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Cake raises $5M for a swipeable mobile browser

27 points by cpeterso 9y ago

sheraz 9y ago
Cool idea, but from the article it really seems like they want to license the tech rather than go head to head against established browsers. This reminds me of something that I would see on dribbble as a UI/UX exploration. Last point, the data consumption! I'd like to see the data and power draw for this app.
- v1nc 9y ago
  I don't understand how the would try to make money with license this go other browsers. Preloading search results and an interface to swipe through it can by implemented in many ways. I don't think Firefox or Chrome will pay them for this.
nautilus12 9y ago
This seems worse in a couple different ways. First imagine a google chrome browser with 8 tabs loaded all the time (i dont know how it choses to load pages but it can't be super clever if you are able to swipe to it that quickly). Sites are not engineered to be friendly in this way, without the Great Suspender chrome would be nearly unusable. Even if there were a clever way to mitigate the fact that you are loading many pages all the time (often needlessly), you lose the index page which allows you to scan a summary of the content and navigate directly to the page you want to go to. Now you have to swipe through other pages, make a judgement based upon their content alone whether or not its relevant and keep moving. It does add back in an element of browsing that has not existed since before search engines, but I dont think that was completely the intention?
weego 9y ago
At first glance I cant think of anything I'd want to use less than this. It seems like the result of a "what if the internet was Tinder" pitch deck to marketing-centric investors. Maybe I'm missing the point as it seems to me like the only results from this design getting traction would be that mobile data use will sky-rocket and stuffing ads into the top of pages would become the norm. It seems incredibly person hostile.
10dpd 9y ago
This isn't a new, licensable or patentable idea - there are tons of apps out there that allow you to swipe to view different web pages.
philipov 9y ago
They called it Cake cause it's a lie, right? I bet they think they can eat their Cake and have it, too.
tobyhinloopen 9y ago
Nice app, but why does it need $5M?
- deecewan 9y ago
  Almost every time I ask this question (online or in person), the answer is mostly 'marketing'. I've come to interpret a lot of that as 'this founder can now say they've raised an $x round' and also now the founder's share of the company is with $y. I just don't know why anyone would want to dilute their cap table so early on, before the product is even public, unless their intention is to exit before building a decent company.
shafyy 9y ago
This seems like a "solution looking for a problem" type of thing. I doubt that the mobile search experience is huge pain point (at least their arguments didn't convince me) and with Cake, it limits you too much. I still want to look at Google my self and decide which pages I want to open. I am shocked at how investors are still pouring this money into startups with no real traction and revenue.
nopinsight 9y ago
It's interesting that the startup raised a fairly large amount of money before the key technology is successfully patented. Is that a common practice? One would think that without other moats, successful patents would be the key value proposition of the startup. What if the patenting fails (as another commenter suggests)? >> “We believe the technology we’re in the process of patenting could have multiple applications. We believe a web browser’s a great application,” says Hulet.
- spupy 9y ago
  Any idea what they are patenting exactly? While the idea is interesting, the app in the video doesn't seem to use anything new UI-wise, except the category selection bar above the keyboard.
andy_ppp 9y ago
I've thought for a while now that while this is nice it's much better for me to have tabs be swipe rather than forward or back (or search). I've lost count of the times when I need to be able to switch between two information sources. This isn't that though - I'm not sure how interesting is is being able to access every result in a search - I'm much more likely to want to flick between Stack overflow and Jsfiddle, or my bank and the tax man's account details.
2T1Qka0rEiPr 9y ago
This browser seems to be relying on a search engine underneath it. Presumably Google/Bing aren't too happy to serve up results without adverts in there for themselves to earn revenue... Seems like there would need to be some sort of agreement for revenue sharing here.
reustle 9y ago
And just like that, you mobile data is all used up.
Kequc 9y ago
