Tag: podcast

Episode 25: Jeremy Irish, Geocaching HQ co-founder

Jeremy Irish launched Geocaching.com on September 2, 2000. He co-founded Geocaching HQ, along with Bryan Roth and Elias Alvord.

In this episode, Jeremy shares memories of the early days of Geocaching HQ, as well as what he’s up to today.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 25: Jeremy Irish, Geocaching HQ co-founder
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Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 25): Jeremy Irish

[music]

00:12 Chris Ronan: Hi there! This is Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, geocaching username Rock Chalk. Hope you’re in the right place, but even if you’re not, stick around, sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale. A tale of the beginnings of geocaching.com. Jeremy Irish joins me for a conversation. Jeremy is one of Geocaching HQ’s co-founders, currently a senior vice president here. He started geocaching.com, so he’s kind of a big deal. He has a lot of great stories, and you’ll hear many of them today. I’ve looked forward to having him on our podcast for a long time, and he really delivered. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did. This is me and Jeremy Irish talking, what else, geocaching.

[music]

01:04 CR: Well, Jeremy, thank you for doing this. You’ve never struck me as somebody who’s a look-back kind of a guy, you’re look forward kind of a guy, aren’t you?

01:10 Jeremy Irish: That’s pretty true, yeah.

01:12 CR: You don’t really… You don’t really seem to revel in talking about the glory days and all that stuff.

01:15 JI: I get bored really quickly.

01:17 CR: You get bored. [laughter] So we appreciate you humoring us and talking a little bit about stuff here as we’ve got this big anniversary coming up next year, 20 years since the website started, since geocaching started. When you think back to 20 years ago today, it’d be 1999, you were still a little ways off from hearing about this game. What kind of stuff were you doing back then?

01:41 JI: Oh geez, let me see. Well, I was originally from the East Coast, so I grew up in Virginia. I was working for General Electric; actually, I was a webmaster when that was a term. And I was on the East Coast, and I was really just bored of being on the East Coast, and I’d lived there my whole life, and I always said it was like one of those flavor ices, once you suck all the… All the really sweetness out of it, then all you’re left with is a little bit like an ice cube.

02:05 CR: Yeah, right.

02:07 JI: I was really thinking about where I wanted to go next. And I had joined the Air Force, and I traveled to South Korea, and then I actually did my training in California, and went down to Texas. So I ended up back in Maryland, just close to my home, and really got that travel lust, so decided to go out to the Pacific Northwest. And I was a webmaster for GE, so I was basically one of the first web developers out there, so I was trying to figure the thing out. And I was looking online for tech jobs… And this was in ’98. And I found out that Microsoft was out in the Pacific Northwest, out in Seattle, and I got a job offer to come out, so that fall of ’98 I came out to Bellevue, where Microsoft is, and I started working for them as a contractor. So that’s what I was doing originally.

03:00 JI: I did that for a year. I was building internal websites and doing work for them, and it was coming up on one year of my contract, and at that point they give you a couple of months off before you can do contract with Microsoft again. So there was a company that wanted to do some contracting work for the same company I was working for, and I started working at Savvy Shopper, and Savvy Shopper was online… They called it Bricks to Mortar. No, Bricks to Clicks was what they called it. So it was basically taking on a physical store and then putting it online where that was kind of new and fancy. So I worked on the e-commerce platform shopping cart application for this men’s online retailer, and that’s where I met Bryan and Elias, so we were all working for this company together. So that was the beginning of the three of us meeting and working together as co-workers instead of as entrepreneurs or partners in that. And we were working for an entrepreneur, so it was our first experience working together, which allowed us to have a really strong relationship before we started geocaching.

04:08 CR: So May 3rd, 2000, Dave Ulmer hides the first stash, as it was called then. Mike Teague is the first person to find it. People are hiding stashes and posting the coordinates online. Mike Teague is documenting them on his personal home page, and some time around July 2000 you stumble on that home page. What was it that piqued your interest about what you were seeing?

04:33 JI: At Savvy Shopper, we had moved to a new location, and we had a lot… I had 20 employees, something like that, I don’t exactly know how many. But we had this warehouse, and one of the guys who worked at the company, he brought in a Garmin eTrex, it was one of those yellow eTrex units, into the office and he was showing it around. And I knew about GPS before, but I thought about it in car navigation stuff, so I didn’t know a lot about the technology. And when I saw this handheld, it was… I don’t know, two AA batteries and you could walk around with this thing. And I went outside with it, ’cause I’m still a gadget geek, so I went outside and I turned it on. And the original eTrexes, and you can probably see the pictures online, they would show this little guy, and he’s this little pixelated guy, and there were, I think, four satellites up above him that were digital. And every time you connected to a satellite there was this little lightning symbol that went to each one of them. And then once you connected to three of them, then you could start getting your location.

05:31 JI: And there were no maps, it was just this screen, this blank screen. When you connected to it and you were walking around, the little guy started walking too, and you would notice that it would draw a track behind you. And I was like, this is like a video game, there’s this… It’s like Tron in a way, or Snake, one of the original games. I was like, well, there must be games related to GPS, because this looks like a game. So I did some searching online, and I came across the Great American GPS Stash Hunt, and the newsgroup as well that was talking about it, and realized there was this game that had just started.

06:12 JI: So I ended up on, I think… I forget the website, I think it maybe was Matt Stum, he was the one who coined the name geocaching. And saw that there were a bunch of caches listed. Mike Teague’s website actually was the first one I went to. And I saw that there was like a couple, maybe one or two in the state of Washington, I don’t recall exactly. But there was one and I was able to plot it by going to RAI and looking at a topographic map, ’cause I knew it was in Washington State, but I had no idea where it was. I immediately went out and then I bought my own GPS that weekend. I went to a marine supply store since I don’t even think RAI had it.

06:46 JI: I bought one of these things, it was like 115 bucks, so it was a big purchase, but I was excited. I was like, “I’m gonna find this container. This is really cool.” So I went and I looked at the topographic maps and kinda got a general idea of where this area was, but I didn’t have much more information, other than this map and my GPS. So I basically put the GPS on. It gave me a distance and direction and I just started driving.

07:08 JI: So I went with another co-worker of mine and my puppy. I had a beagle puppy. So I was like, “I’m gonna take my puppy out for a walk.” So he and I and the puppy went down and drove along this old logging trail, ended up at this… We just parked on the side of the road and then just started hiking and we found a trail that led us up through… It was kind of a deforested area. So there’s a lot of logging in the Pacific Northwest. So I was in this area that they do logging. So it was like a lot of stumps and following up the trail, and I realized a few things. I didn’t have any water with me, so I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have water for me. I didn’t have snacks. I didn’t backpack. I just… We just started walking like it was no big deal.

07:51 CR: Like you’re playing a video game.

07:51 JI: Like I was playing a video game, yeah. I didn’t think about it. I was just following the arrow, and just like, “Okay, let’s do this.” So, we’re hiking up. Of course, my friend, he was a former army, he actually had an IV in his backpack, so he was prepared. I was totally not prepared.

