The Gnonstop Gnomes are here and they cannot be stopped. Gnonstop Gnomes is the first mobile app to come out of Churn Labs, Omar Hamoui’s product lab that he started after he left AdMob/Google. Hamoui demoed Gnonstop Gnomes at Disrupt NYC (see video below) and today the app is available both in iTunes and the Android Market.
The app is a real-world social game and photo-sharing app. You create a Gnome, insert him in different pictures, and record his journey via GPS. The fun part starts when you pass your Gnome onto a friend. You do this with a new gesture Churn Labs invented called Lyft. Using your phone’s camera lens, you can “lyft” a gnome from another screen to yours and help him continue his journey. Anyone who has touched a gnome can follow his adventures and photos as he moves around the world.
It’s a simple app that creates a new experience by combining elements of mobile apps in new ways. Hamoui is having fun with it. In a blog post, Churn Labs notes that it is “already the #1 location based gnome photo sharing application in the world” and quotes him saying, “This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. “I got sidetracked with the whole mobile advertising thing for a bit, but it’s good to finally see this becoming a reality.”
Omar Hamoui and Haider
Sabri from Churn Labs,
please welcome them to the stage.
Hello, my name
is Omar Hamoui, I’m formerly
the founder and CEO of
AdMob, and now actually
a partner working on something called Churn Labs.
And at Churn what we’re doing is
really exploring what we think are some green field opportunities.
We’re really looking at areas of
technology that we think haven’t
really been fully explored, fully
charted and we’re basically building anything in those areas.
We don’t care how crazy it is, or how silly it is.into
even more interesting opportunities, and
so I am going to introduce
to Haider Sabri, a member of
our team, who is going to walk you through one of our very first projects.
Hello everyone.
As you all know the basic
principle of building a
new product or service is to
build something that everybody wants and needs.
Yeah, so, we decided not to to do that at all.
Instead, we’ve decided to
build something and expend
all of our engineering power
and our resources and our
brainpower on building a
product solely around gnomes.
Yes, gnomes, those magical
characters that that we all have grown to love.
Now you wonder why?
The reason why is we thought
to ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be cool
to have a gnome in
your pocket, to take him
with you, to build your very own
custom gnome and take him
with you to take pictures with
him, to take him
to different venues, to take
him to different landmarks and record that gnome at that spot?”
And then at some later point, to
hand that beautiful gnome off
to a friend, give it
to him on his device and
at that point in his journey,
your friend will take him
to wherever he goes, again checking
him in and taking him to
different places around the globe.
That ‘s actually the
entire concept behind – all
the while, by the way, all
the while you’re actually getting updates
on where your gnome is, where he went, and who he’s with.
With and what he’s doing.
So that’s the high
level behind what we’re calling non-stop gnome.
So why don’t you join me at
the iPad, so I can go
through the quick demo.
So here we
got a couple of veteran gnomes.
And we’re going to talk about Lebowski.
Lebowski’s actually very special to
us, because he was born
in the lab, and he’s
been traveling between devices amongst all the guys in the lab.
And he’s traveled almost 2500
miles and these are a couple of photos that he’s been taking.
his morning he was disrupting.
Later on he was
on the ledge of the hotel contemplating thoughts.
He actually rescued Batman in Times
Square on Saturday night and
visited David Letterman, and so on and so forth.
Hanging out at the lab.
And then took a wrong turn, and he got dunked in the toilet.
So that’s Lebowski and actually, all
of these, you can actually
see them on the map and
follow your gnome wherever he’s going.
So We know that
everybody here is gonna install this
app at some point so everybody
would like to know how do
you get a gnome on your device
and it’s very important to
know that, a gnome can only live on one device.
He’s a digital object, but
he is uniquely placed in one physical location all of the time.
So how do we do that?
There’s two ways.
One is to create a custom gnome.
Just like we created Lebowski, we
come in here and design our
gnome, and give him the
attributes he likes, and give him a name, and a mission in life.
The other way actually is what
we want to demonstrate where, lets
say you wanna transfer your gnome
to a new friend.
We’re calling this process Lift.
So in researching the way gnomes
actually transport, we came
up with the conclusion that they’re
magical in the way that they transport.
So, here I’m going to show
you, I’m not sure
if the camera sees this but, we
have a gnome actually that was born today.
It’s his birthday today.
