a video, an all boys scout warehouse. MTV came and filmed the making of the video. I solved the Rubik’s Cube on camera, which made me really proud of myself, ’cause I didn’t think I was gonna pull it off. But…

CR: [chuckle] Oh my gosh.

SB: That was cool. But of course they didn’t use any of the footage. They only used footage of us telling the world how great Pearl Jam was. I was like, “Pearl Jam, has a new record. Let’s check out what Amateur Lovers has to say about that.” “Oh, it’s great.”

CR: I’m sure that helped Pearl Jam out a lot.

SB: Yeah, it totally did.

[laughter]

SB: But more than it helped us out. [chuckle] But…

CR: So it was just the one album?

SB: One album. There’s a video, you can find that’s an embarrassing like dated looking one. It’s called, “Rubik’s Cube.” It’s on YouTube.

CR: We’re definitely putting that on the podcast page.

SB: Oh gosh.

CR: It’ll have to be there.

SB: To be honest, I’m proud of it. I actually think the lyrics are great. I love the message in it. It’s pretty, pretty dated though. It’s literally 20 years old. I have long hair, I look kinda dorky and everybody makes fun of me at the end ’cause I get all tough guy and when I close it’s bad. It’s an era bygone, I had a clean cut-off. I quit the band when we lost our record deal and there’s a story when I was… We were touring our last tour in California. I kinda had seen the writing on the wall, and I knew that I needed to think about what was gonna be the next chapter. And so for me, it was to… It was about basically, I had a feeling that coding was kinda gonna be my thing. ‘Cause I had done that as a kid and I liked it. So I was like, “I’m gonna figure this out, I’mma learn how to do it.” And so I’m sitting in the tour van reading a visual basic, “How to,” instruction manual for pretty much the entire tour. That was how I kept myself busy and the guys in the band are like, “Why are you reading that book?” Like, “What does this mean? Are you like one foot out the door or whatever?” And I didn’t think I was at the time, but it turns out that I actually was.

SB: And so, there’s sort of like a segue right there, of me having my two worlds sort of collide and it was a clean break. I never really… I never went back. And so I haven’t done anything musical ever since, other than a couple… Actually it’s probably something to note is that some of that songs, some of the background music in some of our Geocaching videos, is actually me having done the music for that. I don’t know if you ever saw… If anybody, you can go look it up. The cachers of steel video, that underlying music is actually me, in my studio at home. It’s just instrumental music, but all the geocachers, like doing geocaching workouts, that was my thing. And then there was a, “How to,” Geocaching video also that I had done the music for… I kinda worked with Reid, our videographer. She would occasionally give me some gigs, I guess you can say, so that was a cool way to take my personal interest and kinda merge it with my work interest, it was really fun. It’s a lot of work though, I don’t know how much I’ll be doing that in the future. But it was cool to do, back in those days.

CR: Well that’s really cool. This has been really interesting. Thank you.

SB: Cool, I had a really good time, I didn’t realize I’d have so much to say. Yeah, thanks for having me.

CR: So there you have it. Sean Boots, one of the long time Geocaching HQ staffers, hope you enjoyed that. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, let us know what you would like to hear about on the podcast, by emailing us podcast@geocaching.com is the address, that’s podcast@geocaching.com or if you see me or one of my co-workers at a Geocaching event, please share your podcast ideas with us there. Thanks again for listening, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 11): The Magic of trackable promotions

[music]

Chris Ronan: Hello everyone, this is Inside Geocaching HQ, our podcast from Seattle. Thank you for listening, I’m Chris Ronan. My Geocaching user name is Rock Chalk, I am one of the 80 or so people who works at Geocaching HQ and it is my pleasure to introduce you to some of my co workers and chat about what is happening inside HQ. On this show, we are talking about trackables, trackable promotions to be precise. You may have heard of the recent Magic: The Gathering trackable promotion, or maybe you remember some of the much older promotions, such as the famous Jeep promotion. Well, today, we are going to chat about how those trackable promotions come to be. We will hear from Bryan Roth, one of Geocaching HQ’s co-founders who has worked extensively on promotions over the years. But first, Ellis Bennett and Katie DiJulio, they are the team who oversees today’s trackable promotions, including magic, which we will hear a lot about. And bonus, listen closely, because one lucky listener will get a chance to win something. Let’s get to it.

[music]

CR: Okay. We have Katie and Ellis, who work on trackable promotions, among other things here at HQ. We’ll start by just asking you guys, what your day to day work life is like here at Geocaching HQ and Katie maybe start with you.

Katie DiJulio: Hello, everybody, my name is Katie and I am the partnerships and promotions manager here at HQ. And really what that means is I connect brands to the geocaching community through innovative programs such as trackable promotions, and really we want to inspire those story worthy moments for geocachers across the world. My day to day at geocaching consist of talking with brands through emails and phone calls and really trying to develop fun partnership programs that can engage and get the community excited to be participating and interacting with brands all over the world. My favorite promotion to date was with Michelin in 2014. We collaborated with Michelin to connect trackables to electronic tire pressure gauges that were in the shape of a Michelin man. This was really fun because we got thousands of really cute photos from geocachers all across the United States, and it was all to build awareness for tire safety.

CR: Okay and Ellis, how about you?

Ellis Bennett: I support the partnerships and promotions team, I’m running trackable promotions and other partnership opportunities that come up. My day to day is pretty similar to Katie’s where we’re talking to people on the phone, we’re answering emails and getting to know brands better and figuring out cool ways that we can work together. One of my favorite parts of this job is being creative and telling brand stories through geocaching. Another role I have here is a little side project for the internal HQ green team and we support the environmental initiatives of the company, which includes the Cash In, Trash Out Program.

CR: And both of you have had other roles before the roles that you’re in now are, which have been interesting. Ellis, what did you do before you got into the business development stuff?

EB: I started at HQ in summer of 2016 on the community engagement team. What we would do is answer emails from the community and engage with them on social media, writing blog posts and other fun engaging things. I learned a ton about the game in this process, and I got to know the community really well. And then, this summer of 2017, I started on the partnerships and promotions team and kick started my role with the Magic: The Gathering launch.

CR: Which is something we will talk a lot about, I hope. People are very excited about magic so we’ll get to that. But first, Katie, your past work here at HQ, what has that been like?

KD: Yes. I started at HQ about six and a half years ago and I was on the community relations team and I was at the front desk as the guest service coordinator. I got to welcome hundreds of geocachers to our office in Fremont from all over the world, got to hear their stories first hand, introduce a lot of new players to the game and it was really a beautiful role where I got to gather more knowledge about the game and got to meet our community firsthand. I am now on the business development team. I started here in 2013 supporting the GeoTours and the partnerships and promotions team simultaneously.

CR: Okay, today we’re talking about trackable promotions. For people that aren’t familiar with what a trackable promotion is, what is it?

EB: Trackable promotions are a unique opportunity for geocachers. They get to engage with some of their favorite brands through interaction with these limited edition, branded trackables. These are things that only come out one time during the promotion period. People get really excited about them because it’s a unique experience. They allow geocachers to work together as a collective on a global level and they get to move these custom trackables from geocache to geocache and then watch their journey through an interactive map on the landing page for the promotion. As geocachers interact with these items, they then have the opportunity to upload photos and some of our promotions have run contests for these photos. Some of the prizes that people have won are cash prizes, they’ve won a cruise to Norway and round-trip tickets to around the world, which is pretty exciting, especially ’cause geocachers love traveling.

CR: Trackable promotions come in all shapes and sizes. What, from HQ standpoint, what makes a successful trackable promotion? What are you guys looking at to try to build something that will be great for HQ, great for the community and great for the game?

KD: Well, first of all, it’s really about community engagement and excitement within the community, and we can do that when we find a brand that has a direct overlap with geocaching and the community. This generates excitement, there’s usually a photo contest with prizes involved, and the other part that really makes a successful trackable promotion is when geocachers activate these trackables, when they move them, when we see lots of distance covered on the map, that’s really how we define the success and see how many hands are touching these and interacting with the trackables.

CR: There’s a list of promotion partners on the promotions webpage, you can see a number of the companies that HQ has partnered with over time, and it’s a really varied list, a lot of different kinds of companies, different sizes, different places, is there a specific size of company you guys look for or a certain industry or any specifics like that or can it be just about anybody?

KD: Yeah, you’re right, we have worked with a wide variety of different brands looking at our list of brands that we’ve partnered with. But really the short answer is anybody can partner with us, and we have worked with several different brands ranging in sizes and industries. Really it comes down to, “Is there a direct overlap with that brand and the geocaching community?” That’s how we create win-win partnerships. A great example of this is with Magic: The Gathering. Their audience and the geocaching audience has very similar interests, and that when you blend those together, you can create a really nice partnership. We have worked with really, really large brands and have produced over 24,000 trackables for campaigns. We’ve also worked with smaller tourism bureaus producing only 500 trackables just to promote their small town to geocachers.

CR: One of the questions that I’ve heard people ask over time, and its especially some of my friends in Canada who say, “Hey, you’ve got this great promotion but I can’t do it because it’s not available in Canada and there’s… ” I always know the reason for that, but I think some people out there might not know, so maybe tell me why it is that some promotions are available in some countries but some aren’t available everywhere?

KD: Oh Canada, I am sorry to the geocaching community in Canada, we would love to have a promotion for you. Really it all depends on the brand and their goals and objectives to meet their target markets. We’d love for our promotions to be on a global scale, so that the entire geocaching community can be involved, but some brands don’t have an international market and or they are trying to build and develop a market within a certain country. An example of this was with a promotion we launched this summer with the brand Hurtigruten. It’s a popular cruise line in Norway, but they don’t have a significant presence here in the United States and they wanted to develop their brand awareness. We worked with them to release trackables within the United States only this summer, and there was a photo contest they’re running alongside of it, and the winning photo got a free cruise in Norway.