08:05 CR: Wow.

08:05 JI: But he still didn’t have water, but he had a water filtration system. So there was a point like along the trail where we don’t have any water and we have to find some old murky swamp that we have to get some water out of just so we can continue on, because we’re all totally unprepared for this, but over-prepared in one way and under-prepared in the other. So, it was really hilarious. There was bugs and I… In the Pacific Northwest, I’m not used to seeing a lot of bugs, like in East Coast all the time. So I didn’t have any bug spray either. So it was miserable. The whole experience was miserable getting to the top of this mountain.

08:37 JI: But once we got to the top, and there was this just a stumpy area, and I noticed that we were getting close, within 20 feet, looked around and I found this container. And it had a notebook in it. It a had a disposable camera. It had a Sunny Delight drink in it, which… This is one of the reasons why we have no food in caches because you don’t put a Sunny Delight drink. I know that it’s not really orange juice, but it’s not really drinkable after it’s been out there for that long.

09:06 JI: So yeah, so I was so excited about it and all those problems that I had along the way and that we had getting there, didn’t really matter ’cause we found this thing that somebody had posted online in these coordinates and all we did was follow the coordinates to this location. So, I was pretty elated and from then on, and I’ve heard this quote before, but it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong. That’s kind of how it was. So it became a story, and at the time it was miserable and stuff, but that excitement of finding it, called the eureka moment that you get when you find it. I was like, “I need to find more of these. I got my fix. I need to do this again.”

09:43 JI: So as we’re coming back down the mountain and at this point I think I’m carrying my puppy, ’cause the puppy’s exhausted. I get to the car. I get to my Saturn, which of course I’m driving a Saturn on logging trails, so don’t do that either. I get in the car and I’m like, “Well, I want this to be something bigger than just a few. What can I do to make this thing more accessible and people are more prepared, and I can explain this better and there needs to be a community around this. And how am I gonna do this? I wanna do this, I wanna support it.” so driving…

10:15 CR: You were thinking that then?

10:17 JI: Well, yeah, ’cause I was like, “Well, if we can get a lot of people to do this then there will be more for me to do, ’cause I can’t hide them and find them.” It’s like I don’t… I need some serious memory loss to do that. So I need a community of people to go out there and place these things so I can place them. So, it was really like selfish reasons, originally, for creating this was, “Hey, if I help with this, then I’ll be able to do this more often.” So coming back, I was like, “Well, I have dev skills. I have some web skills. So what if I could create a website to do this?” So, I looked around to see if is anybody else doing this? And people were more just placing them, posting them to the news group. Mike Teague was documenting those locations, some people was writing bits of code they could put it in a postal code or something like that and it would return like a list or you put your coordinates in and it’ll sort by distance, so you can at least know which ones are near you, that sort of thing.

11:11 JI: So, I kinda took about a lot of those ideas, and I had to learn about great circle calculations to figure out how to do a distance calculation between two points on the planet and how do I code that? How do I create a database for this? All these things, which got me excited because it sort of touched on my interest in technology, but also really encouraged me to go outside, which is something that I hadn’t done since I was in the Boy Scouts, when I was more of a kid. When I became an adult it was more a sedentary existence where I was traveling from the office to home and home to the office. Being a video game, I’d say addict, I also played lots of video games. So it was more like video game indoors.

11:53 JI: So my thought was, “Well, this touches… This will get me healthy. This will hit my tech interest here and my gadget… My interest for gadgets. So, why don’t combine those two?” And then maybe other people will do that too, and they’ll get excited and they’ll place these things. So it was like the symbiotic relationship that I wanted to have with other people in doing this.

12:14 JI: So, eventually I built something that made sense, it worked. And actually just one tidbit is I was looking for something that would relate to technology and nature, and I found… I was on the Ansel Adams website and the Ansel Adams website had a lot of really good black and white photography ’cause that’s what Adam, what he’s known about. So I thought, well, I’ll just basically copy Ansel Adams’ [chuckle] website in some ways. So a lot of that initial website was based on that website, and using some color versus black and white imagery, and trying to put some pictures of the outdoors to get people excited about it and stuff like that.

12:56 JI: So I built this website, and I reached out to Mike Teague and said, “Hey, I’ve got this website. Can you give me some feedback?” And he gave me a little feedback, and some back and forth, and I continued to build the website. And then I think it was September… Was it first?

13:12 CR: Second.

13:12 JI: Second, okay, it was September 2nd of 2000, his website went down for maintenance or something. His provider, his ISP shut down his site. And people were like, “Well, I wanna go and find out where these geocaches are,” and they weren’t geocaches, but the stashes. And Mike Teague said, “Well, go over to geocaching.com. Jeremy’s been working on this. You can go there and check it out.” So that’s really where we consider the first launch of geocaching. It had been up before then, but at that time it was all hand-entered for me, people would email me locations and information, and then I would put them in the database. So the earliest geocaches don’t even have usernames associated with the caches.

13:56 JI: But at the time of the launch, there were 75 caches that I documented and entered into the system, and then over time those people… As we created accounts and that sort of thing, people would adopt those. But some people who just left the activity don’t, so sometimes you’ll see some and they’re associated with one of my old accounts because could never find the owner for those.

14:15 CR: And it’s not long before word really gets out about this. Slashdot did something in September 2000, then you mentioned New York Times article, which I believe was in October, and then CNN did something in December. Was that an exciting time? Was it overwhelming? Was it a mix of the two?

14:33 JI: Well, at that time, I had just created the website on my own, and I’d been working on it, and I was actually running it out of my bedroom. So I had, I think, an ISDN connection or something like that, a low internet connection. So it wasn’t in a server room, and it wasn’t… It didn’t have any capacity at all. So when you get slashdotted, when it was a thing, it brought the server to its knees, and nobody could interact with it, so it shut it down. We got slashdotted, so that was scary. And then I was starting to get some inquiries like, “Oh, I saw this Slashdot article or Slashdot post. I’d like to write an article about this, New York Times, and don’t let anybody scoop me. I want to talk about this, I wanna be the first whatever,” I’m like, “Well, you are the New York Times, so yeah, of course.” So that was crazy.

15:21 JI: And then CNN picked up on the New York Times, and over the course of… I think it was the holidays, they would just repeatedly play me awkwardly walking on the beach, [chuckle] talking about geocaching. And they picked the beach, I think, ’cause maybe pirates, I’m not really sure.

15:37 CR: Oh, we gotta find that. I need to find that clip.

15:38 JI: Yeah, but you can’t really… You can’t be cool when you’re walking in the sand, it just doesn’t… [laughter]

15:43 CR: No, no.

15:44 JI: It doesn’t work that way. So yeah, so I was like… That was weird ’cause I’d never done any kind of interviews with that and… Like that, and I didn’t know where it was going, but I knew that I didn’t wanna do this alone, so at that point I reached out to Bryan and Elias and said, “Hey, you guys are… You fill the areas that I can’t do.” Elias was really… A lot of the back-end work that keeps the site running, or that kept the site running back then, I was the designer and developer, and then Bryan really had a lot of business acumen. And being a lawyer doesn’t help either. It does help, sorry.

