International technical standards needed to accelerate IoT growth

International standards are needed for the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to accelerate growth in industrial and manufacturing environments, particularly among small to medium-sized businesses.

"We need to get to global standards in the Industrial Internet Consortium [IIC]. Ensure the architectures are aligned and ideas and standards are being promoted at the same time," said Hans Jörg Stotz, senior vice president of IoT products and innovation at SAP.

Earlier this year, SAP announced that it partnered with Bosch to create a European IoT testbed to try to develop standards to connect sensors, machines, moving assets, and facilities to permeate all layers of the industrial IoT stack.

Other partners in the testbed are Dassault Systemes of France and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of India. TCS is doing the data acquisition, and Bosch provides energy components, and is continuously collecting data from all the machinery in the plant, generating a stream of information about the electricity consumed in the process of manufacturing. Dassault 3D Experience Platform brings a multidimensional representation of all the plant's machinery and functions, and SAP provides a platform and database for predictive analytics and big data.

SEE: AT&T launches $99 IoTStarter Kit to push innovation to market faster(TechRepublic)

Having international standards in place will mean that data coming from the IoT machines will be consistently identified, and mapped in the same way, whether that's data about usage, or when the machine needs maintenance. Right now, most companies are mapping data manually, and it takes so much time and costs so much in personnel labor that many small to medium-sized companies aren't able to afford it, Stotz said.

"We're pushing hard for semantic standards, so that machines identify themselves. The trick is at the end of the day to identify the vast amount of things out there which could at some point talk to the system," Stotz said.

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Matt Jennings, regional president of the Americas for Bosch Software Innovations, said, "There are probably thousands of standards. I think as we look at IoT going forward, we want to eliminate some complexity of connectivity, and we need to discuss ways to do this."

Jennings explained that developing standards is really about "developing best practices," and the more complex standards are, the more it can cost a company to follow all of them, particularly in a manufacturing environment.

"Having common reference architecture for various types of industry use cases or solutions would speed up the opportunities for the organization to implement these types of solutions and it will make them less expensive to maintain," Jennings said. "I also think it will probably speed innovation because there will be a common way to look at things."

Nils Herzberg, senior vice president and global co-lead for the Internet of Things at SAP, said, "Most sensors are stupid. They do not describe themselves to the Internet of Things. Most cars do not say, 'I'm a Chrysler 200 and my serial number is...'. It would be helpful if the machines could volunteer this information, and the Internet of Things would describe itself to itself."

A standardized language would help make sense of industrial data. Sanjay Khatri, director of product marketing and IoT services for Jasper, which was acquired by Cisco earlier this year, said, "Those sensors and those devices that are being embedded into the industrial assets and all of the equipment that's being used in an industrial context, you want to make sure that those are standardized. If you're a car manufacturer like GM, you have manufacturing equipment on the factory floor, but you also have forklifts and you have various different types of other equipment within your manufacturing operation that you're using to run your entire operation. You want to make sure that there is some level of standardization so that when you collect all that data into a central repository you can get a consistent view."

While there are some standards in place, such as the OPC UA, an industrial M2M communication protocol, they aren't sufficient for international IoT use.

Stotz said, "What we are developing here isn't new and unrelated to all standards. OPC UA is a standard that could easily implement the ideas that are currently being discussed in the German platform industry. We believe that existing standards could extend and adopt the ideas being brought forward."

"From a Cisco perspective, we totally agree," said Paul Didier, solutions architect manager for

Cisco's IoT solutions group. "We're working really hard to make sure that those standards exist."

Didier said, "It's really clear there's a lot of value in IoT. A lot of people will say, 'f I had the data, I could do this, I could do that, I could do a lot of amazing things.' That first part of the sentence, 'if I had the data,' is one of the biggest hurdles. Many of these industrial environments are using segmented, proprietary networks that don't communicate with other networks. Anything in there is a challenge to deliver with industrial IoT networks if they remain unmerged."

"Even in sub-verticals like manufacturing for industrial IoT there's a lot of work that needs to be done about trying to simplify and make sense of all these different protocols," he said.

Stotz said, "At the end of the day, I think IoT will only become real if we have standards. Otherwise the small suppliers will not be able to enter the game."