And he’s called,
his name is Disrupt and he’s
actually going to leave my
iPhone where he Resides currently
and he’s going to end up
on the iPad, in a process that we call ‘lift’.
So, pay close attention
as I do this, because as I
open up with the iPad,
there’s going to be an image finder,
or the view finder, and
it going to ‘lift’ Disrupt from one device to the other.
Here we go.
So, in that
sense now, Disrupt is completely
on this device now, and
I think we had a small little bug here.
Murphy’s Law never proves invalid.
So, now this rep lives on this.
Oh, he’s on.
Try it again.
What’s that?
I think you should give it another shot.
So, moving on.
So, now he actually lives on
this iPad and we could take travel entries with him.
And the next time That
a travel entry is made.
Everybody who’s had Lebowski or
Disrupt, in this case, on his
device will actually get
a notification saying, “Hey, Disrupt
is actually at Disrupt in Manhattan.”
And here’s a picture of him
and everybody’s who been along
that path with Disrupt will
actually get to comment and join in the fun.
So, there’s actually a lot
of other features that we have
in the app, but I’m going to hand it over to Omar to wrap things up.
Yeah, so actually I just want to
talk a little bit about ‘Lift’, because
we’re not going to go into that in too much detail today.
But that is kind of one of
the things that we thought were
more interesting in terms of
playing with this application that we’re
building and what we’re
really thinking about is, I have
an iPad, I have a computer,
I have all of these different products,
but how can I connect them in a more interesting way?
Is there a way I can do something
where I can get drag-and-drop to really
work between devices as opposed
to on only one particular device?
So could I drag and drop through the screen?
And so, what you can probably see here essentially is I have my phone.
On my phone there are three photos, so it’s hard to really see that.
But there ‘s effectively three photos
on my phone that I can
basically drag through the
phone and drop on
the iPad What will happen
there is it will disappear and basically
appear on the iPad through
the phone so I don’t know
if you guys caught that, so basically on
this iPad right now, imagine
this is folder or an area waiting to receive a photo.
And on my phone, I effective
have some pre-photos that I’ve just taken.
I can drag them over, and go
ahead and drop through the
phone, and it will basically appear on the iPad.
So, that’s basically what Lift
is, it’s way of doing a different way of device interconnectivity.
So there you have
it: a couple other products we’re working on at Churn.
Thank you very much.
Churn Labs everyone.
Gnomes, I think, I
hope every other startup pitching
today has a gnome, ’cause the bar is set way high now.
Yoshi – gnomes I don’t
know how I will live
without gnomes from now on.
I want to become a gnome.
You ‘ve heard it here first.
Yoshi to become a gnome.
So lift looks very interesting.
It kinda reminds me of Bump
So is that a
future plan to have
like some type of
API that people can
use to leverage that Technology?
Yes, essentially, it is something
that we came across as we
were working on this Gnonstop Gnomes app.
We were sort of just not really really liking how device interconnectivity was working.
Right.
And so we are thinking.
And so that is a project that’s actually underway right now.
And as you said, it tends to remind us of Bump too.
So, perhaps it could used
in a similar way Both with
Sequoia as investors, so we’ll see how that works out.
Wow.
Interesting.
Chris?
I mean Omar is one
of the most successful entrepreneurs of
the last decade, so if
he says gnomes are the next
big thing, I think he knows more than I do.
It’s a huge number of gnome relate apps.
That’s right.
We’ll see what happens.
I think we
might lead the market in gnomes.
Are there any gnomes among the crowd or Are there any gnomes among the crowd?
Well, right now the application isn’t available yet.
Probably in one to two weeks.
Another magical process.
Then his app store approval has to happen and then hopefully it’ll be available.
That’s all right?
So, oh sorry David Well
, I was just going
to, I had Omar – Churn
Labs, Steve Jenks –
Schematic, Kevin Rose with
Milk, so there’s you
know some kind of key entrepreneurs
who have started these little labs,
how is that, how’s that
going it seems like,
I don’t know where you were in
the process with the other, obviously milk was just started.
It seems like you started a few months ago, or maybe late last year.
Yeah, I started late last year.
So, I think what your nding.
Probably among his latest crop of people is.
When some body goes
through a, when somebody’s in
a situation where they can do
what they want; a lot of people will say,
well I’m going to go
hang out on the beach or go skiing or whatever.
But I think for all
of us this is what we want to do.
We just like doing this.
And So, whether it’s something
that’s going to be ridiculous and
silly, or something that is going to be a little more serious.
