0
1
A startup called Cake has an ambitious plan to take on incumbents like Chrome and Safari to build a better browser for mobile devices. The company announced this morning it has raised $5 million for those efforts from Peak Ventures, Pelion Ventures and Kickstart Seed Fund.
Cake was founded in late 2016 in Provo, Utah by Jase Bosarge, who had originally developed technologies and a resulting patent portfolio that was later licensed to Google for Gmail. Last July, the company brought on 14-year head of product from Ancestry.com, Kendall Hulet, to serve as CEO.
The idea behind the browser is to rethink how consumers want to search the web from mobile devices – that serving up a standard set of links to click is something that no longer makes sense, that is.
“Browsers today are still very similar today to what they were 15 years ago,” explains Hulet. “They weren’t reimagined for mobile – they’re basically desktop experiences crammed onto a mobile phone,” he says.
In addition, the company claims that returning a list of links it takes 87 percent longer to get to the first organic listing on their phone than on their desktop.
In Cake, the idea is to largely eliminate the index page in favor of a swipeable set of search results in various verticals, like web search, image search, video, news, and shopping. Pages are pre-loaded for faster results, but Cake tells us it’s not serving Google AMP-based pages (Google’s accelerated mobile pages).
Instead of returning a link list, the browser just loads the best result, and then allows you to swipe horizontally through other related pages. This makes moving through search results quicker, and can even help expose you to results you may not have otherwise clicked.
To read the original article:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/30/cake-raises-5-million-for-a-swipeable-mobile-browser/