Three takeaways for TechRepublic readers:

1. International standards are needed to fuel IoT industrial growth particularly among smaller companies.
2. SAP and Bosch have partnered to create a European testbed for IoT to accelerate growth.
3. Existing standards such as OPC UA could be modified and reworked to serve as a base for new international standards.

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Robot control: There's an app for that

You can use your smartphone to send and receive email, take pictures, play games, check the weather and stocks, get directions, watch videos, surf the web, and call and text people.

How about using it to control robots?

Efforts are underway to develop apps that leverage mobile devices and the cloud to manage the movement of robots.

Researchers the University of Texas have demonstrated a proof-of-concept software architecture for the cloud-­based Advanced Robotics Laboratory (CARL), which allows operators to access and control humanoid robots using any modern web browser via devices including smartphones.

The researchers demonstrated the system's feasibility and ease of use by controlling "Dreamer", a humanoid robot, from afar and enabling untrained members of the general public to take immediate control of the robot and accomplish a dual-arm manipulation task.

There are many areas of future work enabled by CARL, the researchers' report said. The current user interface is a proof of concept and can be enhanced by integrating more advanced 3D point cloud sensors and user-input devices such as a 3D mouse, joysticks, and gyroscopes on smartphones.

In the future, using CARL and cloud-based applications and services to facilitate collaboration, multiple operators will be able to control multiple robots to achieve a shared objective. "It could also take the form of multiple operators controlling different aspects of a single robot," the report said. "For example, it may be difficult for a single operator to focus both on navigating a rugged terrain and tracking a mobile target. This is analogous to how a team of operators on Earth control just two rovers on Mars."

Another research effort, at Savitribai Phule Pune University in India, has looked into robot control using an Android smartphone. Android-based phones are becoming more powerful and equipped with several accessories that are useful for robots, the report said.

The purpose of the project was to design a robot that could be controlled by a phone, leveraging powerful computational Android platforms and using Bluetooth wireless communications technology. The researchers presented a way to use a smartphone to control robots, such as moving the robots forward, backward, left, and right

The researchers at the university "derived simple solutions to provide a framework for building robots with very low cost but with high computation and sensing capabilities provided by the smartphone that is used as a control device".

A few robotics vendors are leveraging smartphones for some rudimentary controls, said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, a global technology analyst and advisory firm.

For instance, an iRobot Roomba smartphone app allows you to set a start time, change the number of cycles, and even tell it to go back and charge itself.

"Many robots have analog controls on them, which are hard to use and not very customizable, and you must touch the robot to change anything," Moorhead said. "Smartphone control enables control [of robots] away from the home, and the ability for the manufacturer to more easily provide variables [to] enhance the experience for the buyer."

The downsides are security issues and the need for the phone. "You don't want someone hacking in for fun and have your Roomba turn on at 3 am every morning to wake you up," Moorhead said. "Also, as more vendors move controls off the robots and onto the smartphone, if you lose it you lost the ability to control the robot."

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Ten ways businesses can kill innovatio

Businesses can often be wedded to behaviours that stifle the innovation they claim to embrace. These behaviours are frequently unconscious -- a side effect of certain practices becoming entrenched in a company.

Here are 10 ways that businesses can inadvertently smother innovation without even realising it:

REFUSING TO UPSET THE CORE BUSINESS

Companies that refuse to consider any activity that might disrupt their established business risk ignoring technological and societal changes that will eventually eat away at their core.

Jeremy Cox, principal analyst with Ovum, said: "One of the problems that organisations have is asking 'Is it going to cannabilise our sales?' and that can be a blocker to innovation.

"They may say 'Don't upset the apple cart', but if their business doesn't then somebody else will."

Cox cited the software giant SAP as having successfully grappled with this dilemma. The German multi-national invested heavily in pushing its cloud-first strategy, potentially at the expense of its core software businesses. The move is paying off, at least in terms of growth, with revenues from cloud subscriptions and support up 129 percent year-on-year during the first quarter of 2015, compared to 16 percent growth in SAP's long-established business of software licensing and support.

In a report entitled Taking Control of Innovation to Drive Customer Relevance and GrowthCox highlights Olivetti, Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang as "former darlings of the investment community that failed to sense change and act on it".