[laughter]

16:24 JI: That’s my subconscious talking about lawyers but…

16:26 CR: We won’t let Bryan hear that part.

16:27 JI: No, no, he’s heard all the lawyer jokes, so… [chuckle]

16:30 CR: No doubt, no doubt.

16:30 JI: So it’s fine. And having somebody with a lot of business experience. And so the three of us really worked well together, and I said, “Well, it’s great,” ’cause having three is really great for running a business because there’s always a tie-breaker. Either you all agree, or one person disagrees, or two people disagrees, but there’s always gonna be a decision that gets made. So I didn’t realize at the time, I just thought these are two people that really… I really respect, and I’ve worked with them, and I understand them, and they’re excited for this, but they don’t know where it’s going either. It’s gonna be this side project that we’ll work on. It’ll be fun, but we’re not gonna spend… I even remember writing an email to them at one point… I was thinking it was 2001, and saying, “I don’t think this thing will ever make money, so we need to figure out a way for it to support itself. Because if it can’t support itself, I can’t spend all of my nonworking time working on this.” I’m kind of getting ahead, but that was… Having two partners was definitely key to being successful in this.

17:32 CR: The company has around 75 employees now, but it didn’t… Just as you alluded to, it didn’t just take off like a rocket, right?

17:38 JI: No. [chuckle]

17:39 CR: It was five years, for instance, before Bryan became a full-time employee. During the early days, as you said, it was you and all of you guys, doing this as you were doing your regular jobs, and then as time went on you were able to devote your focus to geocaching. But it wasn’t like that right off the bat.

17:58 JI: No, no, it… So yeah, after the… We were selling Travel Bugs, I think, in 2001, and we were selling t-shirts. So originally we started the company by using shared server space and selling t-shirts. We were working with this company that basically acquired the assets and us. And they were a… They do imprinting, they do silk screening, and embroidery, and that sort of thing. So I was building e-commerce sites for them, and that was my full-time job for… I think it was two or three years that I was doing that. And my side gig was doing geocaching, and that was more of a passion project ’cause I really didn’t… I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know if it was gonna be sustainable on its own. So yeah, we sold 144 t-shirts originally, that was our original geocaching logo, which is definitely more complex than today’s logo. That ended up keeping the server costs and buying more shirts. So we keep… With that profit we get more shirts and then we buy more shirts, and…

19:00 JI: In 2001, we came up with this idea… I came up with this idea for Travel Bugs and that would help fund as well. I remember just sitting and watching TV, and then just peeling stickers of activation codes and tracking codes and we were completely disorganized with it, so I’d have to find the tracking number of the Travel Bug on this list, and then stick it on the envelope, and then ship them out. So we’re all doing this by hand. So any of the ones you see, there’re literally imprinted or numerical, those are like the original Travel Bugs that were out there that we had. And we had to figure out how to source it, who’s gonna print Travel Bugs.

19:36 CR: When Nate was on the show a while back, we had a fun conversation with him and Bryan about the big machine you guys had, the…

19:43 JI: Oh yeah, it would go…

[vocalization]

19:44 CR: It shook the building and… [laughter]

19:46 JI: Yeah, I know, yeah, that was for the Jeep promotion originally, ’cause we were trying to do alphanumeric codes ’cause the original numeric codes were easily breakable and for this we wanted to have something a little bit harder. So we had to figure out how to program this thing, which used to print or stamp dog tags. So it was a dog tag stamper. Yeah, and that thing… [chuckle] It was so loud, yeah, so we all had to wear headphones or just deal with it. But that was all part of it…

20:14 CR: Right.

20:14 JI: The experience.

20:15 CR: The game of geocaching is unique for a lot of reasons, and I think one of the most important is that the community invented the game. The community creates the content. And for that reason, you and Bryan and Elias and this company have always had a unique relationship with the community. Could you talk about that a bit?

20:36 JI: Obviously, starting this thing out, I realized that I needed to have a bunch of people that will participate in this thing so I could participate in it as well. So… And I hadn’t run communities before, so this is all new to me. But creating the forum, that was one of the first… Well, actually, the mailing list, we had a geocaching mailing list that we started with first and that was just like… In this community, I need to encourage people to do this. And people… And I remember the first person in California to place a cache was like, “Well if I place one of these things, will anybody actually find it?” We had this… We kept saying, “If you hide it, they will come. We just say, “If you hide it they will come.” People will hide it and they say, “Oh wow, somebody logged my cache and I got an email,” and you’re like, “Yep, alright well, thank you.”

21:18 CR: Tell your friends. [chuckle]

21:18 JI: And tell your friends, yeah, literally, tell your friends. Key things I was thinking about when the geocaching activity started, one of them was… ‘Cause there was some counter-culture, “Let’s go to abandoned buildings and take pictures,” kind of thing, “let’s go trespass.” And people would… And I think there’s still websites out there that do that. It’s like, “Oh hey, I went into Disney property, I went to this old ride and I snuck in, I took all these photos,” and they uploaded it, and then it’s basically encouraging people to go and… The pictures are great, but encouraging people to go trespassing in these locations, I was like, “Well we can’t be committing crimes. We need to be above board. This needs to be a public website. We need to work with people if people are trespassing or littering or they’re doing something that they’re not supposed to do.”

22:01 JI: And then the other big thing was family-friendly was important. And being family-friendly meant that if I ever had kids, and now I have three, and I go to a geocache, I’m not going to expect something that I shouldn’t or go to a place that I wouldn’t wanna bring my kids. Keep that above board. And then the third one, commercialization.

22:22 JI: Okay, so no solicitation. And over the years, this has been a controversial one. There’s always exceptions to the rule, and that’s why we always call them guidelines instead of rules, because there has to be some allowances to creativity. But we didn’t want people to be actively using these to get you to go and buy ice cream or put coupons in them, or create little contests and stuff like that unless if we manage it in some way that is better for the community. And we’ve experimented with ideas in doing promotions over the years and the end result is like any kind of activity that we incorporate or advertise and incorporate into the game. It’s something that enhances the game, it doesn’t detract from it. So that was probably the three core pillars, I guess, that we had considered originally when starting the website.

23:08 CR: You briefly mentioned it earlier, but maybe talk a little bit more about Travel Bugs because that’s become such a big part of the game and it’s something that you came up with. What was the impetus for that?

23:19 JI: Well, originally, I would go to geocaches and people would put objects in Ziploc bags and they would have a piece of paper in it and it would say, “Hey, if you found this, send me an email, let me know that you found it and where you found it.” And this is… And some of them are like, “And this is from such-and-such a location, I’m trying to get to this location.” So that was happening naturally. People were just wanting to put them in caches and just see where they went. So it was like putting a message in a bottle, and then seeing where it floats to based on people moving it. Also, at the same time, there was an activity called Where’s George. And Where’s George is when you take… Every dollar bill has its own serial numbers, so you would enter the serial number of a bill into this website, and then you could write a message like when you found it, and then they would spend the bill, and then they would write or stamp a Where’s George stamp on there to say, “Go to wheresgeorge.com and enter in this code and tell me where it’s been.”