CR: The most recent one is the Magic promotions? There have been a couple of waves here, and there is so much excitement around… I think in the time that I’ve been at HQ I haven’t seen as much excitement around a promotion as around Magic, and I think people would really enjoy knowing more about that. How did that thing start, how did it come to be?

EB: The global brand manager of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering reached out to us in January of 2017. Their goal was to release a new set of cards, Ixalan, and then the Rivals of Ixalan and they wanted to do this in a fun and engaging way and thought geocaching would be a great collaboration. We worked together, and we came up with the idea of creating trackable mileage goals, this was for geocachers and Magic players to achieve together in order to earn sneak peeks of their new card set. The first launch was designed to create buzz around this whole promotion, they designed a really cool trackable with the Magic card look and then this was to get awareness out about the first deck. And then the second launch, which just came out in the end of November, is a trackable race between four different tribes so Dinosaurs, Merfolk, Vampires and Pirates, and between those they’re doing a trackable race and whoever gets the most miles wins at the end of the promotion period, and that means they get to decide which tribe stakes the claim on the city of Orazca, and that’s really exciting, you can go on geocaching.com/magic and watch the progress. There is four different colored map pins on the trackable map for you to view.

CR: The first release of those trackables happened and then there was more recently a second release of tracks. Multiple releases which is also a little bit different for the community, was that always the plan and is there going to be another one some time in the future? I’ve heard people wondering about that.

EB: That was really fun because we saw how excited people got about the first release, and they didn’t know there was going to be a second release, so that was kind of a double surprise for them.

CR: I’m not even sure I knew.

[laughter]

EB: Yeah, yeah. We kind of kept that under wraps. The first release was meant to generate buzz, they designed the trackables based on the iconic Magic card design, and then the second launch was really about the new cards and arrivals of Ixalan story. As far as a third release we aren’t going to give any more information about that, but do stay tuned because Magic or not, we will have more exciting promotions in the future.

CR: Some of the trackable promotions that HQ does produce trackables that become very desirable in the community and almost become very collectible, people wanna keep them, but that’s not the objective, that’s not the hope and the goal of these trackable promotions. We want these out in caches, we want people moving them from place to place.

KD: Yes, that’s right. The goal and purpose of these trackables is for them to be activated and placed in a cache so that they can travel and more geocachers can continue to engage with them and also have the opportunity to take photos and upload them. When geocachers request to receive one of these trackables in the mail, they’re agreeing to place this trackable in a geocache within two weeks of receiving it. Yes, we know these are really cool trackables and there’s only a limited edition and there are times when people want to hold onto that and keep it in their collection, but really that’s not the purpose of these trackable promotions. We want to see them moving and traveling from geocache to geocache.

CR: It used to be that there were a certain number of trackables and the word got out and you said sign up here, fill out this form, and once the number was over, the form closed and that was it. And it could be done in a couple of hours as I remember. But now you guys have a much better system, I think, and certainly I’ve heard a lot of good things in the community about it, that hopefully gives more people a chance to get one of these. Tell us about that.

EB: The way that we do it now is we open the web form for a certain number of days, it could be a week, it could be two weeks, it could be three days, it just depends on what the partner wants. And anyone can submit during that time period. And every single time we get more requests than we can fulfill, which is exciting, but I understand that’s frustrating for the community ’cause they won’t always win.

CR: And using Magic as an example, what are we talking about here?

EB: For the first launch we had 1,500 trackables to give away and we received almost 30,000 requests.

CR: Wow.

EB: Which is exciting, we love to see people engaging and submitting and although we can’t fulfill all of those, the nice thing is once people release them into the game and into geocaches, people who didn’t win them still have the opportunity to go find them and engage with them.

CR: ‘Cause that’s like a 1/20 chance. If you get one, congratulations. [chuckle]

EB: Yeah. It is…

CR: You beat the odds.

EB: It’s super lucky if you get one and we do see people celebrating a lot on social media, kind of bragging about it, like, “Look what I got”. And it’s for good reason ’cause they’re hard to get.

CR: I know we can’t go through every promotion that’s ever happened, as much as some people would like to hear about them, but I do wanna touch on one because we heard from a listener and her email was kind of what was the impetus for this episode. She wrote in to ask about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which was a promotion that happened a few years ago. She was hoping that we might be able to have the author of those books onto the show which we weren’t able to do, but I at least wanted to hear what Katie has to say, since you worked on that project. And a little bit of the history of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid trackable promotion.

KD: The Diary of a Wimpy Kid was a really fun promotion in 2014, because it was the first of its kind where we worked with a children’s book author to develop a series of trackables. There were six different designs and they came… There were 2000 tags in each of those designs. And they mimicked the story line of what the book was about. Essentially the Heffleys, the family in the book, was on a road trip and their luggage kept falling off of their car. Each piece of luggage also represented a trackable. There was a pair of socks that fell off the car, you could find a socks trackable or a sunscreen trackable. And it was really fun because all of these were released into the community and people got excited if they could find multiples to match up all of them in the same series. The cool thing about these trackable promotions, although this launched in 2014, there’s stilltrackables moving today. I looked at the map today before the podcast, and I saw that a trackable from this promotion is still… Was just placed in a geocache today. The geocache was called Christmas Card Lane, which is fun because it’s around the holidays and fun to just see that even though that promotion has ended, thetrackables are continuing to travel.

CR: And if somebody has an idea for a great company, a partner for HQ on a trackable promotion, is there something that they can do to help make that happen?

EB: Yes, we do love receiving suggestions from the geocaching community for trackable promotions. If you do know of a potential partner and you think they’d be a good fit, feel free to send us an email at promotions@geocaching.com, with your ideas. If you have a contact it would help if you could introduce us to them or send us their contact info. All you Canadian geocachers out there feel free to email us.

CR: Well, this has all been great, extremely informative. Anything else we missed?

EB: Yes. We have a spoiler alert.

CR: Spoiler alert!

EB: Spoiler alert! There will be a trackable promotion launching in Spring 2018 with a fun ice cream brand. This will be a US-only promotion. But if you email us by January 1st 2018, either Ellis or Katie will get your email at promotions@geocaching.com and we will send whoever the first person to contact us with the code word “Happy promo” a special trackable in the mail.

CR: Is it gonna be a gallon of ice cream that you’re gonna send out? That wouldn’t work, no.

EB: It might melt. [chuckle]

CR: It might, it might. It might melt. Promotions@geocaching.com with the code word…

EB: “Happy promo”.

CR: “Happy promo” is the code word. Okay, spoiler alert out of the way. Anything else? Any other spoilers?

KD: No more spoilers but just one big gigantic thank you to all the geocaching community out there for your participation in our trackable promotions. Without you these trackable promotions wouldn’t be possible. Thank you for being a part of it and for submitting all those fun photos.

[music]

CR: How about that? A chance to win a special trackable to the first person who emails Ellis and Katie at the address that they mentioned. We will update our podcast page once I have confirmation that the prize is claimed. But we are not finished yet. Next up is Bryan Roth. He is one of the Geocaching HQ co-founders. And I thought it would be interesting to ask him about some of the legendary trackable promotions. One that still ranks very high in the hearts of geocachers is the Jeep promotion which dates back to 2004, and that is where we started our conversation.

[music]

CR: Yeah, let’s talk about the first one because that’s one that people definitely still remember, it had some allure within the community. The whole Jeep thing and you were saying that Jeremy was hugely involved… Jeremy Irish for people that don’t know. One of your co-founders here at HQ. That he was extremely involved in the beginning and then of course you involved as well.

Bryan Roth: Yeah, it’s true. Jeremy really drove the initial Jeep travel bug promotion that we did in 2004. I wanna say it was 2003, we got contacted by Rodale who is a big publisher, I believe they’re out of New York and at that time they did Backpacker magazine and a whole bunch of other magazines. One of their big publishingclients, or one of their big advertising clients was Jeep. And they were looking for a way to use geocaching, or leverage geocaching to create a fun and engaging promotion for Jeep. And at the time they reached out, they spoke with Jeremy, and Jeremy had the idea of creating trackables using Jeeps, Matchbox car style jeeps. And Rodale at the time was working with Jeep and Jeep was willing to give away vehicles which was really cool especially in the early days, the thought of geocachers being able to win an actual Jeep through something relating to geocaching was just a fantastic idea.

BR: And working with Rodale and the agencies that represented Jeep, we were able to get a few thousand little yellow Matchbox car Jeeps. We custom made travel bug tags that have the Jeep logo on them and had some information about the landing page being jeep.geocaching.com. And in the first year there were three ways to win a Jeep. They actually gave away three vehicles in the first year. There was a sweepstakes where anybody could just enter their information and a random drawing would be conducted and one winner would win a Jeep at the end of the year. And then we had a monthly photo contest where there was a goal of liberty or discovery or adventure, or something like that, and people had to go out and find these little Jeep travel bugs and take a picture of them in a scene that would depict liberty or adventure or whatever that goal was. And every month we would have, there was community voting, and the community could vote on which picture they thought was the best. I believe that based on the community votes, once a month they would chose the top photo and that person would win a Garmin GPS device, which was really cool.
BR: And then at the end of the year all of the top photos went to the agency that represented Jeep and they chose their favorite photo and that photo, the creator of that photo, the photographer actually won a brand new Jeep. That was the second way to win a Jeep. And the third way was essentially an essay contest, but it was using geocache logs. You had to write about your experience of finding one of these, something like that. And that one was the hardest because it required us doing so much reading to figure out which were the best logs and it’s subjective. And ultimately I don’t remember which one was chosen but that person actually won a Jeep as well. And in the subsequent years of the Jeep promotion, we went from a little yellow Jeep and we had a one year was a white Jeep and one year was a red Jeep and one year was a green Jeep. And in each of those subsequent years we did not have an essay contest. It was the photo contest. You had to find one or receive one somehow and then take pictures of a different scene and it was a similar format where the community would vote. People would win a Garmin device on the monthly contest and then for the annual contest Jeep would choose, or the agency would choose the photo and that person would win a Jeep. And then there was always the sweepstakes element, which was just a random chance to win one, because not everybody could find one.
BR: Sometimes they were collected and kept by geocachers. I think that still exists when it comes to trackable promotions, unfortunately. But it made it harder for people to find the more that they were out of circulation. And here was this sweepstakes option, where you could still get an opportunity to win a Jeep. As part of the Jeep promotions, because we were working with Rodale, they would do these full-page spreads in a variety of Rodale magazines, talking about geocaching and here’s how you can win a Jeep in this really fun Jeep travel bug promotion. I think that that in itself helped to draw a lot of attention to the game of geocaching, as well as giving geocachers and new geocachers an opportunity to actually win vehicles as part of this promotion. That was the biggest promotion that we had ever done back in the early days, and it has obviously gone on to spawn a whole lot of different trackable promotions that we’ve done over the years. A lot of people really appreciate them.
BR: I love them. I love seeing all the different trackable tags and there’s been coins done, different opportunities to win trackables by either finding them in caches or visiting some retail stores. We’ve done some promotions with Mountain Warehouse over in the UK, where you could go into a retail store and get a Mountain Warehouse trackable. We’ve done promotions with Garmin over the years, where you could go into the Blacks and Millets retail stores, also in the UK, and get some really cool Garmin coins. Back in the old days, there were five different coins that you could collect by going to these different retail stores, and that was a really fun promotion.