The danger is large companies can become fixated on the idea that they produce a certain type of good or service and are unable to accept that in a changing environment they need to shift their business towards doing something else, said Mark Raskino, VP with analyst house Gartner.

"One of the biggest problems is the sense that firms specialise in industries and then say 'It may be the case that the customer is asking us to do this but that's not what we do'. That's incredibly dangerous because technology today is really messing around with the boundaries between sectors."

Companies may have to accept dramatic shifts at the core of their businesses to avoid losing market share, he said, giving the example of the tobacco industry having to meet growing demand for e-cigarettes.

BEING MISERLY

Beyond just giving ideas verbal backing, companies need to find hard cash to get innovations off the ground. Most companies have a product or service that is a cash cow, and Ovum recommends milking it to fund new concepts.

In particular, Ovum's report says that firms should not make immediate business needs a condition of investment, but should be prepared to provide backing on the grounds of future potential.

"If you want an IT department that will innovate, it must have some money to experiment with," said Gartner's Raskino.

"It's not been untypical for IT departments to have almost zero R&D budget. Of the money you've got to spend on IT at the beginning of the year, you need to ask what proportion of that you are leaving open with 'R&D and innovation' written next to it?"

Another consideration is that firms may overestimate the cost of experimenting. For instance, the London-based analytics start-up GoSquared recently discussed how it was able to exploit the pay-per-use, on-demand nature of Amazon Web Services' public cloud infrastructure.

GoSquared CTO Geoff Wagstaff said that being able to spin servers, storage and databases up and down on demand had enabled it to experiment with different distributed databases and search technologies before committing to an architecture.

As an Economist Intelligence Unit report points out: "In industries with lower barriers to entry, technology is driving bigger changes. Over the past decade persistent reductions in technology costs have made new business models feasible; this trend will continue, with companies competing far less on capital deployed and far more on the strength of their ideas".

NOT SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

Focusing too heavily on short-term outcomes can exhaust a company's opportunity to innovate.

Constantly fighting fires to ensure revenues and profits are in line with forecasts and to maintain the confidence of shareholders is a common impulse for managers. Unfortunately this drive to meet targets can leave little time for anything beyond keeping the business ticking over.

"The dominant job of management is to keep this enormously complex enterprise going, with almost the exact same outcome year over year, which is a miracle in itself because the world outside is changing," said Gartner's Raskino.

"You have in management a machine that is running incredibly hard every day just to keep thing operating. That operational mindset is to reduce and repulse any change that doesn't have to happen.

"It becomes a fundamental problem for innovators who are trying to change stuff when you essentially have a corporate machine whose job is to lock everything down as much as possible."

The danger is, Raskino said, that this approach can create a culture where innovating around what the business does is off the table.

LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, INSTEAD OF LEARNING FROM THEM

Apple founder Steve Jobs once famously said that "People don't know what they want until you show it to them".

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who coined the phrase 'disruptive innovation', agrees, saying that customers are often not able to visualise how a product or service could better serve them.

Speaking to researchers from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Christensen said that "for the innovations that matter, customers are not very articulate at what those things need to be".

Instead of straight-out asking customers what they want, Christensen suggests examining their habits carefully to learn what they want to do in their lives and then creating a product or service that meets that need.

Ovum's Cox added it was also important for firms to check they're not working off assumptions about customer behaviour, rather than data on actual customer requirements and frustrations.

DISMISSING EARLIER FAILURES

Companies that pooh-pooh ideas as old hat could be shutting the door to valuable opportunities.

As Gartner's Raskino points out, just because an idea crashed and burned earlier, it doesn't mean that it won't succeed now.

Since the original idea was suggested, technologies could have matured to the point they have become easier to use and more widely adopted, he said, so the conditions for it to succeed may now exist.

"Ideas move in fits and starts. They go away and come back again. You can always find an antecedent," said Raskino, giving the example of online banking using phones with WAP support in the early 2000s, which was such a failure that it deterred banks from returning to the idea of mobile banking for years.

"But these ideas are never exactly the same. WAP banking versus app banking are not the same. Technologies and cultures change."

