Copied, stripped, but not discouraged: Snapchat, shoved by Instagram who just steal her "stories", does not kill. The application to the 150 million active users is by train to redeem Vurb, for more than 100 million, revealed on Monday evening the information. A "bonus" of $75 million would have been granted to the founder of the start-up, Bobby Lo.
Vurb? A mobile application that wants to make your life easier when you are looking for a movie to go see, a restaurant where to dine out of your meeting, an idea of output for your Saturday, etc... Connected to yelp as in Uber, Netflix, Google Maps or rotten tomatoes, the app allows you to search for addresses or information, to save, to send the links to your friends via an integrated chat, and if need to book. It also recommends the services according to the location and the interests of the user, but also according to the time of the day, the weather and the trends, determined from the indices of popularity on the community sites. All this the positioning as a competitor for... Google, and his assistant contextualized Google now.
An app for research, so what?
What interested Snapchat in the acquisition of such a service? The reasons are less obvious than for its two previous acquisitions: that of Bitstrips, purchased $100 million in March of last year and the Emojis have already been integrated in the cat. And that of Looksery last year, intended to improve the experience of the famous filters to selfie.
about Vurb, which did not wish to express on the Redemption, remains to speculate.
The team? Snapchat would be "particularly interested by the team of Vurb more than by its product", indicates a source to Business Insider. The important bonus granted to the CEO of the start-up could validate this thesis.
The recommendations to integrate the chat? "Snapchat could well be in the process of offering an easy way to integrate his cat services similar to those provided by a bot (conversational robot)", imagine on his side Fast Company. The objective of any platform being to keep its captive users, Snapchat could therefore seek to improve his cat to make it especially convenient to organize a cine/resto between mates... and therefore indispensable to the planning of the daily life. In parallel of Facebook which opened in April its messenger to chatbots, allowing us to claim a point weather as a Uber without leaving the platform.
The research, and therefore the pub? Other track: the skills sought by Snapchat among Vurb could relate to the research. Because that is the big weak point of the application, on which we can not add a new user without knowing its exact name or have recourse to its QR code, or explore subject by keyword. "What Vurb does best is precisely what lack to Snapchat: the research," notes the Next Web. However allow the user to explore the platform according to its own criteria, it is to learn more about him... and therefore increase the possibilities of native advertising and geolocalized. A solution that would especially in three letters therefore: pub, pub, pub.