CR: When you think back on other trackable promotions that have happened over the course of years, are there any that come to mind for you that are particularly special?

BR: One of my favorite trackable promotions that we ever did was the Unite for Diabetes promotion. Some of you may have heard of it. There are still Unite for Diabetes trackables that are out there, traveling from cache to cache, which is super cool. The way that it got started was we got approached by a representative from Merck, who’s the big pharmaceutical company. They were working with the International Diabetes Federation, and what they were trying to do was they wanted to have the United Nations recognize an International Diabetes Day. And the goal was really to spread awareness of this disease and talk about lifestyle changes that people could make to avoid getting diabetes. Eating healthy, good exercise, things like that. We came up with this idea of doing Unite for Diabetes trackables. It was the first global trackable promotion that we were ever able to do,and using a grant from Merck, we created 20,000 Unite for Diabetes trackables. And they had this blue ring, which was the symbol of uniting for diabetes. We created a landing page that would talk about how to fight diabetes, and again, the lifestyle choices and things people could do to live a more healthy life and avoid getting diabetes.
BR: And we went out and we purchased a database of city names around the world, and we tried to clean it up a little bit so that there wasn’t anything that was maybe inappropriate for the geocaching community. And we randomly named each of these 20,000 Unite for Diabetes tags around a city in the world. They were named after a city and if you find one now, you can see it’s named after a city. And the goal for them was each trackable that you would find, the goal was to travel around, have people read about diabetes, learn about diabetes, and ultimately to reach the city for which that individual trackable was named, and then circulate within the city in perpetuity forever, ultimately helping to educate people. And what we did was… And this was the first time that we got to do this, so it was so cool. We created a form online and we said, “Hey, global geocaching community. No matter who you are or where you live, fill out this form,” and at that time, the first 20,000 people to fill out that form, we mailed them a Unite for Diabetes trackable. And we were sending these really to all these random places around the world, and that’s where each one would start.
BR: And then the goal, again, was to get to it’s namesake’s city, spreading awareness along the way. There was a photo contest that was a part of it, and I don’t think that there were any major prizes except to the extent that the best photo that was chosen by the International Diabetes Federation was presented to the United Nations. It was supposed to be on International Diabetes Day, which although we had started the promotion with a goal of not only generating awareness but creating enough awareness where the United Nations would decide to create an International Diabetes Day, really early on in the promotion of the United Nations made that decision, to create an International Diabetes Day. One of the goals of this long-return promotion was actually accomplished in the early days. I’d like to believe with some influence from the geocaching community, but realistically agree I think it was more than that. And that promotion because it was with a positive health benefit on a global scale and also because we were able to send them to people regardless of where they lived, that’s still one of my favourite trackable promotions that we’ve done to date.

CR: When you look at a trackable promotion what do you think is most important in finding something that is great for the community, for the game and for HQ as well?

BR: I think the cool think about trackable promotions is that they are a fun way to allow brands to engage with the geocaching community in a way that it doesn’t feel super commercial. Here, trackables are something that geocachers like, they’ve become an integral part of the geocaching game over so many years. And to get a Airstream trackable or a Jeep trackable or Unite for Diabetes trackable or a Garmin trackable or a Diary of the Wimpy Kid trackable, those are things that people find them fun. You get to engage with these brands in a way where it’s taking place in our playing field. This is not over advertising where you’re being forced to watch a commercial, this is something where, “Hey I found a cool GEICO trackable in a geocache. And I get to take a photo with it and maybe I can win some sort of a prize.” We know that the geocaching community is one that brands would love to reach. We’re outdoor enthusiasts, we’re technophiles, we’re normal people all over world.
BR: And what we wanna do as a company is, we don’t want the geocaching site to be one big billboard for advertising. What we really want is, we wanna be able to create win-wins, where not only does this brand benefit by getting some exposure to the geocaching community, but more importantly the community benefits, because the brand is coming in and creating these trackables and these potential prizes, that the community loves and prizes that, “Hey if we can give away a Jeep to a geocacher, that’s really cool to be able to do. Or if we can give away a Garmin device or if we can give away some other prize that the community feels is valuable, that’s really cool. But more importantly if we can create an experience where people are finding and moving these trackables and maybe learning about the harms that diabetes cause and the prevention methods for diabetes, those feel like real wins for everybody. And that’s one of the things that I love about these promotions.

CR: Talking about Jeep again, I would think in the early days with you and Jeremy and the other folks working here at HQ back then, that you could not possibly have foreseen that trackables, those Jeep trackables, are now like part of the law of the game and it’s they are like relics and if you do happen to find one… I remember finding one about a year ago out in a cache and thinking, “Oh my God, this is a huge responsibility to find the next good place for this to go.” And I spent several months and I just… No, this isn’t the right place. This isn’t the right place and finally I found a place that I thought was okay, but you guys couldn’t have been thinking that way back then. I wouldn’t think so at least.

BR: We really didn’t. At the time we were just thinking like, ” Lets create a cool promotion and that we can engage the community and give everybody something fun to do,” which is one of the fundamental goals of the company is like, ” Lets get people outside, having adventures, giving them something fun to do. Ideally making people’s lives a little bit better through geocaching.” And now, to look back and see the community honoring the history of this game and of this community, this is a shared history. This is not just this company, this is not Geocaching HQ owns this special piece of history, this belongs to every geocacher around the world. And to see somebody like you finding a Jeep and having it be a meaningful experience, that’s really the gift that keeps on giving. The fact that, “Hey we did these promotions 10 years ago, but it’s still bringing joy to the world, one cacher at a time,” as you go and find it in cache, that’s really meaningful. That’s really special.
BR: And for us to see that something like that has happened it’s just wonderful. And the truth is we wanna do more of it. We really do. And to see the Magic: The Gathering trackables that are out now and to see the excitement around that, not only do we get to see what’s happening today, I think we can trust based on experience that maybe 10 years from now, somebody is gonna find a cool Magic: The Gathering trackable and say, “Wow, this is really special. This made my day and now I have to honor this history by finding another cache to place it in, so that the next person gets some special experience.” Thats part of the beauty of this game overall. That’s part of the beauty of this community. And to see trackables and historical trackable promotions becoming a part of that, it’s just really special and I think we’re all fortunate to be a part of it.

[music]

CR: There’s everything you wanted to know about trackable promotions, but didn’t have a chance to ask. Thanks to Bryan. Thanks to Katie and Ellis. And thanks to the geocacher, Royal Roads Mama, who asked the question about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, that is what prompted this episode. If you would like to prompt an episode, do what Royal Roads Mama did. Send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Tell us what you want us to cover on the podcast. We will do our best to make it happen. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Be sure to go out and get the Last / First souvenirs for finding a geocache or attending an event on December 31st and January 1st. From me and everyone at Geocaching HQ, happy new year and happy caching.

/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 5): Questions from geocaching podcasters and bloggers

Bryan Cindy Ben F and Ben H
Bryan Cindy Ben F and Ben H

[music]

Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I’m Chris Ronan, a.k.a. Rock Chalk, one of the staff here at HQ. This is our podcast coming to you from Seattle, where summer has finally arrived. It does not rain here as much during summer. You may have heard it rains all the time in Seattle. That’s not entirely true. It pretty much rains all the time between October and April. Like, every day it rains at least a little bit during those months. So what happens is… And I only learned this recently because I moved here three years ago. What happens is the rain just suddenly stops sometime in late May and when that happens, you just have to start doing everything you want to do outdoors non-stop between late May and October when the rain finally returns. Because the weather is just amazing during the summer here. So I and a lot of my colleagues here at HQ, we’ve been out doing a lot of caching in recent days and we hope you have been too. For this episode of Inside Geocaching HQ, we are answering questions from the geocaching bloggers and podcasters of the world. They ask the questions for the show, I went around the office to find the right people to answer those questions. We have covered some very interesting subjects, so let’s get right to it.

[music]

CR: We have a question from DarrylW4 of the GeoGearHeads podcast. You can find him at geogearheads.com along with his partner, The Bad Cop. And here is Darryl’s question:

DarrylW4: We know it’s always been a battle to keep a good, free version of geocaching.com versus the full-featured premium experience, but recently I’ve been hearing more stories about cachers that have had to cut back on their caching, either financial reasons or just lack of time. And in many cases these people are telling me that, “Yeah, we like to go caching occasionally.” But especially now that the new app, the former intro app, doesn’t allow them access to a lot of the cooler caches without paying for it, they’ve stopped caching at all. One situation is a fairly active cacher I used to know got tied up with some family things and on occasion they’d go out and do the vacation or a weekend trip somewhere, do some geocaching. And since they can no longer do earth caches and some of the cooler puzzle caches and stuff like that that they liked to do though the app, they just decided, you know, it’s not worth it anymore. They archived and adopted their caches and there is one less person caching. Well, in this case it was four people but, you know, [chuckle] one less group of cachers out there that did have some cool caches, particularly earth caches out there. And I was curious to see if there’s any plans to kind of roll that back and make it more accessible to cachers who can’t or won’t pay the $30 a year for the premium membership.