This is actually what we enjoy doing.
And so, I think that just with the process that you’re seeing.
It’s not a particular, new, crazy
way of – the most efficient way to make money.
I’m pretty sure that it’s not, but it is what we enjoy doing.
So, I think that’s what all of us are doing.
Right.
So, Ryan, any questions or thoughts?
So hard to ask questions about gnomes, right?
I knew I would stump all your guys.
They’re they’re digging, “what do I know about gnomes, how can I”?
Yeah, you don’t have to ask me a question about gnomes.
No, why don’t I ask
why gnomes?
Why gnomes?
Yeah.
We just thought… honestly, the
concept of, we’re in
a place now where we’re going from
the proliferation of these smart phones to ubiquity.
Right now, everybody has them.
And so, I’m just interested to see if people will do this.
Like are they really going to,
like, connect their devices, pass a digital object
from one physical person to another and then will it matter.
Like 4 people down the chain,
am I gonna care that I’m getting photos back from this gnome?
It is going to be more interesting to me
than all these photos I’m getting on
Instagram, or all these other places
– because, lots of the
photos that he showed are completely
uninteresting, but they’re all funny
to us because we all
carry that gnome around, it’s like
this inside joke thatEverybody who had
the gnome or whatever it
is happens to be in on.
And so, I’m just curious to
see whether or not that
kind of social connection means anything.
We don’t know yet.
fine.
It reminds me a little bit of, do you guys geo cash?
Yes.
So, I like love geo cashing and
it’s like a million of people
that do it or whatever, and one of the cool things ready to see.
Had the little thing traveled around the world or whatever.
And it’s like Yeah, exactly.
You can see it on the map.
So, it’s pretty interesting.
Where my bill?
Where my dollar bill, where they stamp it.
I mean that was another one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this augmented reality in
your picture where you can hold
up the phone and maybe see where the gnome might be in the future?
Yeah, actually that’s how it works.
So when you’re taking a picture –
we didn’t demo that part – but,
when you’re taking a picture, you actually
see the gnome, n the view finder.
And you can drag him around and resize him and turn him to scale and then position him.
That’s how all those pictures came to be.
So, it’s sort of augmented reality.
Are you gonna offer
non-gnome things – other objects that you could travel around?
Or, is it just gnomes for now?
For now, it’s just gnomes.
It would be a huge departure.
We’d have to be careful of that.
We don’t want to go crazy.
One thing, you’ve
got a lot of room for..
ya.
Alright, anymore gnome related questions?
Wow, you won the panel
over, everyone here is all gnome focus from now on.
Alright.
Big round of applause for Churn Labs.
Thanks very much.
Alright, and yeah great
way to end always gets to end on a gnome.
So just wanted to get one more
Sabri from Churn Labs,
please welcome them to the stage.
Hello, my name
is Omar Hamoui, I’m formerly
the founder and CEO of
AdMob, and now actually
a partner working on something called Churn Labs.
And at Churn what we’re doing is
really exploring what we think are some green field opportunities.
We’re really looking at areas of
technology that we think haven’t
really been fully explored, fully
charted and we’re basically building anything in those areas.
We don’t care how crazy it is, or how silly it is.into
even more interesting opportunities, and
so I am going to introduce
to Haider Sabri, a member of
our team, who is going to walk you through one of our very first projects.
Hello everyone.
As you all know the basic
principle of building a
new product or service is to
build something that everybody wants and needs.
Yeah, so, we decided not to to do that at all.
Instead, we’ve decided to
build something and expend
all of our engineering power
and our resources and our
brainpower on building a
product solely around gnomes.
Yes, gnomes, those magical
characters that that we all have grown to love.
Now you wonder why?
The reason why is we thought
to ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be cool
to have a gnome in
your pocket, to take him
with you, to build your very own
custom gnome and take him
with you to take pictures with
him, to take him
to different venues, to take
him to different landmarks and record that gnome at that spot?”
And then at some later point, to
hand that beautiful gnome off
to a friend, give it
to him on his device and
at that point in his journey,
your friend will take him
to wherever he goes, again checking
him in and taking him to
different places around the globe.
That ‘s actually the
entire concept behind – all
the while, by the way, all
the while you’re actually getting updates
on where your gnome is, where he went, and who he’s with.
With and what he’s doing.
So that’s the high
level behind what we’re calling non-stop gnome.
