We live in a mobile world — phones are our overlords.
Find a person who forgot their phone at home and I will show you a lost soul. They wander about with hollow eyes, fingers swiping and tapping nothing but thin air. The worst part: when the phone is retrieved, users take a giant, grateful gulp of air and proceed to surf the web on browsers built for desktops, not mobile. We should expect more from the world.
For mobile web browsing, it’s time to have our Cake and eat it too. Today marks two exciting announcements: the launch of Cake’s mobile web browser on Apple and Android, created/designed exclusively with phone users in mind; and the closing of a $5 million funding round led by Peak Ventures, with participation from Pelion Venture Partners and Kickstart Seed Fund.
“Until now, no one has really designed a great browser for the phone,” said Kendall Hulet, CEO of Cake. “We all search and navigate the web so very differently on our phones than when we’re using our desktop computers. Cake is a re-imagining of the browser, giving mobile users more of what we need when we search the web on our phones.”
So your first question is surely, what is so terrible about current mobile web browsers? I’m going to let Hulet explain this one:
On social media and messaging apps, we consume primarily visually-rich content and interact with it through intuitive gestures. But on web browsers, we scroll to a link on a text-based page, tap on it, wait for the subsequent page to load, and then return to the text-based results only to do it all over again. We are not taking full advantage of the modern era of high-speed connections and touch-enabled mobile devices.
Cake is the answer to this problem, providing mobile web browsing in an easily consumable solution. After performing a search, Cake users can swipe between results as web pages rather than clicking on one result, going back, and clicking on another. Watch this and you will get a sense of Cake’s offerings:
By suppressing the search index and preloading each web page, Cake gives users a quick, efficient way to swipe through the web. I used it last night after watching The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and I must say, it’s enjoyable: I flipped through various reviews and thought pieces in a matter of seconds, a much different experience than my usual mobile web surfing habits.
“We want to get out there, get some users, learn, and continue to build the product,” said Hulet. “The world needs a better mobile web browser. The browsers that we have today are desktop experiences crammed onto a phone.”
With 10 employees working out of their Provo-based office and $5 million at their disposal, Cake’s story is just beginning. Hulet and his team hope to use today’s funding to build up their product and pave the way for a substantial A round. We’ll stay tuned.
“Our mission is to make a better way to consume content,” said Hulet. “We want to continue to innovate around that, we’re just scratching the surface of what I think we can do. Building and launching Cake is step one, we want to continue to drive user adoption and traction around that. And then continue to innovate around better user experience.”
