I find it odd there is no discussion about what Google's motivation/business case is for Ingress. Reddit user Sharper_pmp has a compelling theory that it's an attempt to collect pedestrian route data to compete with Nokia's newly announced turn-by-turn routes for pedestrians. He also brings up instances in the past where Google has created mutually beneficial ways to have people voluntarily build their data sets.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc...