Introducing Omar Hamoui's First Project From Churn Labs: Gnonstop Gnomes

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