Phil Keslin is the Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Niantic, Inc., creators of Pokemon GO. Started in early 2011 and Incubated within Google, Phil led the engineering team in exploring the convergence of mobile, geo and social within a range of applications leading up to the launch of Ingress and FieldTrip. Prior to Niantic, Phil was a contributor to StreetView, GMail and Lively products while at Google. Additionally Phil was a GPU Architect at NVIDIA and a key contributor to the design and development several of their GPUS. In 2000, Phil joined up with John Hanke to found Keyhole. As its CTO, Phil led the development of the Earthviewer application which would later become Google Earth following the company's acquisition by Google. Phil received his MBA from Southern Methodist University and his Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
Past Talks
5 October 2018
Phil’s is known for being CTO & founder of Niantic Inc, creator of Google Earth & Pokemon GO, and his contributions to Gmail, Google Maps & Street View.
Before Niantic, Phil co-founded Keyhole, and led the development of Earthviewer which when acquired by Google in 2004, became Google Earth. Niantic was formed as a project within Google, but it went out on its own & became a startup in 2015.
Their objective is to use emerging technologies to enrich human experiences in the physical world. Pokemon GO is the company’s biggest success to date.
The augmented reality game is one of the most successful mobile-gaming apps to date as it grows closer to 1 billion downloads and over $1.2 billion in revenue.
But Niantic has no intention of slowing down, late last year, they secured $200 million in funding and announced a Harry Potter augmented reality game which is expected to release later this year. It is currently under active development and we may even have audio integrated into the A.R. experience.