I don't want webpages being preloaded on mobile because as it stands mobile carriers are still charging an arm and a leg for mobile data. Preloading means that pages are being loaded that I never see. The clientside ecosystem is mad, average webpage size has ballooned to 3MB. I often choose to preload a podcast, in exchange for loading one single webpage. Therefore choosing which result I want before opening it is something I'm interested in. Webpages are easily the heaviest use of my data as it is. I could spend all day on maps, reading email, or otherwise without any problem.
- saturdaysaint 9y ago
  I pay $60 a month for 23 gigabytes of 4G on Virgin Mobile - it's almost impossible for me to use it, and I avoid work wi-fi and casually watch video. A year or so ago, I got 8 gigabytes for that $60. Admittedly, Virgin is a bit of a value leader, but the world is headed toward extremely cheap data, so it's savvy for a startup to make a product geared toward that.
  - epicide 9y ago
    Cheap, fast, coverage. Pick two.
    - saturdaysaint 9y ago
      Easy - cheap and fast. I've never had coverage issues within 50 miles of a major metro area (where I spend 99.999% of my time). Paying 30% more to have coverage on every remote stretch of a roadtrip (when I'm typically trying to disconnect and/or listening to downloaded music/audiobooks) has never been remotely tempting. Besides, I mainly mentioned Virgin as an example of where I expect all the carriers, the coverage leaders included, to go very shortly.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      This is highly localized to India, but Reliance Jio offers all three. Widest LTE coverage, fastest and most modern data infrastructure, cheapest plans. They're literally killing incumbents like Vodafone and Idea. To give an idea about the prices, I pay ₹349 ($5.46) for unlimited voice plus 1GB high speed data per day. Oh and this is not a monthly plan, it's for 3 months!
TipVFL 9y ago
Great, a browser that permanently takes up about 20% of the screen with fixed controls on the top and bottom. And I guess if you go to a website that also uses that design pattern you'll have about half of the screen left for content.
rwx------ 9y ago
Can't the swipeable feature be implemented in a browser plugin for chrome/firefox?
- matt_morgan 9y ago
  Right, this is not a product, it's an interface.
- anfilt 9y ago
  Yea, this seems like crappy gimmick. The fact people throw money at crap like this. The fact they got 25 million dollars too... One developer probably could build this...
bayindirh 9y ago
This feels like the CueCat from the 90s. A supercharged "I feel lucky" button. Honestly I can't understand why this is worth $5M funding.
igammarays 9y ago
Google's gonna snap this one up real quick if it gains any traction. Oh boy, they're not going to be happy about taking eyeballs away from their index page.
fenwick67 9y ago
So it's stumbleupon but only for phones
themihai 9y ago
You loose the gesture navigation within each website so it doesn't look that great. I also prefer to have a "bird eye-view" over the results instead to check them sequentially, especially if I don't know what I'm looking for.
kolp 9y ago
Tried it on a mobile with fibre wifi. Terrible user experience. * Did a sample image search and pages didn't preload. * Couldn't find any app controls to adjust settings or delete history. * Deleted app immediately. Can't see this gaining traction.
hackergary 9y ago
I've been working on something similar for the last 2 years, so probably longer than Cake. I call it WonderSwipe, currently in beta on iPhones: https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile-search-10-100x-faster-introducing-wonderswipe-6f2ff0d0e667 https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile-search-10-100x... While we are thinking similar in regards to the stupidity of clicking hit-and-miss links on a list of search results on mobile, fussing with history back and forth in browsers, Cake hasn't gone nearly far enough. Our goal is to not render HTML at all, but summarize text extracted from articles. Full browser views are there only as backup. Only then can we achieve something truly remarkable: 10-100x speedup compared to conventional browsers. In short, we skip the bloat in dealing with the full HTML DOM and Javascript that's been so abused in ads and articles, which signicantly drain your phone battery and slowdown browsing. And then the summaries reduce your cognitive load in cutting through the noise and getting to an answer, faster. And in the midst of all the social ails surrounding fake news and filter bubbles, I have plans to address those too. I'm just starting to market WonderSwipe after being in stealth developing it for the last 2 years, so even though it's still in private beta, I'd love your ideas and feedback in terms of what I'm proposing. As web search is like consulting the Oracle in ages past, I believe there's no more important issues to address than truly rethinking mobile search and knowledge transfer.

