Category News

Buzzfeed Launches “Cute or Not” App

Buzzfeed has just launched their second app, which is essentially a Tinder-like experience where you rate dogs and cats as Cute, or Not.

Users are simply presented with different cats and dogs, all of which have seemingly been uploaded by users, and then are prompted to swipe left or right accordingly.

The really interesting aspect of this is that users can submit their own photos, and there is a section of the app called Trending, where ostensibly the pets with the most cutes recently will be housed. Since this is a completely unsiloed experience, it is essentially a global overview of what animals are trending. But the real question for Buzzfeed is why?

“Cute or Not is also about making something we think will delight people. In fact, Cute or Not actually started as an editorial experiment by BuzzFeed’s animals team where BuzzFeed community members could upload their pets to BuzzFeed and vote for their favorites. We believed that Cute or Not would make an even better app experience and wanted to build something that our community could have fun with.”

Takeaway: I wouldn’t bet against Buzzfeed when it comes to user engagement. And if any media company today can buck the trend of fewer apps, it’s Buzzfeed. It will be interesting to see if any of these experiments feature brand integration in the future, and if this strategy proves successful, how we might partner with Buzzfeed to perhaps launch a co-branded app experience.

Tech News

Vurb Launches to Solve Mobile Search

Today, Vurb, an app for iOS and Android, officially came out of Beta and is now available to the public. Vurb’s moonshot is to take on Google in Mobile Search with a radically new and different approach.

Vurb’s approach is turn Search into it’s own dedicated app, and in doing so, to integrate apps, and app data, especially those apps that already exist on your phone, when serving you search results. Currently, those results don’t include shopping, but that’s a feature they will be adding shortly.

The key here is that they believe this is how Google might have built Search if the company were to have started today. And they have a point, as Google’s mobile ad business is struggling in comparison to Facebook and their desktop model.

Takeaway: Whether Vurb is successful or not, the evolution of Mobile Search will certainly affect how we advertise. Mobile Search will soon overtake desktop, and effectively advertising against that will be critical to our future success. This card based approach is not completely foreign to Google, as it’s the basis of Android 5.0, as well as their Google Now product, which they believe will largely replace mobile search in the future.

Microsoft’s Vision of the Future

And finally, here’s an opportunity to bask in the glow of what Microsoft believes to be the future of technology. It’s always interesting to see what the people making the future are predicting.