Introducing Omar Hamoui’s First Project From Churn Labs: Gnonstop Gnomes
May 23, 2011 at 17:20 PM EDT
When Omar Hamoui left Google a few months after selling AdMob to the search giant for $750 million , he set up shop with mobile engineer Mike Rowehl as Churn Labs . Today at Disrupt NYC, we get to see the first product churned out by the labs: Gnonstop Gnomes. Gnonstop Gnomes is part social game, part mobile photo app. You take pictures with your iPhone camera and insert an image of a gnome into the picture. The app marks the location of each picture and you can follow where the gnome has been. The social part comes in when somebody else with the same app "lifts" the gnome from your phone to theirs. They do this by grabbing the gnome from your screen with their camera and making a lifting movement. Once the gnome is transferred to their phone, they can start taking pictures with it, and you can keep on following its journey as it gets passed along.