CR: Thank you, Darryl. So to answer that question, we go straight to the top. Bryan Roth is the president and CEO of Geocaching HQ. Bryan, we kinda talked about this a little bit on a podcast a few months ago and it’s a question that a lot of people are interested in, and it’s something that I know that you have been thinking a lot about and the team here has been thinking a lot about.

Bryan Roth: Hey Chris, that’s true, and first of all it’s good to be back on the Geocaching HQ podcast. Thank you Darryl for the question. I guess I would start by saying that it makes me sad to hear that people are stopping geocaching for any reason. I know that sentiment is shared by a lot of us here at HQ. One of the things I can say is that over the past few months, since we spoke in March, we’ve had a number of conversations around that topic here. At the same time we’ve spent a lot of time working to add features and functionality to that app. So for those of you who have been using it, I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few improvements over the last few months. We’re really excited about that. We have quite a few more improvements on the horizon and we really can’t wait to give those to the community. So the short answer is: Yes, we are actively looking into how we might address this.

BR: Our goal is to find the right balance between charging for features so that we can support the company and giving everything away for free. As much as we would like to open the app and let everybody have unlimited access to all geocaches at no charge, we wouldn’t stay in business too long as a bootstrapped company. So really quickly, for those of you who don’t know, Geocaching HQ is not a funded company. We have not taken VC funding or private equity funding or anything like that. The revenue that comes from the community is the revenue that we use to support the company to pay our bills, to pay our employees, to provide benefits, etcetera, etcetera. So not making any money isn’t really an option. And I know a lot of people have ideas, “Oh we should sell ads or sell our customers’ data,” and things like that. And we do some advertising. We have no interest in selling our customers’ data to anybody because we don’t think that that’s the right thing to do.

BR: And so what we’ve chosen to do is try to charge for the tools that we produce to make geocaching easier to play. Historically we’ve got the website for those people who want to go play puzzle caches and multi-stage caches, and earth caches. You can go to the website and you can continue to do that for free. Use your dedicated GPS device like a Garmin, there are other mobile applications that provide GPS navigation functionality. It’s not that you can’t play, you can play. At the same time the goal is to allow other partners as well as ourselves to build better tools for the geocaching community, and for API partners they’re allowed to charge for those applications and people can pay for additional functionality. When it comes to our mobile application our goal was to build a best of breed tool, and I thing we’re getting closer and closer every day to having the best tool out there for geocaching, but also we have to find ways to leverage that tool to generate revenue.

BR: So for those people who really appreciate it and enjoy it and are geocaching actively, our ask is that they consider becoming premium members. And at the same time, we would really like to have a balance between paid features and free features so that it makes for a good introduction for new players, but really active players will help support the site and the ecosystem that powers geocaching. At this time what we are focused on, is we’re looking at where that line is drawn. And I think that, as I mentioned in March, we’re not comfortable with where it is now, hearing stories of people giving up geocaching because they can’t find the cache that they want in the app certainly doesn’t make anybody feel happy, myself included.

BR: We do have plans, we will be probably testing in the near term some different models of how that will work and so many users won’t see those tests. Normally they’re segmented among a small percentage of the audience and we look at what it does for engagement, new user activation, even premium membership conversion and retention. And if we can find a better line that allows more people to have more access without making it harder for us to support ongoing operations of the company, then that’s something that we’re gonna do. So I guess in closing, what I would say is, we are definitely planning to address this. We have testing coming up that we’re going to be doing with the community, and based on the results we do plan on making some changes going forward.

[music]

CR: So our next questions are from GeoJangie, who is a blogger, geocaching blogger, in North Dakota in the United States. And she has a couple of questions, and to answer those I am joined by Cindy Potter, who is the director of community here at Geocaching HQ. So Cindy, for people who don’t know what you do, what is it that keeps you busy here at HQ everyday?

Cindy Potter: Okay, well first my username is Frau Potter, I was first hired here because I speak German, so that’s why I have that name. But I oversee two teams that work with the community and also the volunteer reviewers, moderators and translators. The teams do all the email answering from the community, all the social media posts, a lot of the blog posts. And we also oversee the guidelines, so we’re part of the appeals process if someone has hidden a cache and they don’t feel like the process went well and they want to appeal the process, then they write to us and we give them an answer.

CR: Well we have three questions here from geocachingjangie.com. And I’m gonna spell that out and I think we’ll probably also have it in the notes for the show but www.geocachingjangie, that’s J-A-N-G, as in George, I-E.com. That’s all one, geocachingjangie, all one word, dot com. And so her first question is regarding geocaching education. She asks, has Geocaching HQ considered creating a “geocaching education workshop” to partner with cachers to teach geocaching in locations around the world with ideas and products from HQ?

CP: Wow, I love this question. As I said before, I’ve been here six years, and this is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I personally love this idea, we talk about it like Geocaching 101 workshops. I feel like there’s great ambassadors out in the community that know this game and really wanna teach new players. And it does feel like we could set up a system, I call it, “Train the Trainers,” where we could have perhaps some kind of an online workshop that people could take in order to qualify to become these trainers, and then maybe we have some sort of sponsorship materials that we can share with them in order to make those events go more smoothly. And maybe in the future we have a way on the website to highlight those events a little bit more easily or to send emails to new cachers to point out when those events are available in their area. Unfortunately we have a small company here and we don’t have enough people for all the fabulous ideas there are, but, yes, I do hope that we’ll be able to do this at some point. And in the meantime, I really want to say to those people that do host those workshops that we really do value that and think it’s really cool that you’re out there helping people get started with the game.

CR: Her next question is about events and it is, “What suggestions do you have to bring a large event to a state with a smaller geocaching population?” For example, where she is from, North Dakota.

CP: North Dakota? I love North Dakota. I’ve been to North Dakota. Let’s see, well first I’d like to start by saying large isn’t necessarily best. So sometimes people have this idea that mega events… That’s the status that everybody wants, right? But there are actually some events worldwide that would qualify for mega status that actually don’t want mega status ’cause they want to keep their numbers down. Now, that doesn’t answer your question but I think my point is just that we value all levels of events and don’t just favor mega events. And that’s something we, I think, need to look at more carefully in the future, too. Like, “How can we support those medium sized events a little bit more?” So for example events that maybe have 50 or 100 people and just a variety of really fun activities without all the stress of what a mega status would have.

CP: But that said, some ways to maybe look at how to do a bigger event, I would suggest, would be looking at existing examples. So an example would be the Going Caching event that takes place in Georgia every year, moves around to different locations. I haven’t had a chance to go to it, however I’ve heard from numerous lackeys that it’s probably the most fun event they’ve ever attended. And had a chance to meet the organizers at GeoWoodstock recently, and just seeing how friendly they are and how creative they are in their design, I’d say they could probably offer some tips. Some creative kind of concept or puzzling that can be done at the event can be really fun. Another idea is partnering with your tourism agency to see if they’d be interested in helping to sponsor Geocoins. So I know that some lackeys at our office, in fact you might be one of them…

[laughter]

CP: Likes to find those events where Geocoins are part of it and will travel quite far to take part in those events. And in many cases it’s an outside agency, not the cachers themselves that are funding the coins, but an agency that’s hoping to attract tourism. And I’d also like to say that we are not the event experts here, it’s really people in the community that make the best events. So I’m probably not the best person to ask since I’ve never organized an event that large and I’m always in awe of those that can.

CR: Well I think your point about tourism agencies and such, is really important because their job is to bring people to the city, to the town.

CP: Right.

CR: So if you can go to them and say, “Hey, we’ve got geocachers out there that might wanna come to our town and if we can just give them a little carrot to do it… ” And it might be through a geocoin that you earn and the example that I think of is the Tri-Cities Mega here in Washington State in the US, but I’ve seen it at other places too. So yeah, those are all good ideas. Her next question was about new cache types and she says, “I have a feeling someone else is bound to ask this question.” She actually was the only one [chuckle] that did for this episode, but we certainly have been asked this question many times which is, “Is there a new type of geocache in the works? For example history, virtual with new regulations, etcetera.”

CP: We do wanna make improvements to the game. I will say our focus this year is more shoring up of what we do have. Obviously, we retired the classic app and a lot of our time has been put into making sure we have all the necessary features into the free app, and also doing things on the website, updating things like the dashboard and the profile that were pretty clunky pages before. I always had trouble finding things and I’m hoping as we continue to refine this page that it will be easier for people to find things, and updating the outdated logging experience as well. But we know that’s not enough, we don’t want just the pages on the website to be easier to use, we want to have more features in the game. And so we have been talking about ideas for what other things we could add into the game. We don’t have any particular news to share, but I do want the community to know that we’re cachers too. So we have ideas and we also can solicit ideas from the community of, “What would you like to see as changes to the game?” And we welcome those ideas to be shared with us.

CR: There was another question that was asked that I’d like you to be here for, because [chuckle] you and I, we’re both involved in this quite a bit and there are actually a couple of people that asked this. And the question was basically wanting an update on challenge caches and asking if they would become a distinct cache type. It’s been a little over a year since the end of the moratorium and so people were just wanting an update on how things were going. And as you and I, and the rest of the team have been talking about it over the course of weeks… I think that what was interesting when the moratorium ended, and I don’t think that we anticipated this, was that it was gonna take about six months or so, five-six months for the community to figure out the challenge checker aspect of things. And so I think the moratorium ended around April last year, April-May, and for the first four-five months it felt like things were awesome because [chuckle] nothing was really happening. And we eventually figured out that was because the challenge checker issue was something that they were figuring out. And once they did, we started getting a better sense for how things were going.