24:16 JI: I was like, “Well I can combine the idea that here, somebody has a goal with this object that they put in a cash container with this idea where you take a serial number, a unique identifier, and then you can go to a website and find out where it’s been. If you combine those two, and then somehow integrate it to the game, and then charge for the tags, this would be a funding opportunity for us to get more functionality, maybe hire some people, maybe not do this as my side gig anymore, so I can focus on this more.”

24:43 JI: So that’s basically the idea, how it got started originally, just finding how to source it and get the first ones printed and that sort of thing. That took some… A little bit of time, but that was the idea. And then, of course, you’re bitten by the Travel Bug, the idea that this thing is vicariously moving… You are vicariously living through the bugs that are moving around. Hopefully, people post photos of them and you’ll get emails about these adventures these little bugs go on. So that was the basic idea.

25:10 CR: I could spend all day asking you about lots of other projects, but are there things that… Moments that are top of mind for you? I mean when… And the rare times that you do think back, because I know you like to look forward, but if you are just reminiscing, are there certain projects that come to mind or certain moments in the history that are particularly memorable for you?

25:31 JI: So I think the Jeep one was really cool just because I love Jeeps, and I finally bought a Jeep after all these years in 2014, I think, or something like that. I finally bought a Jeep. This promotion really hit just some buttons for me, the happy buttons. The idea of finding out there are brands that really integrate with the game. The fact that we had these little diecast metal Jeeps that… Just fun things like, how do we print them, and how do we get them out to the world so people can move them around? Do we ship them? I remember packaging them were fun ’cause we’d get… We just had shipments of these little diecast metal Jeeps that would arrive and I think it was the yellow Jeep originally, which then we did locationless caches around and one of them was the find yellow jeep. So it was kind of a fun mix of the two projects. And then releasing them out, and then seeing the photography that people would submit, because there was a sweepstakes, but there was also a photography… There was an essay and a photography portion of it, and then people would choose like the best pictures; somebody won a Jeep at the end of the promotion, which is pretty awesome, along with the sweepstakes and that sort of thing.

26:35 JI: So that was cool, just because it combined Jeep, this amazing brand experience with geocaching. Never thought I had the opportunity to do something like that. And then just the promotion itself was very unique and seeing the creative user content that people are creating out there with the photography, or even like geocaches. So that’s the Jeep promotion. The things that have stood out to me over the years is traveling. The first time I was able to travel, I was flown to Denmark to speak at an event and I’d never done that before. So I got to go to Copenhagen, and then met up with the folks that had sponsored me to come out, drove on a Segway; it was the first time I was on a Segway, and then got to see Copenhagen, got to fly to a new… Or was it… Yeah, fly to a new country.

27:27 JI: And then I went to Aarhus and met now our first employee’s husband in Aarhus, Denmark and that was where I did my speaking event. So just being able to travel outside the United States and have my experience, first experience talking about geocaching. And then just all the events I’ve gone to; to GeoWoodstock where I used to get in line and serve, what was it, Caesar salad; I did that like a couple of years. It was fun just to be in line to be able to… It’s hard to meet 500 geocachers in an event. So the best way to do that is serve them food, ’cause everybody’s coming to the same location. [chuckle] So it was like, “Hey, here’s some Caesar salad. Nice to meet you.”

[laughter]

28:06 JI: And then we don’t have a lot of time, so move along, and then we’ll talk to the next person because you’re limited with your time. So there’s… I went down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest and Richard Garriott has a geocache there where you end up at a tower that he created, really cool. You end up walking along this trail with all of this like Halloween-themed stuff along the way after solving all these puzzles, and even meeting Richard Garriott, which as a videogame geek guy, grew up with Ultima series of games. So I played all the Ultima single player games as the avatar to the Ultima online experience. So meetings like… So, childhood hero, also now, tourist astronaut, really cool.

28:49 CR: Yeah, very cool. Yeah.

28:50 JI: Got to meet some really cool people. They don’t have to be celebrities, [chuckle] like meet geocachers that are gadget cachers that create these amazing experiences. I could go on on all the really cool experiences that I’ve done because of this game.

29:06 CR: So there was a lot of excitement fairly recently, it’s been a couple of years, but about the return of the… There was the APE cache that was found in Washington and now there’s two active APE caches. And you actually were… You hid that Washington, you and John Stanley, right, were the ones that actually hid it. How about that promotion? That was something that is part of geocaching lore and people love talking about the APE cache and I just kinda wonder when you think back to working with 20th Century Fox on that whole thing.

29:32 JI: It was interesting at the time. It’s outlived the movie. Nobody watches the movie after they go and find one of these geocaches. They basically approached us and said, “We wanna do something with you for this movie coming out,” and they had this concept of this alternate history of evolution where there’s these apes that have been evolved, just like man has been evolved and there’s this evidence out there. So there’s this organization that’s going to release this proof. So each location, they basically asked, “How do we do this?” It was a collaborative experience. So coming up with the idea where we get excitement around Project APE with the entire world, but at the same time, there’s only 12, and then I think 13 locations that you could place them, that a lot of people are not gonna be able to play this game. So how are you gonna live vicariously through the people who are finding it? How do you get that excitement around it and try to mitigate some of the disappointment?

30:31 JI: So we picked all the locations and we found local geocachers that would place it for us. I had that all coordinated. And then there’s so much trust in there, too. This is like if I’m sending a prop from the movie in this big container to somebody I’ve never met and that person actually placed the container and didn’t take the prop from the movie, that’s pretty impressive. So it’s like this absolute trust that happened. We had very trustworthy amazing geocachers that worked on it. And then this idea that throughout the week, we would sort of slowly reduce the radius of where the geocache is so they could find it. That was a lot of fun, just trying to schedule that even personally, like sending out a message so people are ready for this thing. And then I think it was every Friday, releasing it, and then seeing how quickly people would find it.

31:17 JI: I used to say that we could get a geocacher to somewhere faster than the US government could. [laughter] ‘Cause you’d just post a coordinate of a new geocache and send out an instant email that says, “Hey everybody, there’s a geocache there, go find it,” and it would be found within less than an hour.

31:32 CR: That’s true.

31:32 JI: It would be found anywhere in the world, more or less. So anyway, that was really exciting. And geocaches were found within an hour. Once people found out it was in Washington State or something, people are waiting for that message to go out, where multiple people would show up at the same time. And nobody ever fought over a geocache as far as I knew. But just the fact that it lived on beyond the promotion and has become legendary, and the fact that now there’s the trifecta that you can find the three geocaches in the Pacific Northwest and a lot of people will travel here, and then the interest in going to Brazil to find a geocache that’s out there, and the fact that that thing still exists today is pretty impressive.

32:16 CR: Yeah, I mean I never would’ve… I don’t know if I ever would have gone to Brazil if it wasn’t for that cache.