So why don’t you join me at
the iPad, so I can go
through the quick demo.
So here we
got a couple of veteran gnomes.
And we’re going to talk about Lebowski.
Lebowski’s actually very special to
us, because he was born
in the lab, and he’s
been traveling between devices amongst all the guys in the lab.
And he’s traveled almost 2500
miles and these are a couple of photos that he’s been taking.
his morning he was disrupting.
Later on he was
on the ledge of the hotel contemplating thoughts.
He actually rescued Batman in Times
Square on Saturday night and
visited David Letterman, and so on and so forth.
Hanging out at the lab.
And then took a wrong turn, and he got dunked in the toilet.
So that’s Lebowski and actually, all
of these, you can actually
see them on the map and
follow your gnome wherever he’s going.
So We know that
everybody here is gonna install this
app at some point so everybody
would like to know how do
you get a gnome on your device
and it’s very important to
know that, a gnome can only live on one device.
He’s a digital object, but
he is uniquely placed in one physical location all of the time.
So how do we do that?
There’s two ways.
One is to create a custom gnome.
Just like we created Lebowski, we
come in here and design our
gnome, and give him the
attributes he likes, and give him a name, and a mission in life.
The other way actually is what
we want to demonstrate where, lets
say you wanna transfer your gnome
to a new friend.
We’re calling this process Lift.
So in researching the way gnomes
actually transport, we came
up with the conclusion that they’re
magical in the way that they transport.
So, here I’m going to show
you, I’m not sure
if the camera sees this but, we
have a gnome actually that was born today.
It’s his birthday today.
And he’s called,
his name is Disrupt and he’s
actually going to leave my
iPhone where he Resides currently
and he’s going to end up
on the iPad, in a process that we call ‘lift’.
So, pay close attention
as I do this, because as I
open up with the iPad,
there’s going to be an image finder,
or the view finder, and
it going to ‘lift’ Disrupt from one device to the other.
Here we go.
So, in that
sense now, Disrupt is completely
on this device now, and
I think we had a small little bug here.
Murphy’s Law never proves invalid.
So, now this rep lives on this.
Oh, he’s on.
Try it again.
What’s that?
I think you should give it another shot.
So, moving on.
So, now he actually lives on
this iPad and we could take travel entries with him.
And the next time That
a travel entry is made.
Everybody who’s had Lebowski or
Disrupt, in this case, on his
device will actually get
a notification saying, “Hey, Disrupt
is actually at Disrupt in Manhattan.”
And here’s a picture of him
and everybody’s who been along
that path with Disrupt will
actually get to comment and join in the fun.
So, there’s actually a lot
of other features that we have
in the app, but I’m going to hand it over to Omar to wrap things up.
Yeah, so actually I just want to
talk a little bit about ‘Lift’, because
we’re not going to go into that in too much detail today.
But that is kind of one of
the things that we thought were
more interesting in terms of
playing with this application that we’re
building and what we’re
really thinking about is, I have
an iPad, I have a computer,
I have all of these different products,
but how can I connect them in a more interesting way?
Is there a way I can do something
where I can get drag-and-drop to really
work between devices as opposed
to on only one particular device?
So could I drag and drop through the screen?
And so, what you can probably see here essentially is I have my phone.
On my phone there are three photos, so it’s hard to really see that.
But there ‘s effectively three photos
on my phone that I can
basically drag through the
phone and drop on
the iPad What will happen
there is it will disappear and basically
appear on the iPad through
the phone so I don’t know
if you guys caught that, so basically on
this iPad right now, imagine
this is folder or an area waiting to receive a photo.
And on my phone, I effective
have some pre-photos that I’ve just taken.
I can drag them over, and go
ahead and drop through the
phone, and it will basically appear on the iPad.
So, that’s basically what Lift
is, it’s way of doing a different way of device interconnectivity.
So there you have
it: a couple other products we’re working on at Churn.
Thank you very much.
Churn Labs everyone.
Gnomes, I think, I
hope every other startup pitching
today has a gnome, ’cause the bar is set way high now.
Yoshi – gnomes I don’t
know how I will live
without gnomes from now on.
I want to become a gnome.
You ‘ve heard it here first.
Yoshi to become a gnome.
So lift looks very interesting.
It kinda reminds me of Bump
So is that a
future plan to have
like some type of
API that people can
use to leverage that Technology?
