
Cake raises $5M for a swipeable mobile browser - cpeterso
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/30/cake-raises-5-million-for-a-swipeable-mobile-browser/
======
weego
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.

------
Kequc
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
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
Cheap, fast, coverage. Pick two.

~~~
dingo_bat
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!

~~~
epicide
Yeah, I'm extremely jealous of the cellular plans I've heard of from other
countries. The state of US carriers is a joke.

------
shafyy
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.

------
hackergary
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...](https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile-
search-10-100x-faster-introducing-wonderswipe-6f2ff0d0e667)

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.

------
igammarays
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.

------
sheraz
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
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.

------
bayindirh
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.

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

~~~
matt_morgan
Right, this is not a product, it's an interface.

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

------
fenwick67
So it's stumbleupon but only for phones

------
nautilus12
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?

------
TipVFL
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.

------
andy_ppp
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.

------
nopinsight
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
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.

------
2T1Qka0rEiPr
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.

------
themihai
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
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.

------
10dpd
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.

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

~~~
deecewan
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.

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