The problem for companies, said Raskino, is that once an idea has been dismissed in this fashion by a senior member of staff it may never get brought up again.

SUGAR-COATING REJECTIONS

Managers may think it's better to suggest an employee's idea might be trialled at a later date than rejecting it outright.

However, if that manager has no intention of reassessing that idea, and is simply letting the employee down gently, then that may discourage people from coming forward again.

"You're doing middle-management and you're trying to be kind to people so instead of saying 'No, we're not going to do that', you find some other kind way of saying it. You say 'We haven't got the resources right now but we'll take a look at it next year shall we?," said Gartner's Raskino.

If none of the ideas flagged as something 'We could try next year' are raised again, then the ideas may be lost and staff may come to feel there is no point making suggestions in future he said.

CONFUSING NEW TECHNOLOGY WITH INNOVATION

It's a mistake to think that the path to innovation lies in implementing the latest big data analytics package or buying a 3D printer.

Technology may be needed to realise innovation, but it shouldn't come first, said Gartner's Raskino.

"Innovation is doing new things in new ways for customers, some of which may or may not involve new technology."

"This idea that simply doing show-and-tell with new technology is somehow innovation in itself is pretty lacklustre, and it's where IT departments rapidly lose face."

"Your job is more than just to bring a 3D printer into the office and demonstrate it and say 'Look this is new technology'. Your job is to think about the key problems of the business today -- what can we do new, different or better than we could have done five years ago?"

"Part of that is probably new technology, but a lot of it is probably existing and maturing technology. The business creativity is the missing element," said Raskino.

NEVER WANTING TO BE FIRST

The first companies to market with a product or service face significant risk, but being a follower carries its own dangers.

"The paradox is that, if you decide not to try to lead, you can become too slow and unresponsive to achieve second or third place," said Gartner analyst Mark Raskino in his report 10 Innovation-Killing Phrases That CIOs Should Refute.

According to Ovum's Cox, being a fast follower "is likely to become a bigger problem than it has been in the past because things are changing so rapidly" and there is less time to capitalise on new markets.

"It's almost like the cycle times to innovation are having to be collapsed because buyer behaviour is changing all the time," said Cox.

HAVING INNOVATION SILOS

Research and development typically requires deep knowledge of particular subjects, but there needs to be scope for different research teams to collaborate.

Splitting research teams into isolated, highly specialised units will limit a firm's ability to identify which areas of research are complementary to each other and could be combined to create new products and services.

"An example would be the train manufacturer Bombardier. They had lots of engineers who are specialists in developing different parts of a train working in isolation with each other," said Ovum's Cox.

"What the head of the company did was to throw down a challenge to develop the maintenance-free train. The point he was making was to think beyond the incremental [individual areas of research] and try to come up with new things and collaborate together on particular challenges. As a result of that a lot of innovation has emerged."

Ovum recommends formalising collaboration between research teams by implementing an innovation-management process.

REFUSING TO TAKE RISKS

Being risk-averse can still be a sensible approach, but it shouldn't be a business's default stance.

Enterprises that always favour business as usual often lack the will to bet on unproven but potentially disruptive innovations, according to the Ovum report Taking Control of Innovation to Drive Customer Relevance and Growth.

"In the industrial age this would have been deemed the virtue of prudence, but in today's hyper-volatile market conditions such a cultural attitude risks institutional myopia," the report states.

Ovum's report highlights the dangers of standing still on core product and service offerings, citing figures that the average lifespan of an enterprise back in the 1950s was 75 years, compared to 15 today.

"Start-ups will do a lot of stuff on faith that corporates aren't willing to do. But often those techniques aren't that dangerous, they just don't fit with the tick-box culture that large corporates like to see," said Gartner's Raskino.

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Innovation defined: New, useful, real and critical to long-term success

Innovation. Every company wants it. Entire books have been written about it. Scores of business consultants make their living off it. And the press are always applying it as a label to whatever product, company, or idea is hot at the moment. But the use of the term 'innovation' to describe so many different things has pushed the concept dangerously close to becoming nothing more than an overused corporate buzzword with no real meaning. And meaning matters.

