Former AdMob Founder Omar Hamoui’s Churn Labs, his first venture after selling his mobile ad company to Google for 0 million, was one of the early highlights for TechCrunch Disrupt’s Start-up Battlefield. Hamoui’s first creation is Gnostop Gnomes, an intriguing mobile app that allows users to transfer a digital gnome between devices and chart the character’s movements around the world.

It’s a curious first step for Hamoui, who created Churn Labs in Irvine, Calif. earlier this year as a way to test out ideas in overlooked areas. In this case, it lets Hamoui explore the notion of whether people will find some value in sharing a unique digital character between friends. But the really intriguing thing is the technology built into the app, which allows people to transfer one gnome between devices. Users can view a gnome on another device using their view finder on the app and when they line up the gnome to an outline, it is “lifted” to the second device. Hamoui also showed how devices can share pictures using the same technology. Using a view finder, a person can drag a picture from one app onto the image of the second device, which receives it. Pretty cool stuff.

Hamoui said Churn Labs wasn’t necessarily designed to make a lot of money. But it’s built to explore these interesting ideas and see where they can go. “For all of us, this is what we want to do. Whether it’s something ridiculous or silly or something more serious; this is what we enjoy doing,” he said.

Other than Gnostop Gnomes, here is a look at some of the other start-ups that caught my eye today:

Weotta is throwing its hat into the local recommendation market. It builds an entire itinerary for the night based on your personal interests and simple information you feed into the website. If you enter in plans for a date with a classy vibe, Weotta will take what it knows about you and create possible itineraries like a dinner, movie and drinks afterward. It’s not curated information but all derived from smart algorithms. Once you create an itinerary, you can quickly create a Facebook event and invite others. The service will link to outside reservation and ticketing services such as Open Table and Tickermaster. The events can be shaped by what Weotta knows about you from your Facebook profile. And itineraries can be altered using real-time recommendations from friends.

Weotta will have to provide some good recommendations right off the bat, things people might not have thought about themselves. And it will need to be really tailored to people to create some personal plans for them. Weotta said it will also allow you to collaborate with fellow users on an itinerary so the plans reflect the interests of multiple people. This is a busy space but I like the idea of pulling it all together in one service.

Sonar is looking to help uncover the hidden connections between people at venues. The idea is that it will help you find people to interact with that you’re already connected with in some way. It’s a cool idea, bringing your online social graph into live venues so you can figure out interesting people to chat up.

When a user arrives at a place, you can announce your presence with Sonar and the app will tell you who is also there that you’re connected to. So if you have someone there that shares a Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter friend, you’ll be able to see them. You can also look up a quick bio to see if the person is someone you might want to meet. If you do, you can send out a preformed invitation to chat citing the person you have in common.

Sonar said it only uses publicly available data so users must make that private if they don’t want that to be used. But I think this is a cool way to discover people around you that you might not have realized were there.

Rexly is stepping in where Apple has failed with Ping. It’s a media recommendation engine that tries to make smart use of user behavior data and social information to push out good suggestions on what to buy. The service, which works with iTunes music to start, builds an activity stream based on every action a user does in iTunes and allows users to share and comment on content. Then it creates recommendations based on your actions and those of your friends. But it does it in an intelligent way, allowing a user to identify up to six trusted people to follow, whose tastes will have more sway in a user’s recommendations.

While this only works with iTunes music for now, it’s meant to scale up and be a service that recommends movies, TV and books from Netflix, Amazon and other services. And that will make it even more appealing as a cross-platform recommendation platform that touches various forms of media. I think Apple’s meager attempt with Ping shows there’s more work to be done in this space. That’s why I like Rexly. It has a way to be smart about social signals, applying more weight to trusted friends and it has a cross-platform play that other single providers won’t or can’t implement.

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GigaOMGigaOM · Tech News, Analysis and Trends

From: The Windows Phone 7 Team
To: The Windows Phone 7 Advertising Gnomes

After months of deliberation, we hereby present the master plan for all modern mobile commercials.

To acquire:
Rights to Feist instrumental break
Cute woman with curly hair (personable)
Handsome, rugged man in vaguely military but alternative shirt
Record shop (build)
Shot-for-shot outdoor location list for all McDonald’s commercials

My WoW warlock guide will attempt to explain to everyone the main benefits of creating warlocks. Warlocks are supreme masters of the black arts that control demons, shadows, and fire. They are master necromancers that deal in misery and torment. They’re able to cast powerful spells from afar, but they are not good at fighting up close since they lack any real physical protection. Several of a warlock’s spells make use of soul shards which must be retrieved from fallen mobs. The warlock is one of the fastest characters to level and truly shines when soloing. In groups, warlocks are frequently the top DPS dealers.

Permissible races for the warlock class are restricted to Undead, Orcs, Humans, Gnomes, and Blood Elves. Warlocks are only allowed to wear cloth armor, like many of the other magic hurling classes. Weapon-wise, they’re limited to just using staves, daggers, wands, and some swords.