CR: And I think you would agree Cindy, we’re still in the evaluation phase because of that. And I think we wanna get through a full “season of caching” this summer and fall, being the main part of the year when it’s really busy for us and for reviewers in most parts of the world. And then, once we get into the fall, get back with reviewers and see, “Okay, how do you feel about things and have the new guidelines alleviated the stress that you were feeling about this kind of cache? And if so, where do we go from there?”

CP: Right. And something for the community to keep in mind that it’s not so simple just to add a new icon and it can create problems in itself. You know the people out there that are icon hunters. They wanna all hide every different type of icon. They wanna find every type of icon, so we need to be ready that if we were to provide an icon that we really are proud of what it has become, because there’s going to be a lot of surge in activity. And if it’s not a pretty solid cache type, it’s gonna be very frustrating for a lot of people and we don’t want to end up grandfathering something that gets out of control. And also, I also wanna say we know why the community likes challenge caches. They really love these personal achievements and that’s something that we have a strong radar on here. Ideas are spinning about different ways that we might be able to also encourage that. Nothing yet to show, but we know that that’s something that is fun. It’s fun in other games to have some sort of achievements or badges and so, we’ll see what the future brings.

[music]

CR: Okay. So, for our next questions we have Ben Hewitt from the product team here at Geocaching HQ. And I want to start by talking about a question that we had from Oboeman who writes for the Allgauer Geocacher blog which is at www.allgaeuer-geocacher.de, and we will put his web address in the podcast notes. But he had asked about, “Can you alter the unknown icon to distinguish between unknown with a traditional and unknown with a multi in the end?” That’s kind of a similar answer to another question that came in from Patrick from the Podcache, which is a great name for a pod… Don’t you think Ben?

Ben Hewitt: I do.

CR: For a geocaching podcast, podcache.de, and he asks, “Why is it not possible to do a nano icon?” And I think the answer for both of these questions is fairly similar. So, being on the product team, I’d like to see what Ben has to say about those two questions.

BH: Yeah. I’m gonna focus on the question about a nano size. That’s something that we are well aware that the community has wanted and has been interested in adding for years. And it’s something we’ve actually discussed several times amongst the product and development and design teams at HQ. Actually to a pretty great level of detail. The short answer is, it’s not nearly as easy as it seems to just add more cache sizes. Anything is possible of course, which is why we investigated, but the technology stack that our system is built on, those cache sizes are rooted pretty deeply through a variety of services and on down to the database level. And so the last time we took a look at adding a nano cache size, we discovered, in working with our engineers, that it was gonna be weeks of work just to add that one cache size.

BH: And in our estimation, the amount of work that it required was not enough to justify just taking that on as a project by itself. That said, those are the kind of things that we keep an eye on to opportunistically loop in to a larger project. Basically where that one landed after the last discussion is like, “Hey, let’s wait until we’re working again on the cache submissions process or the cache details pages on the website. And remember that there’s an interest in having a nano cache size or possibly other cache sizes.” Because that would really be the right moment to rope in some of those other wins, is when we’re really digging down and re-architecting those systems on a larger level. It makes a lot of sense to do those things then, it doesn’t make as much sense to take on these smaller additions that would require a lot of work by themselves.

CR: Next question for Ben. We go back to DarrylW4 from the GeoGearHeads podcast and here is Darryl’s next question.

DarrylW4: We recently had a long discussion about the caches along a route function on GeoGearHeads, and part of that discussion was this is a feature that people don’t really seem to use to its fullest anymore. Probably in part because so much of the caching is done via smartphones. And I was wondering is there any plan to extend the features of the caches along a route to be usable on mobile, apps or otherwise? And how about the ability to even do lists easier so that we can grab and download the caches that are found along those route files from the mobile devices better.

BH: Darryl always has good questions. Like Darryl, I am a fan of the caches along a route feature. And like Darryl, I have often thought to myself that, “Hey, this feature is kind of hidden away and is not quite user friendly enough in terms of the functionality that we’re trying to deliver.” If you know how to use it, you can do some really awesome stuff, if you’re doing a driving trip and you jump through the hoops there. And so similar to my answer that I just gave about nanos, this is really something we’ve looked at and we’re waiting for the right moment to jump on this. Caches along a route right now is a side car to pocket queries. And if and when we take on an update to that, more likely than not it would merge in with a maps project or additional work on lists, which probably most people can tell we put a lot of work into lists in the last year, year and a half. And I don’t know exactly what that would look like but my best guess is what we would do is make it easier to create caches along a route in some sort of map experience and then, as Darryl already eluded, create a list of those which then you would get for free in the mobile app once you had created a list.

[music]

CR: Okay. So for our next question we have Ben Field, who is on the IT team here at Geocaching HQ. Ben, before we get to the actual question, since you haven’t been on the podcast before, maybe just tell people a little about what you do here at HQ.

Ben Field: Yeah, I’m the director of information technology here and along with my team we support the whole systems and network infrastructure that keeps the website and mobile applications running.

CR: Kind of an important thing?

[laughter]

BF: Yeah, no doubt.

[laughter]

CR: Okay, so our question is again from DarrylW4 from the GeoGearHeads podcast, and here it is.

DarrylW4: On a fairly recent episode of GeoGearHeads we fielded a question from RReagan, a very hypothetical situation, what would happen if geocaching.com had a catastrophe and lost their servers and all of the backups, and all the backups were bad? And his question was basically, could Project-GC and all of the GSAC databases out there be used to restore it? Definitely that’s not a situation that could or should ever happen, but it did bring up an interesting question of what is the contingency plan at geocaching.com for any of these various situations? We know that years and years ago there was a fire at the data center that took it offline, we’ve seen issues with internet services as a whole because of AWS going down. Is there any information you can share with us about these plans at geocaching.com to help bring the service back online should the worst happen? Even if it isn’t a nasty, everything goes out, but just even maybe a server issue or some kind of service issue?

BF: So I see this as really a two part question. I see the first part centered around what our course of action would be in the event of a disaster such as a total loss of the data center from mudslide, earthquake or other unwelcome scenario. And, well first of all we have offsite replication for everything that makes Geocaching run, including all the geocaches, logs, trackables, etcetera, so there should never be a scenario where we would need to recover from Project-GC or GSAC databases, etcetera. But we also have the ability to run our infrastructure elsewhere. So in the event of a disaster we’d be recovering offsite copies of all of our data to a new location which would likely be a fully cloud based, at least for an interim period, and then bringing our services back online as soon as possible.

BF: Then, for the second part of the question, I think revolved around how we recover from less critical issues such as single server or service failures. And these types of failures are common in most any web service infrastructure. There are bugs in code and services can crash, server systems have hardware failures. But the idea is to build as much redundancy into the infrastructure as possible, which is what we do as much as we can within the budget that we have. The geocaching core game elements are all supported by redundant systems, so there theoretically aren’t any single points of failure. But it’s not to say that code can’t get pushed out and an issue arises that didn’t manifest itself in test or staging, or that multiple hardware failures occur at the same time which in conjuncture could cause an outage. We’ve also seen some legacy components that haven’t properly handled a failover when a device fails. But in these types of scenarios we have a lot of skilled people here who can jump on a problem and determine the quickest path to resolution and then figure out the best way to prevent anything similar going forward.

[music]

CR: There you have it, that was Ben Field. You also heard from Bryan Roth, Ben Hewitt and Cindy Potter. Thanks to the podcasters and bloggers who asked those questions. If you have a question you would like to hear us answer on the podcast, our email address is podcast@geocaching.com, that’s podcast@geocaching.com. Keep an eye on the Geocaching blog, if you are not already. There is a lot of stuff happening these days. Our summer promotion starts soon, that’s the lost treasure of Mary Hide. Read all about that on the blog. Get ready for that, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun coming up later this summer. Thanks for listening and from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 10): Shop Geocaching

Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan aka Rock Chalk, one of the staff here at HQ. On this episode we hear from Mark Anderson, whose geocaching username is markstafari. Mark is a long time HQ staffer who works at the Shop Geocaching warehouse here in Seattle. It is just a couple miles away from the main Geocaching HQ office. If you have ever ordered something from Shop Geocaching, then Mark and/or his colleagues were the ones who got it ready and sent it your way. He also had a hand in creating one of the products that has been especially popular over the past couple of years. We will have more on that in just a few minutes. So here’s me and Mark talking about how things work at Shop Geocaching.

[music]

CR: Well, I remember the first time that I visited the warehouse and being a geocacher. It was kind of like Charlie Bucket going into the chocolate factory on Willie Wonka. You know what I mean?

Mark Anderson: Oh, yeah [laughter]

CR: I’m like, they better check my pockets before I leave because I might just walk off with a few things. I know it’s mostly HQ people going in there. But do you ever just have a random cacher that walks through? I have to think it’d just be amazing for them.

MA: You’re not the only one to have that reaction. Definitely, we have a little bit of signage that gives us away and we also have a cache at our location if you’re in the area. But for the most part, it’s just like, we can tell oftentimes they’re searching for the cache right outside our door, which we can see their shadow, so we can maybe prepare for them to come in. If it’s nice in the summer, we often almost daily have our big bay door open. Of course, that welcomes a lot of people to just peek and in summers we’re right off the tour boats down on the waterfront. So we get quite a few visitors in the summer believe it or not for not really advertising where our warehouse is. Most of the time respectful that we don’t have maybe a ton of time. That’s the part that sometimes they wanna talk and we’re…

CR: Yeah, it’s not a visitor situation like here at HQ. 02:44″>

MA: Exactly, yeah. We try to accommodate for sure. Ironically, as most of the caching world is going into hibernation pretty soon, this is our time to shine down at the shop. Certainly the best team I’ve every worked on in 20 plus years of shipping and receiving at various places. It’s just a super unique situation and it’s a fun environment. There are a couple of us, we’re practical jokers down there a little bit, keeping it loose ’cause it is a warehouse, it’s not the most glamorous work, but we make it a fun environment.

CR: When somebody orders something from Shop Geocaching, it doesn’t go into a monster place somewhere with hundreds of people that are filling orders. There are five of you at the HQ warehouse, correct?

MA: Yeah, we’re a small operation. Yeah, just five of us, that can be lost in the mix sometimes. But again, our volume is at a place right now where we can comfortably accommodate every order placed within the last 24 hours we’ll ship the next day. We have up until noon everyday, we’ll ship every order placed before that, so it’s as real-time as we can get it. But we are not quite the scale of Amazon yet. [laughter] Hopefully some people respect that in the fact of there can be unexpected delays here and there. I primarily work with distributor orders and stuff like that, and I’ve built a really good relationship with many of them over the years.

CR: And for people that don’t know what a distributor is, we’re talking about people around the world who are reselling geocaching stuff, right?

MA: Correct, yeah.

CR: So if somebody has a shop in Washington state or in Germany, these are the distributors.

MA: Yeah, there’s a few requirements you need to meet. I think there’s a lot of operations out of basements and such, but there are a few larger ones, particularly in Europe, where I think it is the sole business, and there’s some decent size orders that head over there.

CR: One thing I’ve had people ask me is how do you guys decide what to offer on Shop Geocaching? There are some things that seem pretty obvious like cache containers and stuff like that, but there’s a lot of creativity too that I’ve noticed. You and I were talking before we started recording about the devious containers and stuff like that. So are these things that you guys at times come up with? Or is it stuff that you hear about? What’s the mix of that in determining what ends up actually being on the site available for sale?

MA: Well, it’s a little of both, I’d say. We definitely get a lot of those ideas from… I think currently we get several of those, we source those from other distributors. If other distributors have great products they’re selling, we definitely like to be a part of that as well, so things like fake pine cones and fake rocks. Actually, fake rocks I think we’ve been able to source here, but another recent one that’s been pretty popular is insects attached to nanos. That’s just sort of a fun. [chuckle] My favorite is the spider, and I’m actually finalizing one of my own that I’m gonna put out in a while that…

CR: Cool.

MA: Just another cool point, maybe another favorite point type angle. The container itself won’t be exciting, but the reveal will be the moment. Personally, I’ve only hidden a couple of them, but that’s my goal in this upcoming year is to put some creative ones out in my neighborhood ’cause there’s certainly not many creative ones. And I know that quality caches are a big thing and especially, in keeping the game healthy and getting more and more people introduced to it. You wanna find the quality cache on that first one. I’ve introduced it to people where it hasn’t been, and they’ll never cache again if they find a wet, soggy… Yeah, I don’t know. Or just your basic container. There’s the thrill of the find, but if you can add another little element of like, “Oh, oh.” Another cool one is fake chewing gum, a chewed up piece of gum that’s stuck to a nano. Those are the ones that I like the most, even though you can’t really stash much stuff in there as far as trade-ables. The kids probably don’t like em as much, but those are my personal favorites. And again, we have a lot of freedom to source and try things like that. There’s not a strict, “We’re gonna work on this type of container.” This or this. If somebody finds something or hears about something, we can usually run with it if it’s not too expensive or within reason, I guess.

CR: One of the things that I think is really cool about what you guys do is trying to make sure that the products that are offered, they have great utility to them. We were talking, for instance, before about the tree hugger product. Maybe talk about that a little bit for people that aren’t familiar with it. It’s a really cool idea, and it’s a great way to solve this problem that’s out there that people want to hide caches on trees, for instance, and unfortunately, sometimes they nail it or they drill it, which you’re not supposed to do. That’s not in line with the guidelines.

MA: Right, it’s a no, no.

CR: And now we’ve got this product that enables you to avoid that kind of a thing and hide caches in the right way, which is tree hugger.

MA: Yeah, yeah. So my manager, I think it was about a year ago, he tracked down a source that basically had this surgical tubing with a bracket, attached around a tree, and it’s not a way out there idea, but you couldn’t… Obviously, the surgical tubing will expand as the tree grows, and so that made perfect sense for attaching a cache. And that was not the intended purpose of this product out there. It’s like a livestock fence company or something like that. So they were…

CR: It’s kinda funny how many things are created, and geocachers find a way to repurpose them for caching. And definitely their intended effect is not.

MA: They were so excited though, I think and continually trying to improve their packaging, and appearance, and super cool things like that where we can promote best practice of geocaching, the rules within the game that are not always obvious and maybe newer hiders, again, may nail or screw something to a tree or something. That’s a big no, no. Things like that are not clearly marking your cache containers as a geocache, etcetera. We try to provide all those tools or as many as we can, as many as we can source. And we’re continually working on ways to promote the best practice for geocaching, and really just help improve, especially first cacher experiences. I certainly can empathize with the first cachers. When I first even joined the company, it just was so confusing to me early on. And we’re talking this was in 2008 and 2009. Yeah, it was tough for me. And even when I went out with a couple people, and it took a while for me to really grasp it and enjoy it for what it is. And I think, now, having 10 years of experience with it and the products, it’s like kind of view things differently, and you view products in different ways. There’s a lot of things that could be related to either trackable or container.

CR: One of the things that you talked about was how you and your colleagues at the shop have the freedom to try to pursue an idea and one thing that folks will know you for whether they realize it or not, because you’re involved in this very popular product, which are the buildable toy sets. And you were involved with that from the inception.

MA: Yeah, yeah. In sort of a roundabout way, yeah. We did find a first vendor that we tinkered with a trackable two-inch figure that did really well, but the vendor wasn’t… It was a secondary hobby for them. Our current vendor is just amazing with what she can do with any of these parts. She basically re-purposes these official parts, cleans and redesigns them essentially, and she can print over these actual parts, which is allowed. And we, of course, follow all legal guidelines as far as that’s concerned. We’ve been through that a little bit. And yeah, it’s turned into a nice little selection of a spread of build your own cache containers. A couple of different figures now, a male and a female figure that come with a trackable element. And we have a kitty and a dog now that attach to those buildable parts. The small things always are a good thing and you can attach em to any of these buildable brick parts that you may have at home. Your own creations make anything trackable, that’s been popular. And then the one that started it all was as far as more of a set, and really the only one that I designed [chuckle] from the beginning was the build your own ammo can container.

CR: Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. With a little nano that went inside of it.

MA: Yeah, yeah. And so that was our first experiment with an actual buildable follow the instructions, and the final result is a container that vaguely resembles an ammo can, with the latch down and everything. So yeah, I got to come up with a prototype with my kids. I pretty much came up with the design, but they have better eyes than me as far as finding all the parts. I was digging through the big box, the big random box at home, and I think it took two or three days before I came up with a pretty cool design that locked and presented it to just the co-workers at our weekly merchandise meeting that we have. And yeah, they all dug it and it was like, “Alright, let’s get it rolling.” I didn’t know how that sourcing parts, all the same parts for selling the same set and I was just… I didn’t think it was possible but this vendor is just amazing in her sourcing and she can make it all happen.

MA: Really, the finished product looks like it’s straight out of a factory. It’s really impressive. And even all the way down to the backer art like the card, just the packaging is all custom done by her and really a nice touch on top of the cool novelty item that these buildable toy sets have turned into in an ongoing series that it’s certainly fun to… I spearhead the projects, although I don’t design them really anymore at this point. Our vendor is super creative and she knows our themes and she’ll either throw ideas at us or we will do the same and she’ll come up with something. It’s pretty amazing to see her work or see the finished product.

CR: I’ll let you get a drink there.

MA: They don’t usually let us talk this much over at the warehouse.

[laughter]

CR: You’re getting it all out. You’re gonna get it all out today.

MA: That was my little bu-dum ching.

CR: That was pretty good. Is there a most popular product at that shop? Does it vary?

MA: Oh, golly. Well, definitely, I think trackables.

CR: Just trackables in general.

MA: Trackables in general continue to be… The old travel bug still continues to be probably the biggest selling trackable. And it’s trying to keep up with just certain events around the year. Pie day was really huge. An outside vendor did a coin for that, that was just hugely popular a couple years ago, and we had no idea. It’s those trackable coin moments that we definitely keep an eye out on.

CR: Well, I could sit here and talk about products or geocaching products for hours and hours. We’re gonna have to do a part two and a part three. We’ll bring Marty and Phil and Gary and Dylan. We’ll bring everybody from the shop and we’ll just do a big round table.

MA: Are you sure? I mean. This might be… This talk is a little too hot for most years, I know.

CR: No, I think it’s awesome. God, it’s music to my ears, I love talking about it. But thank you and we’ll chat again sometime.

MA: Oh, yeah, Chris. It was a blast.

[music]

CR: That was Mark Anderson, aka markstafari from Shop Geocaching. Interesting talk, I hope you enjoyed it. So here’s my next question. What would you like to hear us talk about on Inside Geocaching HQ? You can email us, podcast at geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast at geocaching.com. Tell us what sounds interesting and we’ll see if we can work it into an upcoming episode. Thanks again to Mark for his time. Thanks to you for listening. Until next time, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

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/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 4): Logging Changes, Send to Garmin

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Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast, welcome. We are happy to have you. I am Chris Ronan, your host. It has been a busy time at HQ since our last episode, lots happening around here. There are now 3 million active geocaches in the world, huge milestone. Hopefully, you went out and you found the cache to get the souvenir that marked that occasion. We also had another souvenir opportunity with Cache In, Trash Out week, and another souvenir on Big Blue Switch Day, that is May 2nd, when we, essentially, celebrate the day that geocaching became possible back in the year 2000. Today, we are talking about some of the new features and changes to the Geocaching website and to our app. I will talk with Ben Hewitt about the “Send to Garmin” feature. That’s a cool new toy for those of us who cache with our Garmin GPS devices. First though, I have a chat about logging changes with three folks at HQ who have been very involved in updating the way that we will all log geocaches via the app and the website. The changes will be noticeable, but they are necessary, and I personally think that they will make logging a lot more efficient. So here is me and a few of my fellow HQers, Nadja, Becca and Stuart, talking logging.