27 points by cpeterso 9y ago

Cool idea, but from the article it really seems like they want to license the tech rather than go head to head against established browsers. This reminds me of something that I would see on dribbble as a UI/UX exploration. Last point, the data consumption! I'd like to see the data and power draw for this app.

v1nc 9y ago
I don't understand how the would try to make money with license this go other browsers. Preloading search results and an interface to swipe through it can by implemented in many ways. I don't think Firefox or Chrome will pay them for this.

nautilus12 9y ago

This seems worse in a couple different ways. First imagine a google chrome browser with 8 tabs loaded all the time (i dont know how it choses to load pages but it can't be super clever if you are able to swipe to it that quickly). Sites are not engineered to be friendly in this way, without the Great Suspender chrome would be nearly unusable. Even if there were a clever way to mitigate the fact that you are loading many pages all the time (often needlessly), you lose the index page which allows you to scan a summary of the content and navigate directly to the page you want to go to. Now you have to swipe through other pages, make a judgement based upon their content alone whether or not its relevant and keep moving. It does add back in an element of browsing that has not existed since before search engines, but I dont think that was completely the intention?

weego 9y ago

At first glance I cant think of anything I'd want to use less than this. It seems like the result of a "what if the internet was Tinder" pitch deck to marketing-centric investors. Maybe I'm missing the point as it seems to me like the only results from this design getting traction would be that mobile data use will sky-rocket and stuffing ads into the top of pages would become the norm. It seems incredibly person hostile.

10dpd 9y ago

This isn't a new, licensable or patentable idea - there are tons of apps out there that allow you to swipe to view different web pages.

philipov 9y ago

They called it Cake cause it's a lie, right? I bet they think they can eat their Cake and have it, too.

tobyhinloopen 9y ago

Nice app, but why does it need $5M?

deecewan 9y ago
Almost every time I ask this question (online or in person), the answer is mostly 'marketing'. I've come to interpret a lot of that as 'this founder can now say they've raised an $x round' and also now the founder's share of the company is with $y. I just don't know why anyone would want to dilute their cap table so early on, before the product is even public, unless their intention is to exit before building a decent company.

shafyy 9y ago

This seems like a "solution looking for a problem" type of thing. I doubt that the mobile search experience is huge pain point (at least their arguments didn't convince me) and with Cake, it limits you too much. I still want to look at Google my self and decide which pages I want to open. I am shocked at how investors are still pouring this money into startups with no real traction and revenue.

nopinsight 9y ago

It's interesting that the startup raised a fairly large amount of money before the key technology is successfully patented. Is that a common practice? One would think that without other moats, successful patents would be the key value proposition of the startup. What if the patenting fails (as another commenter suggests)? >> “We believe the technology we’re in the process of patenting could have multiple applications. We believe a web browser’s a great application,” says Hulet.

spupy 9y ago
Any idea what they are patenting exactly? While the idea is interesting, the app in the video doesn't seem to use anything new UI-wise, except the category selection bar above the keyboard.

andy_ppp 9y ago

I've thought for a while now that while this is nice it's much better for me to have tabs be swipe rather than forward or back (or search). I've lost count of the times when I need to be able to switch between two information sources. This isn't that though - I'm not sure how interesting is is being able to access every result in a search - I'm much more likely to want to flick between Stack overflow and Jsfiddle, or my bank and the tax man's account details.

2T1Qka0rEiPr 9y ago

This browser seems to be relying on a search engine underneath it. Presumably Google/Bing aren't too happy to serve up results without adverts in there for themselves to earn revenue... Seems like there would need to be some sort of agreement for revenue sharing here.

reustle 9y ago

And just like that, you mobile data is all used up.