Yes, essentially, it is something
that we came across as we
were working on this Gnonstop Gnomes app.
We were sort of just not really really liking how device interconnectivity was working.
Right.
And so we are thinking.
And so that is a project that’s actually underway right now.
And as you said, it tends to remind us of Bump too.
So, perhaps it could used
in a similar way Both with
Sequoia as investors, so we’ll see how that works out.
Wow.
Interesting.
Chris?
I mean Omar is one
of the most successful entrepreneurs of
the last decade, so if
he says gnomes are the next
big thing, I think he knows more than I do.
It’s a huge number of gnome relate apps.
That’s right.
We’ll see what happens.
I think we
might lead the market in gnomes.
Are there any gnomes among the crowd or Are there any gnomes among the crowd?
Well, right now the application isn’t available yet.
Probably in one to two weeks.
Another magical process.
Then his app store approval has to happen and then hopefully it’ll be available.
That’s all right?
So, oh sorry David Well
, I was just going
to, I had Omar – Churn
Labs, Steve Jenks –
Schematic, Kevin Rose with
Milk, so there’s you
know some kind of key entrepreneurs
who have started these little labs,
how is that, how’s that
going it seems like,
I don’t know where you were in
the process with the other, obviously milk was just started.
It seems like you started a few months ago, or maybe late last year.
Yeah, I started late last year.
So, I think what your nding.
Probably among his latest crop of people is.
When some body goes
through a, when somebody’s in
a situation where they can do
what they want; a lot of people will say,
well I’m going to go
hang out on the beach or go skiing or whatever.
But I think for all
of us this is what we want to do.
We just like doing this.
And So, whether it’s something
that’s going to be ridiculous and
silly, or something that is going to be a little more serious.
This is actually what we enjoy doing.
And so, I think that just with the process that you’re seeing.
It’s not a particular, new, crazy
way of – the most efficient way to make money.
I’m pretty sure that it’s not, but it is what we enjoy doing.
So, I think that’s what all of us are doing.
Right.
So, Ryan, any questions or thoughts?
So hard to ask questions about gnomes, right?
I knew I would stump all your guys.
They’re they’re digging, “what do I know about gnomes, how can I”?
Yeah, you don’t have to ask me a question about gnomes.
No, why don’t I ask
why gnomes?
Why gnomes?
Yeah.
We just thought… honestly, the
concept of, we’re in
a place now where we’re going from
the proliferation of these smart phones to ubiquity.
Right now, everybody has them.
And so, I’m just interested to see if people will do this.
Like are they really going to,
like, connect their devices, pass a digital object
from one physical person to another and then will it matter.
Like 4 people down the chain,
am I gonna care that I’m getting photos back from this gnome?
It is going to be more interesting to me
than all these photos I’m getting on
Instagram, or all these other places
– because, lots of the
photos that he showed are completely
uninteresting, but they’re all funny
to us because we all
carry that gnome around, it’s like
this inside joke thatEverybody who had
the gnome or whatever it
is happens to be in on.
And so, I’m just curious to
see whether or not that
kind of social connection means anything.
We don’t know yet.
fine.
It reminds me a little bit of, do you guys geo cash?
Yes.
So, I like love geo cashing and
it’s like a million of people
that do it or whatever, and one of the cool things ready to see.
Had the little thing traveled around the world or whatever.
And it’s like Yeah, exactly.
You can see it on the map.
So, it’s pretty interesting.
Where my bill?
Where my dollar bill, where they stamp it.
I mean that was another one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this augmented reality in
your picture where you can hold
up the phone and maybe see where the gnome might be in the future?
Yeah, actually that’s how it works.
So when you’re taking a picture –
we didn’t demo that part – but,
when you’re taking a picture, you actually
see the gnome, n the view finder.
And you can drag him around and resize him and turn him to scale and then position him.
That’s how all those pictures came to be.
So, it’s sort of augmented reality.
Are you gonna offer
non-gnome things – other objects that you could travel around?
Or, is it just gnomes for now?
For now, it’s just gnomes.
It would be a huge departure.
We’d have to be careful of that.
We don’t want to go crazy.
One thing, you’ve
got a lot of room for..
ya.
Alright, anymore gnome related questions?
Wow, you won the panel
over, everyone here is all gnome focus from now on.
Alright.
Big round of applause for Churn Labs.
Thanks very much.
Alright, and yeah great
way to end always gets to end on a gnome.
So just wanted to get one more