Knowing the definition of a concept gives us a target at which to aim our efforts. Without a clear understanding of what 'innovation' actually is, we won't know how to get there, how to measure our progress toward the destination, or even what the destination looks like. (This holds true even if 'innovation' isn't an endpoint, but in reality a process.)

INNOVATION: NEW, USEFUL AND REAL

What is the definition of 'innovation'? In her book Collective Genius, Dr. Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and her co-authors describe innovation as "the creation of something both novel and useful." And that specific 'something' can be a product, service, process, business model, or even a novel way of organizing. Innovations can big or small and occur via a breakthrough or incrementally.

Dr. Darin Eich, founder of InnovationLearning.org and author of Innovation Step-by-Step: How to Create & Develop Ideas for your Challenge, also uses the concepts of newness and usefulness to define innovation, but takes it one step further. "An innovation is a high-impact new idea that was developed and brought to life in response to a challenge," Eich wrote. "An innovation could be for a product, service, technology, communication, method, application, or new and better way of doing something." And that innovation can be built off something that already exists or be completely new. Eich likes to define innovation so that it's accessible to anyone and the unique challenges they face.

So, innovations must be new and useful. Anything else? Yes. There's at least one more concept we should add to our definition, and it's a big one. Innovations must also be real. According to venture capitalist and speaker Terry Jones, "creativity is about thinking up new things, innovation is about doing them." Jones, who was also the founder of Travelocity, founding Chairman of Kayak and Chairman for Wayblazer, told me that it's all about putting ideas to work. "I hold four patents but they are not innovations, only paper on a wall, as the company I worked for never reduced them to products!"

I know defining innovation as something that's new, useful and real might seem overly general and meaningless, but the work of Hill and her colleagues shows otherwise. "The leaders we studied," Hill told me, "wisely defined innovation in broad terms as well, which sent a message to their teams that innovation is not the sole province of one group or function -- it can come from anywhere in the organization."

INNOVATION IS ALSO NECESSARY

Now that we have a better understanding of what innovation is, we must ask ourselves if it's actually something we should work toward. Answering this question is critical, because building a culture of innovation within an organization is often a difficult process, especially for companies that don't have a history of fostering creative behavior or following through on new ideas. So, is innovation critical to a company's success?

"Even very traditional organizations are starting innovation initiatives because they know their future growth depends on it," Eich told me. IT and business leaders agree. In a 2015 Tech Pro Research study, over 90 percent of respondents said innovation was 'very important' or 'somewhat important' to their company's success right now. An even greater number (95%) said the same when thinking about the success of their company over the next five years.

Sign up for a free trial and download Tech Pro Research's IT Innovation Report 2015: Top companies, key tech drivers, and biggest roadblocks.

"Most companies will have to be more innovative whether they like it or not because new technologies, methods, trends, and business models are transforming multiple industries," Eich continued. "These changes or new innovations have ripple effects, sometimes in a disruptive or game changing way, that cause non-innovative companies to have to respond or wither."

Jones echoed the importance of innovation for a company's future growth. "Innovation is critical to any company's success if they are in it for the long term," he wrote. "And the long term today is getting shorter and shorter. Consumer tastes and technology are pushing companies to innovate at a quicker and quicker pace if they mean to stay relevant to the market."

Innovation must also be a continuous process. A single innovative product or service does not ensure long-term success. Companies, like popstars, can be one-hit-wonders. "There is no question that innovation can drive success, but in today's rapidly changing and uncertain world, it actually takes more than a breakthrough to sustain competitive advantage," Hill said. "What will really set a company apart is if it can innovate not just once, but time and again."

"That is why we admire innovators like Tesla, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and even our local coffee shop or design firm who is committed to adding value for its customers in new ways," said Eich.

WEAVING INNOVATION INTO THE VERY FABRIC OF YOUR COMPANY

Armed with a definition for innovation and the knowledge that it is critical to one's long-term success, organizations must take the next step, which is building a culture of innovation. And this is when the real work begins, because organizations can't just spend their way to successful innovation.

Corporate leaders must manage innovation as a core business function. They must put policies and practices in place that cultivate innovation. They must provide adequate resources for the process. And most important, leaders can't become roadblocks.