Kequc 9y ago

I don't want webpages being preloaded on mobile because as it stands mobile carriers are still charging an arm and a leg for mobile data. Preloading means that pages are being loaded that I never see. The clientside ecosystem is mad, average webpage size has ballooned to 3MB. I often choose to preload a podcast, in exchange for loading one single webpage. Therefore choosing which result I want before opening it is something I'm interested in. Webpages are easily the heaviest use of my data as it is. I could spend all day on maps, reading email, or otherwise without any problem.

saturdaysaint 9y ago
I pay $60 a month for 23 gigabytes of 4G on Virgin Mobile - it's almost impossible for me to use it, and I avoid work wi-fi and casually watch video. A year or so ago, I got 8 gigabytes for that $60. Admittedly, Virgin is a bit of a value leader, but the world is headed toward extremely cheap data, so it's savvy for a startup to make a product geared toward that.
- epicide 9y ago
  Cheap, fast, coverage. Pick two.
  - saturdaysaint 9y ago
    Easy - cheap and fast. I've never had coverage issues within 50 miles of a major metro area (where I spend 99.999% of my time). Paying 30% more to have coverage on every remote stretch of a roadtrip (when I'm typically trying to disconnect and/or listening to downloaded music/audiobooks) has never been remotely tempting. Besides, I mainly mentioned Virgin as an example of where I expect all the carriers, the coverage leaders included, to go very shortly.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    This is highly localized to India, but Reliance Jio offers all three. Widest LTE coverage, fastest and most modern data infrastructure, cheapest plans. They're literally killing incumbents like Vodafone and Idea. To give an idea about the prices, I pay ₹349 ($5.46) for unlimited voice plus 1GB high speed data per day. Oh and this is not a monthly plan, it's for 3 months!

TipVFL 9y ago

Great, a browser that permanently takes up about 20% of the screen with fixed controls on the top and bottom. And I guess if you go to a website that also uses that design pattern you'll have about half of the screen left for content.

rwx------ 9y ago

Can't the swipeable feature be implemented in a browser plugin for chrome/firefox?

matt_morgan 9y ago
Right, this is not a product, it's an interface.
anfilt 9y ago
Yea, this seems like crappy gimmick. The fact people throw money at crap like this. The fact they got 25 million dollars too... One developer probably could build this...

bayindirh 9y ago

This feels like the CueCat from the 90s. A supercharged "I feel lucky" button. Honestly I can't understand why this is worth $5M funding.

igammarays 9y ago

Google's gonna snap this one up real quick if it gains any traction. Oh boy, they're not going to be happy about taking eyeballs away from their index page.

fenwick67 9y ago

So it's stumbleupon but only for phones

themihai 9y ago

You loose the gesture navigation within each website so it doesn't look that great. I also prefer to have a "bird eye-view" over the results instead to check them sequentially, especially if I don't know what I'm looking for.

kolp 9y ago

Tried it on a mobile with fibre wifi. Terrible user experience. * Did a sample image search and pages didn't preload. * Couldn't find any app controls to adjust settings or delete history. * Deleted app immediately. Can't see this gaining traction.

hackergary 9y ago

I've been working on something similar for the last 2 years, so probably longer than Cake. I call it WonderSwipe, currently in beta on iPhones: https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile-search-10-100x-faster-introducing-wonderswipe-6f2ff0d0e667 https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile-search-10-100x... While we are thinking similar in regards to the stupidity of clicking hit-and-miss links on a list of search results on mobile, fussing with history back and forth in browsers, Cake hasn't gone nearly far enough. Our goal is to not render HTML at all, but summarize text extracted from articles. Full browser views are there only as backup. Only then can we achieve something truly remarkable: 10-100x speedup compared to conventional browsers. In short, we skip the bloat in dealing with the full HTML DOM and Javascript that's been so abused in ads and articles, which signicantly drain your phone battery and slowdown browsing. And then the summaries reduce your cognitive load in cutting through the noise and getting to an answer, faster. And in the midst of all the social ails surrounding fake news and filter bubbles, I have plans to address those too. I'm just starting to market WonderSwipe after being in stealth developing it for the last 2 years, so even though it's still in private beta, I'd love your ideas and feedback in terms of what I'm proposing. As web search is like consulting the Oracle in ages past, I believe there's no more important issues to address than truly rethinking mobile search and knowledge transfer.