I got the impression that they were doing this to show off the tech, and the Pokemon angle was just because they needed a well-known, medium-sized corpus of data to work with. They even said "it's the perfect target for an ambitious web application," implying that the topic was second to the tech.
There's not many topics that fit the bill, and this is way more intriguing than a list of US Presidents or UN Countries.
There's not many topics that fit the bill, and this is way more intriguing than a list of US Presidents or UN Countries.