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Chris: Okay. So today we’re talking about the logging process on Geocaching.com and the Geocaching app, and we have Stuart, Nadja and Becca who are all very involved in working on logging in at HQ, in addition to lots of other stuff that they do, so maybe first we’ll hear about what they do. So Stuart, how long have you been at HQ? What is the overview of what you do at the office everyday?

Stuart Schwartz: Well, alright. Howdy. My name is Stuart Schwartz, and I am a lead developer on one of the delivery teams here at Geocaching HQ. I’ve been at the company near six years. As a lead, I effectively direct the technology as it’s being built by this team. I am one of three components to how that’s directed. There’s a technology side, a product side, and a UX side.

Nadja Conklin: Hi, I’m Nadja. I’ve been at HQ for a little over two years. I’m a product manager at HQ and I work on the web team, specifically with a core team of people including Stuart, Becca and myself, and a couple other very dedicated engineers. And yeah, as a product manager, what I do is I spend most of my time doing research and planning for projects and then helping make sure that projects and features get out the door smoothly and efficiently and in a great way that helps our users.

Becca Olson: Hi, I’m Becca. I’m a UX designer at Geocaching HQ, and I’ve been here for about four years. I work with Stuart and Nadja along with the rest of the team to make sure that the things that we’re designing work well for people. So I test them with people and work with Nadja to do research beforehand and also do the visual design.

Chris: So before we get into some of the stuff that’s gonna be changing here in the coming weeks with regards to logging your geocaches, Stuart, can we talk just first about, I think it’s just such an interesting process, just think about the fact that you have tens of millions of logs every year on ocaching.com and through the app. I think last year there was something like 80 million found logs, and I would assume there are some challenges and some… Some interesting things that you have to work through to make sure, from an engineering standpoint, all of that stuff happens the way that it should happen.

Stuart: Indeed, that’s true. First and foremost, I think the biggest challenge is not losing data or corrupting data from the past. So this game has been around for quite a while, near 15 some odd years, almost 16, I believe we just had 16. We’ve ended up with nearly one billion logs. We’re somewhere around 800 million at the moment, this is geocache and trackable logs. So the sheer volume is pretty intense and when we look at it as a whole, it’s a little overwhelming, but one piece at a time, it’s manageable.

Nadja: Okay. So we’ve talked about the enormity of the whole thing and now we have some… People are gonna start noticing some changes here in the next few weeks, next month or so. Nadja, can we talk first about why before we get into what the changes are, why are these changes going to be happening?

Nadja: Sure. Well, like Stuart was mentioning, the game has been around for about 16 years and there’s been a lot of change at HQ recently. So we’re addressing some growing pains along the way. And on the website, that’s namely… It’s around old code. Our existing logging page is in old code. And what that means is it limits the ability to work on logging and logging-related projects, namely drafts and syncing up with mobile and allowing some fun features like photos of favorite points in drafts. Without a new logging page, we wouldn’t be able to do things like that. Also old code dependencies can slow down development process, anyone that has worked in engineering, I’m sure, is familiar with that, which means that we can’t respond to customer problems as quickly as we would like to. And also the existing logging page, it’s not localized or mobile responsive. So, by working on a new logging page, we can address all of those things and also make some improvements along the way, including UX improvements and tackling some things with time zones and other exciting things.

Chris: Okay. So, there’s some interesting challenges there that need to be met and a lot of research I’m sure has gone into figuring out how to address those challenges. So, Becca, can you talk about that a little bit. What kind of research do we do, as a company, to figure out how to address these issues?

Becca: Yeah. We did a lot of research coming into this project about how people log geocaches, how people log maintenance and needs archived logs, things like that. And we do a lot of talking to users all over the world. We’ll do phone interviews and ask and we also watch them go through the current logging flow and see where they run into problems and pain points, and then we’ll take the information from all of that and start to recognize where we can improve and how we could make changes. And then once we have the product designed and developed, we’ll release it slowly to beta testers and to play testers, and ask them questions, ask for feedback along the way, and we can make changes before doing a full release to everyone.

Chris: And there are changes that are made along the way to, aren’t there? I think that there’s a thought among some people, not just with geocaching products, but any product, they think, “Oh, they’re just gonna give us what they want to give us and that’s just it.” But as beta testers know, you guys make a lot of little adjustments along the way based on the feedback that you get.

Becca: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we wanna release to small groups at a time, and so we can gather that feedback and make quick changes before we release to everyone. And then even after we release to everyone, we’ll continue to gather feedback and make sure that we’re making changes that make it the best workflow possible.

Chris: So, as your team was doing research, Becca, was there anything that came as a surprise to you, that caught you off guard?

Becca: Yeah. With the report a problem, research, specifically, we went into that with the hypothesis that people were not logging needs maintenance, or needs archived logs because they were afraid of offending the cache owner. And as we talked to people and watched the way people did that workflow, we learned that that is partially the case, but it was also largely that people didn’t understand the difference between needs maintenance and needs archived. They maybe didn’t understand what the output of that was, who was being notified once they submitted one of those, where that log was gonna be posted. And then also people weren’t a fan of writing two separate logs, so if they’re already writing a found it log, having to go back through that process and writing a second one for needs maintenance, or needs archived. And so collecting that data was a little bit different than what we expected, and we used that to design the new workflow.

Chris: Okay. So, Nadja, what kind of things are people going to start noticing as they’re logging caches here in the next several weeks?

Nadja: Well, aside from a brand spanking new logging page that is mobile-responsive and localized and looks pretty great. One of the most exciting things is the way that Becca was referring to, how players report a problem. In the research that Becca was referring to, we learned a lot about how users do or don’t report a problem, and we noticed that there was some confusion that players were having with reporting, “It needs maintenance,” or “It needs archived.” Not knowing where that information was sent to or what benefits it has for the game. So what we wanted to do was really empower users to report problems, and in an easy way, that didn’t require them to write two different logs because we know how important it is for the community, not only with letting cache owners know when there’s something wrong with their cache, but also improving cache quality in general.

Nadja: So, something that players will see is a little flag on the bottom of… Below the log text box that allows a user to report a problem right in the context. And it’ll allow to select from some of the most commonly reported problems with caches like a wet log book or something like that. And that will be appended directly to the log text, and then on the other side, when it is on the cache details page, you’ll see not only your original log text but a separate log that shows the needs maintenance, or the needs archived log. Another great win is that players can now attach photos while they’re logging rather than waiting until after they’ve logged a geocache, which I think is a pretty big win. And we’ve also aligned a lot of things with mobile and how favorite points are awarded, things like that. So, overall, I think it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Chris: And there are some rule changes too with logging, correct? And we’ve announced a little bit of that before, but maybe we could just… People that haven’t heard, some of the changes that will be coming in that regard too.

Nadja: Yeah, exactly. So there will be some log type changes, things that we’ve wanted to do as a company for a really long time and things that our community has asked for. So, those include duplicate logs. So, for example, once you’ve found a log you won’t be able to log that find again and that would go the same for events, attending, and will attend, and webcam photo taken. And then also for cache owners, we’re making some changes there that align with the vision of the game. Cache owners will no longer be able to find DNF or needs maintenance their own caches.

Chris: Of course, change is always hard for anybody and it’s especially difficult when you’ve been logging a certain way for so long. I’m sure that there’s going to be educational opportunities here, via help center, and stuff like that. And then also a chance for people to give feedback. Correct?

Nadja: That’s absolutely correct. Throughout… When you’re using the new logging page, we’ll have an area for users to give feedback via a survey and also a link to the blog post with a lot more information on how to use the page and also connecting with any forum notes about the project as well.

Chris: So then, Stuart, getting back to the engineering side of things, we make these changes and how logging is handled, that sound pretty significant compared to what is… The way it’s been done for a long time, how does that change things on the engineering side?

Stuart: That’s a great question. Nadja mentioned earlier that we had some older code in place and that was preventing us from moving quickly, that’s pretty true. Part of the problem is that our technology, our code stack from previous years is deprecated technology, so it’s difficult to find pre-built assemblies and libraries that work with it and it’s difficult to find programmers who can work with it as well. So in today’s era, we’ve been moving to newer technologies and while moving to a newer technology, we had to make a decision, do we just port over what’s existing or we do freshen it up and give users what we believe we will converge on as a better experience? We went with the latter. The technology we chose is MVC with a single page app running on top of it, I won’t go into too many details, but it leverages an API that feeds the front end with data rather than being tightly coupled through post-backs as older web forms technology used to rely on.

Chris: And so there’s a few people out there nodding their heads and saying, “That sounds amazing,” but just, in general, it sounds like it’ll make things a lot smoother for the engineers here and enable us to move more quickly in the future, right?

Stuart: Indeed, it will allow us to move more quickly and it will allow us more flexibility in our UI, our user interface. The user interface maybe will be able to leverage functionality, the same functionality on multiple locations on our site in the future. That’s pretty exciting for an agility point of view as we want to roll out features in new areas, leveraging existing functions.

Chris: One thing we haven’t hit on yet is time zones and that is something that a lot of people may not even think about, it may not have ever affected them, but there are certain parts of the world where we hear about it quite a bit, about how the website or the app handles time zones, Nadja, how are things gonna change in that regard?

Nadja: Things are gonna change for the better. We’ve been making a lot of steps to get to a good place with time zones. For anyone that’s worked with time zones or even just done a brief Google search on time zones will know that it’s very complicated and especially with our game, it’s really important that we have time zones correct. So that doesn’t just mean for people living in Seattle, it means for people living all over the world. So what we’re doing is moving towards having time zones in the time zone of the cache. So that means that everywhere on our site in all the cache details pages, all the logs will be in the time zone of the cache which has taken a lot of work to get us here. We are very nearly done with that, it should be all in place across web and mobile in the next few weeks.