"Many of the challenges we now face as a global community are so complex that organizations also need to become skilled at building innovation ecosystems that can cut across industries and even sectors," Hill said. "In order to do so, we need to rethink much of what we have previously learned about leadership."

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Skills shortage and poor IT infrastructure hinder tech adoption by Asean government

Sub-standard hardware, staff shortages and poor data-sharing are impeding the adoption of cutting-edge technology by the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

The Microsoft-sponsored report, High aspirations, stark realities: Digitising government in South-East Asia, is based on a survey of 300 IT leaders and interviews with experts in industry, government, academia and the civic sector.

Respondents said their priority is better use of data, including cloud access. More than one-third (37%) named cloud computing as the most important tech trend, and there were also high hopes for the internet of things (IoT).

As regards barriers to greater utilisation of technology, top of the list is lack of skills, according to 46% of survey respondents in government, whereas 44% of those working in the technology sector said the main barrier is organisational ICT infrastructure.

In view of high-profile cyber attacks around the world, a surprising finding was that only (16%) of south-east Asian governments consider cyber security a barrier to public-sector technology adoption. The research showed that private clouds that isolate sensitive information from public clouds have reduced security concerns.

“Organisational challenges have overtaken security concerns [as barriers] for governments in south-east Asia as they seek to deliver more and more services digitally,” said Charles Ross, editor of the report.

“Governments in the region have an opportunity to stand at the forefront of smart-government development, but only if it addresses real challenges related to employee and citizen ICT skills, and insufficient infrastructure.”

Asean governments’ sub-optimal investment in infrastructure and training of staff, and their inability to attract better staff when competing on salaries could be because many governments are underfunded compared with the local private sector, said Jim Longwood, research VP at Gartner.

A Gartner survey found that 10% of CIOs in south-east Asia believe the scarcity of talent is reaching crisis proportions, and 48% feel they are suffering from talent shortages.

Longwood noted that in the more emerging south-east Asian countries, global and Indian service providers are setting up offshore delivery centres, increasing competition for experienced resources in countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines.

By contrast, Singapore’s success as a regional hub for global company headquarters has increased competition for better IT resources, resulting in increasing take-up of nearshore outsourcing to Malaysia and offshore to India.

The EIU study also reveals gaps in perception. Just 20% of Singaporean respondents believe the government is “very effective” at implementing new technologies. This contrasts with 57% of Indonesian respondents and 33% overall.

Singaporeans who are long used to easily accessible internet connectivity and robust services are likely to have far higher expectations of their government than users in less developed markets where connectivity is less accessible.

The respondents’ priorities – better data use, IoT and cloud computing – echo the focus of CIOs in the Asean region. Gartner’s 2016 CIO study found that Asean CIOs are focused on investing in business intelligence/analytics, cloud, mobility, infrastructure and datacentres as well as digitisation, with legacy migration a low priority.

“Factors such as improving operational efficiencies via better infrastructure operations and use of digital channels, along with reducing costs, were common drivers for these priorities in south-east Asia as well as globally,” said Longwood.

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Pokémon GO

Travel between the real world and the virtual world of Pokémon with Pokémon GO for iPhone and Android devices. With Pokémon GO, you’ll discover Pokémon in a whole new world—your own! Pokémon GO is built on Niantic’s Real World Gaming Platform and will use real locations to encourage players to search far and wide in the real world to discover Pokémon. Pokémon GO allows you to find and catch more than a hundred species of Pokémon as you explore your surroundings.

The Pokémon video game series has used real-world locations such as the Hokkaido and Kanto regions of Japan, New York, and Paris as inspiration for the fantasy settings in which its games take place. In Pokémon GO, the real world will be the setting!

Get on your feet and step outside to find and catch wild Pokémon. Explore cities and towns around where you live and even around the globe to capture as many Pokémon as you can. As you move around, your smartphone will vibrate to let you know you're near a Pokémon. Once you've encountered a Pokémon, take aim on your smartphone's touch screen and throw a Poké Ball to catch it. Be careful when you try to catch it, or it might run away! Also look for PokéStops located at interesting places, such as public art installations, historical markers, and monuments, where you can collect more Poké Balls and other items.

