When Snoox, the web-based recommendation engine for friends, first launched in November, my only gripe was that searching for recommendations is best suited for mobile, even though giving recommendations feels right on the web.
Luckily, my prayers have been answered as Snoox has developed apps for both iOS and Android, just as promised. The company recently raised $2 million in funding to develop the apps, which have been in the pipeline since launch.
In case you are unfamiliar with the platform, Snoox is a lot like Pinterest, but with recommendations. In fact, I like to call it the Pinterest with a purpose, since the art of creating boards isn’t just for later aspirational perusing, but rather to let your friends know what you think is great.
Simply log in the platform and start typing in your favorite things. Snoox searches for images on the web, or you can add your own, and from there all you need is to add a link. Snoox automatically tries to add in a “Click To Buy” link from Amazon, Best Buy and GrubHub.
The mobile applications offer the same experience as the web, letting users post recommendations or browse through them. Obviously, creating boards full of beautiful imagery and links is best suited to web, but the time I need a recommendation most is when I’m out, on the go, and am looking for something fun to do.
The Snoox team is well aware that mobile is critical to their success. Founder Guy Poreh mentioned that a great deal of their traffic is already coming from mobile. However, “we wanted to make sure we had an infrastructure that could support structured data search,” said Poreh. “It’s much easier to build out that backend on the web first.”
See, Snoox wants to nail the beautiful, aesthetically pleasing nature of Pinterest on the creation end. But on the search side, Snoox wants you to be able to search the word “hotels” and find recommendations straight from your Facebook friends, as opposed to 10,000 pages of Pinterest madness from what could be total strangers.
Most companies launch on one platform before the other, but Poreh tells me that the competitive landscape is heating up, and that if they’re going to launch, they need to launch big.
As you may already know, Stamped (another recommendation platform) was bought up by Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo, and Thumb (yet another recommendation platform) is doing some interesting things so far this year.
Snoox mobile apps use location to even further tailor the search experience, and considering the power of mobile circa 2013, I would suspect that this platform expansion only means big things in Snoox’s future.
“We want to be on web, mobile, TV, everything,” said Poreh. “But we’re starting with mobile.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/94Ww3py5t3g/
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