Chris: And so how does that differ for people that aren’t aware, who haven’t been affected, how does that differ from how it’s been up until this point?

Nadja: Right. So up until this point, if you were perhaps traveling to another country and you came back to your home country and were logging a cache, you might see that your date was off by a day, maybe ahead or behind. This will erase that confusion and prevent logs from being out of order, it will prevent maybe a published listing happening after some geocache logs were made. It will really just align all of those logs that come through and make sure that they’re in the correct order and in the time zone of the cache.

Stuart: So to speak to the technical side of time zones, again, this company is been around for quite a while and the code base has been around for quite a while and these features, they didn’t all start at the same time, they were tacked on at some point or another. So, in the beginning, there was just a website and the website you were allowed to put in whatever date you wanted, and it didn’t really matter what time zone or what time was specified with your find. That was… It was easy and cool and everything was just in Seattle, but as the game became more popular around the world, moved across continents, we ended up finding that people were entering the date where they think they found it, which is in their own time zone, which is where the cache is generally. So we ended up with this heterogeneous collection of time zones with the dates associated with each visit, and it’s a little confusing especially if you’re not in the same time zone as the geocache.

Stuart: But as long as everything’s listed out on the site exactly how it went in, everything kind of works out. What ended up getting really confusing was later, sometime later, we introduced mobile applications. And the mobile applications all uploaded their time zones in pacific time, no matter where you were, which would render out to the website in pacific time. So if a person had logged a find in the time zone of the cache where they thought they were and then their friend had logged it via the app at the same time in the same location, they would show up possibly as two different dates if they’re on different sides of the planet.

Stuart: So normally, these would be simple fixes, but as I mentioned earlier, ultimate goal is not to lose data so this data has come into our system with these assertions of time that aren’t necessarily correct, but they are what people have come to rely on as truth of what they’ve done. So while fixing time zones, we’ve worked really hard to coalesce everything into a similar paradigm while not losing past data. And we think we’ve done it by pushing everything into the time zone of the cache, all logs coming in through uploading field modes, through mobile apps, through our APIs, and through the web, will all come in and be stored in the timezone of the cache and displayed in the timezone of the cache. So, we believe that will create a nice, unified experience.

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Chris: There’s only one person I know who can make time zones sound cool, and that is Stuart. Great talk there with Nadja, Becca, and Stuart. If you have questions about the logging changes as they are happening, please read the geocaching blog. There is a lot of great information there. So if you go to blog.geocaching.com www.geocaching.com/blog, you can read all about the logging changes, and of course, lots of other geocaching-related stuff. Also the geocaching help center will have information about the logging changes there as well. Okay, next up, “Send to Garmin.” Those of us who like to cache with a GPS device know the workflow for getting caches onto the device can be fairly involved. That is why we were very excited to release the new “Send to Garmin” feature on the website. Ben Hewitt was the point person on that project and we talked all about it.

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Chris: So we released “Send to Garmin” and it’s a great feature for those of us that own Garmin devices and Ben worked on this project with the folks at Garmin and with several folks here at HQ. I wonder if we could go back to when this project was first beginning. What precipitated it? What were the things that made HQ and Garmin say, this would be a nice feature and this is something that we should start working on?

Ben Hewitt: Absolutely. Anybody who’s been around Geocaching.com long enough knows that we have a “Send to GPS” feature on cache details pages and on the little map previews on our browsing map. And anybody who’s used those long enough also knows that those have been breaking more and more over time. It’s a really handy feature if you’re able to use that. It just pops the file for the cache right on your device without having to do anything else and you can unplug and go geocaching. And we know that people love that. We’d heard a lot of support inquiries and foreign posts, and we’d seen just a lot of feedback about, “Hey, this used to work, it’s not working anymore, and it was really important to me.”

Ben: So we heard that message loud and clear. And so a while ago, I went to Bryan (Roth) and I said, “Hey Bryan, you need to set me up with a contact at Garmin so we can talk about how to fix this.” Unfortunately, it’s not something that either Garmin or us could fix with the existing “Send to GPS” functionality because the reason that doesn’t work anymore is that modern browsers don’t support that technology anymore. If you really want to do some research, you can go Googling around about this. If you check out Garmin’s communicator plugin page, they have a link to a blog from Google that explains why that technology is no longer supported, and it’s for your benefit and my benefit, and everybody’s benefit because it’s more secure. So good thing for your computer security, bad thing for “Send to GPS” technology.

Ben: So we knew we needed to do something different and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to do that by ourselves. I started working with some folks at Garmin a while ago, and I said, “Hey, how can we do this differently? We can’t do ‘Send to GPS’ anymore, you know that, we know that. What can we do differently?” They spent a little time thinking about options and they came back to us and said, “We think we could do this kind of functionality with our Garmin Express software.” If you have a Garmin device, you may already be familiar with that software. It’s really useful for keeping your device’s firmware updated. You can load new maps with it. It’s a good device management tool for your Garmin GPSs and watches, and other gizmos, if you have those. Garmin said they would build some new functionality into Garmin Express for us and for other partners that they have, but we became the guinea pig for Garmin to try something new out.

Ben: And so, it took quite a bit of back and forth. They would build something into Garmin Express, we built some new services on our end, and then they would send us a beta-build of the software and we would test. And we’d give them feedback, and they would give us feedback on our end. So there was a long period of back and forth where we were really trying to get it right, trying to set this up to be the best experience we can have it be for our mutual customers, for people who are geocachers and Garmin GPS users. That led us to the point that we got to this week, which is releasing our first version of “Send to Garmin” functionality that uses Garmin Express, and we added that on the new lists page where you can… Using Garmin Express, you can now, with a click of a button, send an entire list of geocaches to your Garmin device using Garmin Express.

Chris: So let’s talk about how it works then… You need a Garmin device, obviously. You need Garmin Express software. So somebody who’s new to this, what are the steps? I want to start using “Send to Garmin.” How do I go about it?

Ben: So there’s lots of ways that you could go through it. My personal favorite is to go to the homepage, the search page, run a search, find the caches that I’m interested in. Maybe it’s just everything in a big region or maybe it’s some specific things that I’m interested in, for the geocaching I’m doing today. Check the boxes along the side. I add them to a list, and then I go to the list page, and over on the right of each list, there’s a little dot dot dot menu, a little circle with three dots in it. If you click that, you’ll see the Send to Garmin button in there. Like you said, Chris, you have to have Garmin Express installed for this to work. You have to have your device added in Garmin Express.

Ben: Both Garmin and we, did quite a bit of work trying to onboard people to this flow, and so if you don’t have those things ready to go when you go try this, we’ve got some, but we hope our helpful pop-ups that coach you through the process of, “Here’s a link to go get Garmin Express.” Garmin has good instructions about how to set Garmin Express up. And then we have, on the lists page, some instructions about where to find it. So then, of course, though, you can create a list in lots of ways. You can add caches to a list from the map, you can add from cache details, you can add it through partner apps, and other mobile applications and desktop applications. So any way you can create a list is great, and then once you have that list, then you go back to the lists page and send it to Garmin from there.

Chris: It’s interesting when you… And I know you’ve talked to a lot of people about this too, how many different ways people have to get geocaches onto their device. And I know for me, personally, the way I would get my list onto my Garmin is, “Okay, you run a pocket query and then you gotta download the file, and then you gotta find the file and put it on to your… ” This is a… For me, personally, it’s a great streamline thing, but of course, there are other ways that… A lot of people just like being able to send that one cache onto their device. And I would imagine there’s a lot of different ways then that this functionality can find its way through the website. Maybe you could speak to at least just the possibilities of that, although we can’t say for certain exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day.

Ben: For sure, so we wanted to try something new out, that’s what this is. We know it’s brand new, we know it’s gonna take a little bit of learning for people to get used to it. And we thought that, given all we’ve done with lists over the past few years, that this was a really good first place to try it. What we released this week is not meant as a replacement for anything just yet, it’s meant as a cool new toy for people who find that workflow useful. That said, we’re also… We put in… We’re monitoring usage of this feature, we’re listening to feedback, we wanna know how it works for people and if this is a good tool for them. And if it is, then we’re absolutely… We’d love to add it to some other places, including, potentially, replacing the existing Send to GPS which still works, but you have to jump through some pretty serious hoops to get it to work. So this is a start, what we did this week, it’s not the end game, it’s a start of trying something new, it’s a start of trying a different collaboration with Garmin. I’m pretty excited about what we have to offer today, but we also know that there’s more work to do.

Chris: So there are some parameters with using this software and this new functionality, of course, you need to have a device that is supported by Garmin Express, and in our testing, I know we found that that can go back many years. There are some very old devices that do work, but there are some that don’t and that’s an unfortunate reality, right?

Ben: That’s the long and short of it. I know that Garmin has worked hard to make Garmin Express support as many of their devices as possible, but like a lot of software, and like a lot of device life spans, there are things that are no longer supported. So I feel the pain of people whose device may not be supported by Garmin Express. I’ve had some trusty old GPSs that I’ve beaten into the ground until the buttons were falling off. So I know that feeling of the beloved partner. But we are doing our best and I know Garmin is doing their best to support a wide variety of products, but the truth is that not all of them are supported by Garmin Express.

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Chris: So there’s some background on the Send to Garmin functionality. Thanks to Ben for his time. Thanks again to Nadja, Becca, and Stuart for chatting about the logging changes. Good episode, hope you enjoyed it, we would love to hear what you would like us to cover on this podcast. Please drop us a line. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast at Geocaching.com. A few of you have written in with ideas, we’re gonna try to cover those in the coming weeks but keep those ideas coming, podcast at Geocaching.com. Thanks for stopping by, we will talk again soon. In the meantime, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

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