Customize Your Trainer

When you first play Pokémon GO, you’ll get to customize the look of your Trainer, choosing apparel and accessories to give him or her a cool look. Your customized character will appear as you move around on the map, as well as on your profile page. Plus, other players will see your character when they visit a Gym you control.

Add to Your Pokédex

In Pokémon GO, you will gain levels as a Trainer, and at higher levels you will be able to catch more powerful Pokémon to complete your Pokédex. You'll also have access to more powerful items, such as Great Balls, to give you a better shot at catching Pokémon. Keep exploring and encountering Pokémon to raise your level!

There are other ways to add Pokémon to your Pokédex, too. If you catch the same species of Pokémon enough times, you’ll get the opportunity to evolve one of them! And as you explore, you may find Pokémon Eggs at PokéStops, which will hatch after you’ve walked a specific distance. When they hatch, you may find Pokémon you’ve never seen before!

Some wild Pokémon will appear only in certain places near where you live or around the world. For example, some Water-type Pokémon may appear only near lakes and oceans. If you're away from home, be sure to stay alert for Pokémon you wouldn't normally encounter!

If you catch the same species of Pokémon enough times, you can evolve one of them. This is useful for catching Pokémon you’re having a tough time finding in the wild. For example, if there are large numbers of Poliwag in your area, but no Poliwhirl nearby, catch a lot of Poliwag to eventually gain the ability to have one of them evolve into a Poliwhirl!

Join a Team and Battle

At a certain point in the game, you’ll be asked to join one of three teams. Once you join a team, you’ll gain the ability to assign Pokémon you’ve caught to open Gym locations or to a Gym where a team member has assigned a Pokémon. Like PokéStops, Gyms can be found at real locations in the world. Each player can place only one Pokémon at a particular Gym, so you’ll need to work together with other members of your team to build up a strong defense.

If a rival team has claimed a Gym, you can challenge it by using Pokémon you’ve caught to battle the defending Pokémon. Battles are challenging and fun. You choose which of your Pokémon will join in. Each Pokémon has two attacks, and can also dodge the defending Pokémon’s attacks if you swipe left or right. If your Pokémon win the battle, then the Gym’s Prestige is reduced. When the Gym’s Prestige drops to zero, the defending team loses control of the Gym, and you or another player can then take control of it by assigning a Pokémon to defend it.

Once your team has control of the Gym, team members can increase the Gym’s Prestige and level by battling the defending Pokémon. These training battles against your own team help your Pokémon level up as well. As the Gym gets to a higher level, your team can assign more Pokémon to defend it. You can also team up with your friends and battle at a rival Gym together to take down stronger Gyms faster.

You can tackle a wide variety of challenges in different categories, such as catching Pokémon and exploration. By completing these challenges, you’ll unlock achievement medals that will appear in your player profile. Try your best to unlock as many medals as you can!

Pokémon GO Plus

A portable device called the Pokémon GO Plus will enable Pokémon GO players to enjoy the game even while they’re not looking at their smartphones. The device connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth and notifies the player about events in the game—such as the appearance of a Pokémon nearby—using an LED and vibration. In addition, players can catch Pokémon or perform other simple actions by pressing the button on the device. Look forward to the launch of the Pokémon GO Plus accessory in late July 2016.

Free to Play

Pokémon GO is available for download at no charge on the App Store and Google Play. Pokémon GO is free to play, with loads of fun things to do and Pokémon to discover at every turn. For players who want to enhance their Pokémon GO experience even more, certain items and features can be accessed via in-app purchases. Players can spend real money on PokéCoins, the in-game currency of Pokémon GO. PokéCoins can then be exchanged for power-ups, extra items, and other enhancements.

Photo Fun

When you encounter a Pokémon in the wild, you can turn on the camera feature, putting the wild Pokémon into the live scene where your camera is facing. Then capture the moment with the in-game camera you can find in your Bag. Line up your shot and hit the shutter button to take the photo. The snapshot will then be saved to your smartphone’s photos for you to share however you’d like.

Music by Junichi Masuda

Pokémon GO will feature all-new music composed by GAME FREAK’s Junichi Masuda. Mr. Masuda has worked on Pokémon games since the very beginning and has composed many of the classic and memorable songs that have inspired fans for decades.

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