It seems that Snapchat is stepping up its game. According to an article in The Information, Snapchat might be soon challenging Google. It has acquired Vurb, a recommendation app. The purchase amounted to an astounding $100 million, but that figure is supposed to become double because of payments for team retention. It seems that Snapchat wants to keep Bobby Lo, the Vurb founder and CEO, around.
How will Snapchat's acquisition of Vurb change how you use the internet? It's still unclear but one direction that it could go is with helping people to organize parties and night outs with friends. Vurb could be used to build on the existing features of Snapchat, particularly how it can turn addresses in links for maps. In the future, when people start talking about movies or places that they want to go to, the app can provide more information about it and even arrange meet ups.
Vurb has been trying to be a kind of information digest for users. It was seeking to provide a digested view of what's going on around the world to users. That would be ideal in today's world where the attention span has is quite short.
Vurb is an award-winning app that recreates how searching on the internet is done. It focuses more on browsing and not on coming up with search result pages. The app could help you to find out more about a movie or a restaurant. Once you have a set of options from the app, you can bundle them all together and send them to friends so they can check them out too.
According to Tech Crunch, how Vurb will be used in Snapchat is still unclear, but what's certain is that the purchase is part of a trend where startups are being forced to sell as they run out of funding.