[chuckle]

32:21 JI: So yeah, it’s awesome that this has created that. I wanted to feel like Indiana Jones every time I found a geocache. But you literally can go to Brazil and find a geocache now and it feels like that kind of adventure. So, yeah, and then the fact that I think it was really well introduced back into the game, getting that geocache back to make that trifecta happen, having that community involvement for it. Honestly, in the past, I would have shut down those geocaches if I hadn’t… At that time, I used to have regrets not shutting them down because they were such a pain. People would constantly wanna have the old geocaches returned to those locations with a new container and we had to create rules around it and it was frustrating because I wanted to capture the original experience, but replacing the container just wasn’t… It didn’t seem right to me. So, being the bad guy often throughout the game has not been the most comfortable part of the experience, but I think it’s helped the game.

33:24 CR: A couple of years ago, after many years as the company president, you shifted gears, you moved into a senior VP role, what made you wanna do that?

33:32 JI: Yeah, it’s been about two years now. I had a lot of life changes and realized… I joke when I was… I became 42, that’s the answer to life, the universe and everything, if you know Douglas Adams books. So that was my year of living uncomfortably, is how I themed it. And I just got to thinking about what’s important and how much energy and time that I put into the game. And I love all the energy and time I put in the game, but really, I think as a result, a lot of my personal side suffered.

34:04 JI: So I kinda went through some changes there and I was still president and working through it and that sort of thing. But there was a point where I thought, “Well, my passion, it is about… Passion is building something.” And you’re right, I’m more of a forward thinker. I like to break things because I think breaking things make things change over time and you can’t just do the same thing. So, I came to the realization that I wanted to do something else. I wanted to do something within the company, but I didn’t wanna manage the company. I think I manage okay, but I’m better at building product and coming up with new ideas and it was keeping me from doing that.

34:42 JI: So it’s been over two years now. Bryan, Elias and I talked and I thought, “Well, I think the best thing to do is me to step down, and then look at other concepts around geocaching and location-based games in general. So why don’t I take this time and focus on figuring out new ideas, playing around with those ideas, and if those ideas take off and there’s some spark of… Something fits within the game, then we’ll go for it.”

[music]

35:12 CR: So there you have it, Jeremy Irish. I learned a lot during that talk. I heard several fun stories that I had not heard before, hope you did, too. If you have an idea for our podcast, something you’d like to hear us talk about, you can send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear your ideas. Hard to top this talk with Jeremy, but we will try. So, hey, thanks for downloading our podcast. Please tell your friends. And from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 24) Virtual Rewards 2.0

[music]

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, Special Edition. I’m Chris Ronan, also known by my Geocaching user name which is Rock Chalk. So what makes this a special edition? Well, we’re announcing Virtual Rewards 2.0 today. You can read about it on the Geocaching blog or hear all about it, right here, right now. I am joined by Cindy Potter, who is the Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. So here we go, talking in Virtual Rewards 2.0.

[music]

00:54 CR: Well, the last time, Cindy, you were on our podcast, was this exact same subject. So apparently, we only bring you on here when it’s time to talk about Virtual Rewards. So, Virtual Rewards 2.0. Let’s talk about this project and just an overview of what this is all about.

01:12 Cindy Potter: Okay, sure. No, that’s funny that I guess I have nothing else to talk about besides Virtuals, but that’s okay. We’re very excited to announce another round of Virtuals. We’re calling it Virtual Rewards 2.0. Still using the same name but it is different. We’ll talk more about that. It’s more similar to the process of what we did for Adventure Labs. So there’s going to be a page going live either today or very soon thereafter, where people can opt in to receive a virtual reward if they meet the minimum qualifications and those will be visible on the page. And then we’ll randomly select up to 4,000 individuals by geographic distribution.

01:55 CR: So compared to the first round of Virtual Rewards, I think with any project, we try to learn from it and see if we can improve on it and make it better and certainly the process here is a little bit different than the first time around, and a lot of that is because of input, both from the community and volunteer and community volunteers and so forth.

02:15 CP: Right. Yeah. We heard what people said. There are lots of very passionate responses. We tried not to get too hung up on like does that mean we can’t ever do Virtuals again? We listen to the feedback and we did promise that we would do it differently for the future. We didn’t know if we were gonna be able to do it but we did say that if we did it again, we would do it differently so, it would target different users. So this time, we know everybody loves Virtuals, we do too, but we’re not going to try to target “top hiders” since there are challenges with doing that, this time, we’re making it more open. By our estimates, about 40,000 people worldwide would qualify for the criteria that we’ve come up with. It’s gonna be more putting the power in the hands of the cache owners that they will know if they qualify. They can see the criteria visibly so there’s not some secret algorithm like we had before and they can sort of make a promise to the community by opting in saying, “Yes I’m committed to this. I would like to make a virtual.”

03:30 CP: The last round, I think most people know about two-thirds of the people ended up making Virtuals and that felt to the community like that wasn’t enough. They would like to see closer to the full 4,000 being used. So we’re gonna see if this process helps to improve that. And so with the random selection too, it’s kind of acknowledging that this game is made up of all kinds of cache hiders and we need everybody to help participate. Yes, there’s a minimum quality of hides we’re looking for and quality of participation but it’s easier to qualify this, go around.

04:07 CR: Why did HQ decide, “Let’s do this again.” What were some of the things that contributed to saying, “Hey, it went well the first time. Let’s give it another go.”

04:16 CP: Right. I think despite people’s dissatisfaction with the algorithm, they were really happy to see new Virtuals come out, and so we thought, “Let’s just try to find another method that might work.” We also saw that the overall quality of Virtuals is much higher than your average cache that is put out so both the total favorite points, the percentage of favorite points, if you look at log length or the frequency at which they’re found is quite high. So, we looked at lots of different data and it was quite clear. Now maybe some of that is because Virtuals are rare and people like to go find them, but I do believe they do have a place in geocaching and it helps us to show something in a community that we’re maybe a box, just isn’t really appropriate at that location.

05:09 CP: The other huge factor was that the reviewers said, “The process went fairly smoothly.” We had some pretty tight guidelines but then kind of loose guidelines like not too much work on the reviewers. No standard of quality that they had to assess going in. And so they were really open when we presented them with the idea, but even more importantly, they were the ones that came up with the opt-in idea that we tried first with Adventure Labs and now we’re doing with Virtuals. We started with Adventure Labs as a test to see how it went. Reviewers felt like that’s what they heard from the community was, “Let’s make sure people really want to make a virtual and so they’re probably gonna put a little more effort in than if we had just selected them based on a secret algorithm.”

06:00 CR: Are the goals of 2.0 different from the first round of Virtual Rewards?

