Jumpin Labs debuts Geronimo, a gesture-based email app

The app allows for sorting e-mail with the flick of a wrist or the angle at which the phone is held

E-mail is such a strange phenomenon. It's the thing that everyone uses, but it's also the thing that everybody hates. Especially when they have to use it on their phone. It's also the thing that I hear most about either being dead and buried, or the thing that is most in need of disruption. And, yet, neither of those ever actually happens. E-mail hasn't changed in decades. 

Now Jumpin Labs is taking a crack at it, with the launch of its new email app, called Geronimo, on Thursday, with the intention of modernizing e-mail with a design-driven approach.

App comes with a whole new type of inbox, one that helps people sort through their e-mail with the flick of their wrist or the angle at which they hold their phone.

"E-mail is this legacy interface that's under-innovated and it's ubiquitous, as much as people say e-mail is dead. So, the problem that we're solving is, I believe, that e-mail hasn't caught up to where we're at with our mobile devices. Managing e-mail, e-mail overload, the ability to handle e-mail in a way that's different than desktop translated to iPhone, I think that's the area that all the problems are in,"  Erik Lukas, founder and chief executive officer of Jumpin Labs, told me in an interview.

"The fact that e-mail is kind of stagnant and been underinnovated leaves it in this space where it's been a drudgery for most people to think about having to deal with it. They're hoping to keep up, barely, while they're away from their office."

So what Jumpin wanted to do was "make e-mail relevant again by rehumanizing it with a much more visceral, visual and physical interaction interface."

Some of the features on Geronimo include horizontal timeline view, which allows users to see their e-mail on a timeline, which shows email volumes by day. Users can scroll between days, and see where they are on their own personal timeline.

It also allows users to quickly move through their inboxes through gestures. Users can pickup individual emails, can grab stacks or columns of emails, and can toss emails into the trash.

They can draw on photos, better organize their e-mails and, most importantly, Geronimo will separate robot emails from human emails by tapping the back of their phone, allowing them to hide all of a user’s robot emails as they fall off the screen.

Geronimo’s app was designed with simplicity in mind, giving users more control. It also reduces the amount of time spent on tasks such as  organizing the inbox and allows for faster replie sto people users interact with most.

"We're bringing a new type of mobile experience that is unique, in that it also taps into a lot of the power of our hardware. So the power of a mobile phone, all its gyroscopes, accelerometers, really isn't being tapped into by anything in the productivity space," Lucas said.

"We found some interesting edges, I think, to start cracking into that. And there will be continued evolution of our thinking about it and, I think, the industry as a whole will adopt and find some ways to make sorting things, dealing with things in the productivity space, more satisfying."

So far, only games have really made any use of those parts of the phone, but Lukas says that he is not taking his cues from that space.

"I try to avoid the area of just novelty and gamification for the idea of gamification itself. Like, I'm actually very anti-that, which is ironic because we probably have an interface that people will say is the most gamified e-mail interface they've ever seen," he told me.

Instead Lukas wants to promote the "quantified self."

"For me, this timeline view of e-mail, where it's broken down by day, shows you the quantity you have to deal with by day. And it makes it more manageable and it makes it easy to move and navigate throughout it and it makes it easy to rearrange things in a personally meaningful priority. The fact that there's a lot of fun interactions and novel ways of doing things is kind of a byproduct of looking for things that were efficient, rather than things that were just quirky."

The typical customer for Geronimo are knowledge workers and Millenials.

"The people who are taking to it, they're using Stock Apple mail, or maybe they're experimenting with Mailbox or Spark or some of the other things. Everything else is too similar to really matter what you're using. Being able to time-shift things is probably one of the only innovations we've had in e-mail, besides it's been slide right or left to archive or delete," Lukas said.

"What we're doing is creating an interface where, at the bare minimum, you have four corners where you can triage things. So you have the option of sorting things individually, or doing multiple selection of items, and quickly sorting those into four different buckets, corners essentially."

Users can customize two of their corners; they start out as label, archive, trash and a to do list, the latter two which can become whatever the user wants them to be. This, Lukas, said has actually trigger an "emotional response," in users.

Having been in beta for six months, there are currently roughly 250 people using Geronimo.

The first version is designed for Gmail users only while support for other IMAP providers will be added in future updates, with Lukas telling me that ee expects that the app will have all e-mail providers within the next year. Users can attach files from their phone, Dropbox, GoogleDrive or iCloud accounts. 

At launch, Geronimo will be available on Apple Watch as well as the iPhone 5, 5S, 6 and6+. Jumpin Labs is working on next level versions of Geronimo for other mobile devices, platforms and wearables in similarly substantial and creative forms.

While Geronimo is already innovating the stagnant e-mail space, this is only the beginning and there is a lot more that the company wants to do with it going forward. 

"I think there's an opportunity to take these early innovations that we're coming in with, which are already pretty substantial for a V1, and to evolve those to a really interesting leadership role in the space. The goal is, essentially, to take some of these innovations, to learn from them through what we're seeing in usage, in a wider audience than our beta audience," said Lukas.

"So I think that some of the interesting things that we're doing are along the lines of tapping into how the hardware can be used in a motion based manner. And I think those are going to explode and will offer us almost endless opportunities to keep honing the sensitivty, the interactions that we're using."

He expects the app to continue to grow, and for Geronimo to lead the way for other e-mail apps.

"As we grow in this space I think there will be an opportunity for a more business oriented version of Geronimo, which we have given some thought to. We have a few concepts we're working behind the scenes. In five years I think we can be in a very strong position where we've started off as an innovator and made sure we didn't just have a flash in the pan of excitement when we started."

Founded in 2013, Jumpin Labs is a 12-person San Francisco-based startup. Geronimo is its first app, and will be its only one for the foreseeable future.

"I always have other things floating around that I will do hackathon projects on for myself or with another one or two of the guys. But the reality is that building and supporting an e-mail product and app at the level we think people deserve, cause its a trust issue, cause we to be relevant, and be very fluid in how we evolve. I think that's more than a full time job for an unlimited team. So our intention is to stay focused on this are, until something else just has to come out, because we've been playing around with it and it's just too good to keep internally," Lukas said. 

Jumpin Labs has raised an undisclosed amount of funding. Investors in the company include Draper Associates (Seed venture fund of DFJ Ventures), along with several influential angel investors.