John Hanke keynote speaker

John Hanke is an American business visionary and business official. He is the originator and current CEO of Niantic Inc. a product advancement organization spun out of Google that structured Ingress Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Hanke's profession began at a computer game plan startup Archetype Interactive where he created Meridian 59 one of the principal business hugely multiplayer online pretending games. They offered the firm to The 3DO Company on the day he moved on from Berkeley in 1996 with a MBA. Hanke and Sellers made another amusement startup The Big Network which was immediately sold in 2000 to eUniverse for $17.1 million.

Hanke later helped to establish geospatial information representation firm Keyhole in 2001 and went about as the company's CEO. Early financing was given by the corporate endeavor bunch inside Sony and the startup had the option to collect critical consideration from the utilization of their planning innovation in media announcing overlays during the early pieces of the Iraq War. Keyhole's planning innovation was likewise noted by Google prime supporter Sergey Brin and the newly open Google purchased Keyhole in 2004 for $35 million in stock.

Hanke joined Google as a part of Keyhole's acquisition, and he became the Vice President of Product Management for Google Geo division. During this period, he oversaw the transformation of Keyhole's technology into Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005. He also negotiated an agreement with Apple to include Google Maps on the iPhone. Other significant products followed, including StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio. During this period, he shaped the team he would later use to found Niantic.

In 2010, Hanke was given resources to staff an augmented reality gaming unit within Google and the new internal startup was dubbed Niantic Labs. Returning to his gaming roots, the company crafted an augmented reality location-based multiplayer game called Ingress. The game had a million players within a year of its 2013 release, and seven million by 2015.

Hanke led Niantic's split from Google in late 2015 and raised $30 million from Google, Nintendo and Pokémon. He stayed as the company's CEO and guided the firm through the release of the much-covered Pokémon Go in July 2016, which has now generated over $4.2 billion in revenue.