06:06 CP: Yeah. So they are somewhat different. Like I’ve said before, we’re not trying to identify top hiders and reward top hiders, although we’re still keeping the word reward in there because we feel that we are rewarding cache hiders in general. So yes, there’s a huge range of cache hiders and we hope we can always find fun things for cache hiders to do like we also gave some cache hiders the opportunity to do the Adventure Lab. So it’s a thank you to those cache hiders but it’s also another attempt at geographic distribution so we’re looking at, when we do the random selection, being more mindful to do it by country. So you’re competing against your peers, within your own country and we’re trying to stretch it to more countries world-Wide.

06:54 CR: We’ve talked a little bit about how things are different this time than the first time. Is there anything else about 2.0 that people will, for instance, you talked about the opt-in process and then the criteria is visible, what kinds of criteria in general are we talking about?

07:12 CP: Well. First and foremost, people might be glad to know that if you receive virtual reward last time even if you didn’t publish it, you’re not qualified or you don’t meet the criteria to get one again. So this would be a fresh set of people. So, some certain number of favorite points total on your caches, a certain number of hides. You need to have logged a cache within a certain number of months and I’m trying to think of, you need to have publish to cache within a certain time period. And I’ll be honest, this criteria is not super high. Like if you’re in a country like the US, or Germany you might look at this criteria and say, “Oh my goodness, all my friends qualify for this. Well, in some of those countries that might be true, but consider that we’re trying to make a criteria that works for the whole world. And so in some of the less active countries, we still want them to be able to qualify for virtual so although there won’t be quite as many qualifiers it’ll be easier for them to earn one.

08:20 CR: So you were here when we announce virtual rewards. You’re back for 2.0. Am I supposed to schedule a 3.0 interview in the future? I think that’s something people will inevitably, well, I will certainly ask about it over the last couple of years. Is there gonna be another round of these? And alright, now there is. Does that mean there’s gonna be another one in the future?

08:37 CP: That’s the million dollar question, Chris, I can’t answer that.

08:41 CR: That’s why it’s a million dollar question. That’s why I have to ask.

08:45 CP: Yeah, I think, we’ll see how this round goes. Hopefully, the community will feel like this is a positive change that we’ve made. I’m sure there will be things about it that they might not like. I think the tricky part people wonder if… Well, so, answering your specific question, yes, there might be another round in the future, but the other question that is even the bigger million dollar question is, why don’t you just open it all up? Why have these rounds at all, right?

09:15 CR: That was gonna be my two million dollar question later, but yeah.

09:17 CP: The two million, that’s a lot of money.

09:19 CR: Sure, short-circuit to it, go for it.

09:22 CP: So it’s possible that we will have opportunities in the future that will be limited releases. I think it’s almost certainly not likely that we will ever release virtuals, the way they were before where it was just open season. And if you think about it today, that was 14 years ago when we grandfather them, we had far fewer cache hiders back then, today we have hundreds of thousands of them and so if we opened it up today, we would end up back where we were in the dark place where basically people were hiding very low quality Virtuals and there’s not proximity rules and it was hard for reviewers to assess. Is this a good quality, is that a bad quality? And we will also wanna be careful that we are sticking to the core of what geocaching is about, which is mostly about the container and being able to sign and trade swag and stuff like that. So if we open up Virtuals too much, it seems like it would potentially harm the rest of the game but we do think that this type of limited release and keeping an eye on the statistics and how the reviewers are feeling, it’s possible we could do something like this again.

10:46 CR: Well, for people like myself, I started geocaching long after Virtuals were grandfathered. And what I see tends to be fun experiences and I think, “Oh this is great. Why would they ever have grandfathered this?” And then after you learn a little more, and especially once you talk to some reviewers who are around back then, well, what’s left are the good experiences and most of the ones that caused the problems, and caused them to be grandfathered aren’t around anymore, so yeah.

11:17 CP: Right. Yes, I’ve heard some horror stories about the dead carcass in the woods.

11:22 CR: Yeah, right.

11:22 CP: The tennis shoes dangling from an electric power line and things like that. Yeah, the ones that are left are the ones that are quality, and the cache hiders are still in the game and probably put out something reasonable in the first place. But yeah, it’s really hard to judge quality. And the way we did the last release, the reviewers didn’t need to judge the quality.

11:46 CR: Another question I hear from people sometimes is, “Okay, you’ve done a limited release of Virtuals, what about other grandfather cache types like web cam?” That’s something that I hear a lot about.

11:58 CP: We have talks about web cam, some… They have a lot more challenges, I’d say than Virtuals do and it’s harder for us to say, that they’re part of the core of geocaching. Also with the privacy laws that have come in place in the last year, a couple of years. I’m not sure about the privacy issues of having increase number of web cams out there and encouraging people taking photos and doing videos of other people. And what are they gonna do with that? So we’re not quite as enthusiastic about bringing web cams back as we have been with Virtuals. So there’s your honest answer.

12:38 CR: Well, we are enthusiastic though about Virtual Rewards. So where can people get more information and what are some of the important dates that will be coming up here in the next several weeks?

12:49 CP: Right. May 14th is the day that the opt-in page goes live, we call it an opt-in page, but you can think of it like an application page. It’s very similar to what we did for Adventure Lab. So it’s gonna be on geocaching.com/play/request/virtuals2019 and that will be open for about two and a half weeks until June first. That day we’ll close the page, so you can still see the page, but you won’t be able to opt-in anymore. And then, on June fourth, we’ll do the random selection of up to 4000 users and they will then have one year to submit their virtual for publication.

13:32 CR: Well, this will be a fun thing to watch and see what people will come up with. It certainly has been fun. It was fun the first time around, wasn’t it? To see some of the new places that people sent their fellow cachers out to see.

13:46 CP: Yes, and some of them got published really fast. In that case, I think there were a few reviewers that knew it was coming and so on their player accounts, they already had a few things going. So we’ll see how quickly this happens. I suppose in a way, when you opt-it on May 14th, maybe some people already have something in mind, so it’ll be fun to see what it is.

[music]

14:10 CR: That was Cindy Potter, Geocaching HQ’s Director of Community. If you wanna learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0, there is a blog post all about it, just go to blog.geocaching.com. The blog includes a link to the opt-in page where you can find out if you qualify to apply for a Virtual Reward. May the odds be ever in your favor and from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Episode 24: Virtual Rewards 2.0

Geocaching HQ is excited to announce Virtual Rewards 2.0 to introduce another limited number of new Virtual Caches for the geocaching community. Cindy Potter, HQ’s Director of Community, is here to chat about the project.

Beginning today, an opt-in web page is available for cachers to apply for a Virtual Reward. The page is open until June 1, 2019. Approximately 50,000 geocachers around the world meet the criteria to apply for a Virtual Reward.

More information is available on the Geocaching Blog (English) (German) (French) (Dutch) (Spanish).

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

(Minor correction: in this episode, it is said that approximately 40,000 geocachers meet the criteria to apply for a Virtual Reward. The correct number is 50,000.)

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 24: Virtual Rewards 2.0
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/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 23): Cache Carnival, AR caches

[music]

00:13 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, aka Rock Chalk, from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Thanks for tuning in, as it were. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to find an AR cache in recent months. AR, standing for Augmented Reality. Nicole from the Community Volunteer Support team is here to give us an update on the AR cache experiment, which recently ended after nine months. But before we get to that, did you participate in Cache Carnival? It’s always fun to hear how a campaign like that is created. So we’ve got Annika from the marketing team to explain how Cache Carnival came to be. Here is me and Annika, talking Carnival.