There are several demonic minions a warlock can summon including the Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter, Infernal, Doomguard, and Felguard. Each of the minions can be valuable, but you’ll need to determine the advantages of using each of them based on the job at hand. Warlocks generally focus on DoT’s (damage over time) and DD (direct damage) spells, but they also possess several specialty spells which can be handy including conjuring Soul Stones. They’re able to utilize soul shards in order to produce several useful items and also to perform resurrection on other players. They are able to heal themselves with life tap and/or drain life, and also possess some crowd control spells like fear and howl of terror. Warlocks can also get mounts at a much lower cost than most other classes because they are summoned via spells and not purchased directly.

The Affliction specialization focuses on curses, drains and damage over time spells. This talent spec shines at raiding, boss killing, and farming. Affliction is commonly acknowledged as the best leveling spec for the warlock class.

The Demonology talent tree uses talents that are designed to make summoned demonic minions more powerful and more useful, in addition to enhancing conjuring spells and giving you better passive bonuses. For PvP, Demonology is a truly great spec. For leveling, it is almost as good as Affliction. This spec can be used at lower levels to make up for a lack of good spell damage loot.

Destruction talents focus on enhancing most shadow and fire spells thereby making the warlock a powerful direct damage dealer. For Destruction, it is all about high damage per second (DPS) and huge crits. This specialization isn’t as effective as the others during the early levels. It requires a ton of soul shards, isn’t mana efficient, and is difficult to use effectively for people who wish to play solo.

To see other information comparable to this WoW warlock guide, then navigate to www.warcraftcodex.com

Ultimate WoW Guide

Have You Heard Of WoW?

World of Warcraft or WoW as it is more commonly known, is a MMORPG which is an acronym for “Massively Multi player On-line Role-Playing Game”. In an MMORPG, thousands of players from around the World exist in the same on-line game world at the same time. They abandon the real world to undertake heroic quests in a land of fantastic adventures

The game has two warring factions: the Alliance and the Horde. When you have decided which side to play there are nine classes of character to choose from: Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior.Each class has its own unique set of talents and abilities. Depending on the build you choose for your character, their talent tree can be DPS, tanking or healing.

There are 10 races to play: Dwarves, Gnomes, Humans, Night Elves, Draenei, Orcs, Tauren, Trolls, Undead and Blood Elves and many professions your character can play: Engineering, Mining, Skinning, Tailoring, First Aid Fishing, Herbalism, Leather working, Jewel crafting, Inscription, Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Cooking and Enchanting. (Note: Within the Rogue class there are two unique secondary professions: Lock Picking and Poisons).

There are thousands of quests to complete with many different kinds of weapons and transportation. In addition, there are four types of Realms which will be the very first decision you will have to make before playing World of Warcraft. The aim of the game is money and reputation which will enhance your power and skill. A good place to start is to get the excellent WoW Ultimate Guide to help you through this mystical world.

Within the game itself there are two “modes” of character:

• Player Characters (which are controlled by real people)

• Non-Player Characters (which are controlled by the games’ software)

So you can find yourself playing a “real” person as well as the games created opponent.
Your character can earn copper, silver or gold to fund your adventures. In addition you will need to work on the different skills for your character.

There are a whole host of guides around and all do pretty much what they claim but some do it better by having additional features such as forums and members areas which help you level your character from 1-70 more easily. Many also have detailed gold guides and the latest up to date information on, for example, Wrath of the Lich King which takes you up to level 80! However, with that said, players are more than free to progress at their own pace and pit their skills against multiple on-line opponents. But if you would like a Best WoW Guides or more information on where to find WoW resource’s just click the link.

World of Warcraft is Blizzard Entertainment’s 4th game in the Warcraft series and is now played by over 10 million people world wide! It starts 4 years after the setting of Warcraft III in the world of Azeroth.

The Horde and Alliance are opposing factions locked in a struggle for control of the land – and neither side is backing down. Alliance and Horde players maybe able to do battle with each other, but they cannot trade or even talk to each other so if you have friends that would like to play, make sure you belong to the same factions!

A good place to start your World of Warcraft quest is to get a good guide: WoW Levelling Guide.

By Andrew Liszewski

Who needs gnomes guarding their flower beds and gardens when you can have those hard working little scavengers from Tatooine protecting your daffodils? Available from the StarWarsShop.com starting December 9th, this fully painted Garden Jawa is crafted in solid resin and stands almost a foot tall. And instead of holding a restraining bolt to tame a wayward droid, it’s got a garden hose in hand and appears to sport a pair of stylish gardening gloves. $34.99 available for pre-order now.

[ Garden Jawa ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]

I could care less about iPod teardowns. I mean, who the hell cares anymore. It’s an iPod. But I looked at nearly every picture of iFixit’s teardown of the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj. After all, this little pocket camera sports a front-facing projector. Of course I wanna see the little gnomes that make the magic happen.