On wednesday, our portfolio company Kik added something to their very popular mobile messenger – a browser. I guess a browser can hardly be called a feature. But inside a mobile messenger, a browswer can become a feature.
Now when you find a song in soundcloud that you want to send to a friend, you can pull it up in the kik browser and kik it your friend who can listen right inside kik, in the browser.
Here’s what I did this morning:
I opened soundcloud mobile in the kik browser
I found the new Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr mixtape:
And I sent it to Ted Livingston, Kik’s founder and CEO:
Now Ted can listen to the mixtape right inside of Kik.
This works for anything that can be rendered in a mobile web page, an item on Etsy, a place on Foursquare, a stock quote on Google Finance, a search result on Duck Duck Go, etc, etc, etc
You can download Kik here and check it out.
I believe that the mobile environment lacks the native virality of the web. With a mobile messenger and the mobile web inside of it, we can get back to that place on mobile. So this is exciting and very promising to me.