[music]

01:06 CR: Well, Annika, you’ve been on our podcast before, but it’s been, it turns out two years.

01:11 Annika: I know.

01:11 CR: And it was unforgettable when you were on the podcast. But for people that may have forgotten, or maybe they weren’t listening yet, could we talk about what your role is here at HQ and what kind of things you do day-to-day?

01:22 Annika: Yes, and it might actually has changed, I think two years ago, I just moved to the Marketing Team, so I’m on the marketing team as a Senior Marketing Manager and working for the international side of things, specifically Germany and France, to get more targeted communication to those markets. And then also, I was helping to get Cache Carnival out to the people this spring.

01:51 CR: And that’s what we wanted to talk about here. So let’s talk about Cache Carnival. How does that idea first start, and how does your team start thinking through what something like Cache Carnival can look like eventually? ‘Cause obviously you don’t know right at the start, this is gonna be Cache Carnival and here’s how it’s gonna work. But in the very beginning, what are you guys thinking about and how do you eventually make your way to what becomes Cache Carnival?

02:18 Annika: It starts off a little more boring, [chuckle] in that the company sets goals for the year. And we always, as our team always has the goal to get people out geocaching, that is a given for anything we do public facing, but then there was also a specific goal this year to focus on cache quality. So we thought, how do we do that, how do we incorporate both engagement and cache quality? And so we thought carnival, and I can’t tell you exactly how that happened. We talk a lot about it, how we can do it technically behind the scene. What do we have? What possibilities do we have technically to make that happen? And then we talk about it a lot, and then somebody has kind of a visual to it, and that it was carnival, because carnival really is very similar to cache creation, if you think about it. It’s people that have a passion, that spend their time creating something for others to enjoy. It’s all over the world, comes in all colors and shapes and floats. And so we thought that was very fitting to the theme.

03:31 CR: How many teams at HQ are working on something like this? ‘Cause from what I understand, it really crosses throughout the company and involves a lot of people.

03:41 Annika: It involves a lot of people, yeah. Usually on the marketing team, we create the time tables for it and we project manage it, but then we couldn’t do it with help of so many others. That is the creative team that creates all the creative assets, all the images, the souvenirs, everything you see that as part of the campaign. And then we have the community team that helps us with the social engagement, Facebook, Twitter, responds to all the questions that come up during… And then we also have the tech teams that help us implement certain technical things. This time, it was, can we make it happen that if a cache owner gets awarded a favorite point that they get points on the leaderboard or how do we get different stages of favorite points of what are different points on the leaderboard as well. So these things had to be implemented, then getting a page for it to follow your success in mobile, the Mobile Team was involved, that was a whole another thing. We have UX involved, product design, that makes sure that the way it’s presented, people understand and can interact with it well. And then this time too, because of cache quality, we also had the team that… The CVS team, involved, they are, you know?

05:09 CR: Community Volunteer Support.

05:11 Annika: Oh my God.

05:12 CR: You used to work on the team.

05:12 Annika: I used to be on that team. [chuckle]

05:14 CR: It’s so far in your rearview mirror that you can’t even remember.

05:18 Annika: I was like… I can’t look back. [chuckle]

05:20 CR: You have forgotten us completely and now you’re just CVS, is that a pharmaceutical store or is that a team that I worked on?

05:26 Annika: I was just thinking very long receipts. I need toothpaste. [chuckle] Oh my goodness.

05:34 CR: Community Volunteer Support team, yes, CVS.

05:36 Annika: Yes, that team that I was just… As always…

05:40 CR: Unforgettable.

05:41 Annika: Unforgettable.

05:42 CR: Your time on that team, yes.

05:44 Annika: God, yep.

05:45 CR: We won’t let them listen to this part.

05:48 Annika: That’s gonna be cut out, right?

05:49 CR: Of course, it will.

05:51 Annika: Yeah, they were also involved, quite strongly, especially with the creation celebration element of the whole thing.

06:00 CR: So how do you guys come up with a point structure for these engagement campaigns? It’s certainly one of the most talked about in the community and I know you’re very thoughtful about it. And you talked a little bit about some of the… You’re trying to get cache quality, you’re trying to get people out, but at the same time, I know you also wanna try to create something that appeals to a very wide range of geocachers.

06:23 Annika: Yeah. And that’s always the difficulty in it, because we do want as many people as possible to have that moment of delight and feeling like they accomplished something, but we also don’t wanna make it that easy that people that are caching more frequently generally, that they feel there’s no challenge in it. So yeah, that’s how we try to do it, with the point structure, we just looked at how many caches do you have to find to get one souvenir, two souvenirs and so on. And then also taking into consideration, some areas have a lot of caches with a high number of favorite points, so then it’s easier but others don’t. So to make it still possible for anybody, even if it might take more, to earn all the souvenirs that they want to. Yeah, we wanna make sure of that. But in the end, we have to make a decision and it can’t be perfect for everybody because it’s just too many people involved.

07:26 CR: It must be interesting to watch the feedback that you see on social media and forums and emails, and so forth.

07:33 Annika: Yeah.

07:34 CR: What kind of feedback has your team seen about Cache Carnival?

07:38 Annika: I gotta say very positive feedback. I think people really immediately understood the thought behind Cache Carnival as being quality-focused, and getting people to experience the best caches and also highlighting those cache owners that placed them for the community. Yeah, and I think there was a lot of delight around that and I think people really liked the intent of this campaign.

08:05 CR: I’m sure people are already thinking ahead even though Cache Carnival is still happening, or depending on when we run this, it may be a couple days old, but people are already thinking ahead, and I’m sure your team is too. Are there other possible engagement campaigns down the road?

08:23 Annika: No, never again. [chuckle]

08:25 CR: Any big scoops that we can give people, or do we just have to say that… I know your team is always thinking about this kind of stuff and trying to figure out where you can plug something in to get people out.

08:38 Annika: Well, yes. We are definitely working hard on the next big thing coming in the summer, but we’ve seen over the last few times how much fun the community had with those teaser campaigns, so I’m definitely not gonna spill the beans today.

08:54 CR: Darn.

[laughter]

08:56 CR: Thought I could get you. Alright.

08:57 Annika: But yeah, if everything goes to plan, I think we’re gonna come up with something new and something quite exciting.

09:05 CR: Okay. Well hopefully we will hear about that later in the year and we won’t have to wait another two years to have you back on again.

09:12 Annika: Oh, I won’t go anywhere. [chuckle] Sorry.

[music]

09:23 CR: That was Annika from HQ’s Marketing Team. Now shifting gears to another recent project, the AR Experiment. AR as in augmented reality, to learn more about how that experiment went and what’s next. We brought in Nicole from the Community Volunteer Support Team. That’s right, Annika’s former team, the team whose name she could not remember. Here is me and Nicole talking AR. Well, Nicole I thought you had been on the podcast before.

09:55 Nicole: No Chris, I was, but you didn’t publish it.

09:58 CR: That’s what you tell me. You say, we recorded. I know we recorded an interview but apparently it was either so good…

10:04 Nicole: So bad.

10:05 CR: I think it may have just been so good that I didn’t think the community was ready for it, but apparently something came up. You ended up on the cutting room floor, it never published. So, I’m sure I asked you this the last time that we talked, but since it wasn’t heard, let’s ask again. What is your role here at HQ? What kind of stuff do you do here?

10:28 Nicole: Okay. So I work on the Community Volunteer Support team, and mostly I’m helping support the reviewers, so the volunteers that help publish the caches on our website. And we also do the appeals process, so if during a review, there’s an impasse where the cache owner and the reviewer don’t come to an agreement, then either the reviewer or the cache owner writes to us and we can help interpret the guidelines and give guidance how to move forward. And so connected to the guidelines, our team also does things like projects like the virtual rewards or the AR caches.

11:17 CR: And the AR caches are what we’re talking about today. That was a project that you were very involved with. Augmented reality caches. What was the goal for this experiment? And maybe just talk about the process in general, how long was the experiment, what were some of the parameters and what was HQ hoping to see during the course of this time period?

11:38 Nicole: So the experiment ran from June 2018 to March 2019, so it just ended last month. And the set up was that during this period of time, cache owners were allowed to submit a mystery cache that would require the finder to download and use an augmented reality app to find the cache. And then augmented reality app is an app that would allow you to… When you look at the world through the phone’s camera, see an overlay that augments the reality that you see with your naked eye. And those caches all had to be named AR underscore, so they’re easy to find. And there were three allowed apps that CVS could use in their design. In June, we started with a very soft launch, this was the first time we did anything, an experiment like this. And throughout the whole process, we collect a lot of data. There’s a survey that’s linked from every cache page that finders or creators could fill out. And the hope was to see how the community would use augmented reality in the cache design, how will this new technology help cache creators to be more creative and bringing new elements to the game.

12:55 CR: And just to be clear, these caches are mostly still out there and they are grandfathered. And people could, today, still go out and find an AR cache, possibly in their community.

13:05 Nicole: That is correct. At the beginning of the experiment, we weren’t sure how it would go with the third party apps that we were allowing, but at the end of the experiment, we didn’t have any concerns at that point. So they’re all grandfathered, they’re all out there. You can go find them, just go on geocaching.com and search for caches that start with AR underscore and see if there’s anything near you.

13:28 CR: Okay. So let’s talk about how the period went, how did the experiment go? What were some of the takeaways that HQ had from this time?

13:37 Nicole: There were over 600 caches published in 35 countries, so it was a pretty widespread. And almost 10,000 founded logs were posted on AR caches.

13:47 CR: And one thing you had mentioned to me beforehand, was the length of the logs on these AR caches was quite a bit longer than maybe you were expecting it to be.

13:57 Nicole: Yeah, that was something that was very surprising. Among all the stats that we are monitoring was the average length of AR cache logs, and about halfway through the average log length was 191 words, that’s the average. So a lot of the AR caches… A lot of the finders of AR caches had these epic journeys where they went with their friends on a road trip and went to the next state to get the closest AR cache, because they were so excited. And I have a watch on a couple of the AR caches, and it’s always really fun, still really fun to see all the logs rolling and the stories that people… The adventures that people had or still having.

14:39 CR: So you talked about there was a survey that people could fill out when they found and logged in AR cache. What kind of feedback were people giving? Was it more about just the process of using the extra app or was it about the journey or was it a mix of all that stuff?

15:00 Nicole: It was a mix of all of that. So, those who did participate in the feedback, left overwhelmingly positive feedback. Of course, there’s always also critical feedback, but the survey showed that between 70 and 80% of the geocachers who participated really, really enjoyed the AR cache experience, and they liked the creativity that the COs were able to demonstrate with the AR apps, the new element that AR caches brought to the game. And just unique experiences that they had. And some of the other feedback we got was about the new technology. It still has its challenges like little box or also big box, [chuckle] and sometimes the AR apps didn’t work quite as expected, or they would crash, which of course is very frustrating. But surprisingly, a lot of the positive feedback was still from players who had issues with the apps and they still had a good overall experience.

15:57 CR: So what are the next steps on something like this? Obviously, you have a lot of feedback to go through and a lot of things to consider, but from your standpoint, what are kind of the next steps on the horizon with possibility of AR?

16:09 Nicole: So we encourage everyone to go out and find AR caches. The survey is still live so you can still participate and we are still monitoring the submissions. And yeah, this is not the end. I can’t say anything more at this point, but definitely stay tuned.

16:24 CR: I know I asked you before in the conversation that nobody ever heard, that not only you’re from Germany, but you speak, it seems like a new language, every month. Is it still just five? Just five?

16:35 Nicole: It’s five.

16:36 CR: Just five. I say just five. Go through them for me, I love hearing them.

16:43 Nicole: I’ll just tell the history of how I got to know these languages. I was born in Germany. My dad is German, so I learned German growing up, but my mother’s Russian, so I learned Russian growing up as well because I spent the summers in Russia with my family there. And then when I started school in Germany, you get to pick a language in fifth grade and another one in seventh grade. So I picked English and French, and I wasn’t really good at it. [chuckle] So my parents were like, “Okay, let’s send you to France, let’s send you to England to live in host families for like a month or two. And that worked really well, so they did that twice. I went to England when I was 15 and to France when I was 16, I believe. And that’s where I learned English and French. And then when I had to decide what to study in university, I was really inspired by Chinese, because my host family in France was actually half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese, and so, I picked Sinology and learned Mandarin.

17:39 CR: Wow, so five. That’s so impressive. And so whenever we have… You talked about being on the appeals team. If we have a ticket that’s in Mandarin, obviously, you’re gonna get it. Most likely. Russian is a pretty good…

17:53 Nicole: Please, if you speak Mandarin, write to us in Chinese. I would love that.

17:56 CR: Yeah, I don’t think you’ve got any use of it, have you?

17:58 Nicole: There were a couple of spam calls in Chinese that we got.

[laughter]

18:05 CR: Spam calls. I love it. Well, I think we’re gonna keep this episode and we are gonna let people listen to it this time and if… I don’t know, we’ll just keep letting you hang and maybe eventually you’ll stop saying yes to these interviews with me, but thank you very much. I think people will love hearing about AR. And I think I joined most people in looking forward to seeing what’s next with it.

18:29 Nicole: As do I. Thank you, Chris.

[music]

18:34 CR: So there you have it. Nicole from the Community Volunteer Support Team. We also heard from Annika of HQ’s Marketing Team. Thanks to both of them. If there’s something you’d like us to cover on the podcast, please send us an email. The address is podcast@geocaching.com, that’s podcast@geocaching.com. In the meantime, from me and all of my fellow lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.