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If you’ve ever watched a food video and thought, ‘Wow, I’d like to know more about that ingredient’, or ‘What’s that piece of equipment?’ or simply ‘I can do better than that,’ then Nom may be the food app for you.
Created by YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and the platform’s engineering lead Vijay Karunamurthy, Nom allows food lovers to create, watch and interact with live videos via their desktop computer, tablet or smartphone, whether that be a cooking demonstration, a live event, or even behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen.
Trends
This food app taps into two popular trends: watching food videos on social media and smartphone live–streaming (through apps like Periscope, for example). Users can ask questions and comment in real time, or – and this is probably where its real appeal lies – create their own cooking show by live–streaming what they’re doing to the rest of the Nom community, in what is known as a ‘Nomcast’.
The steps to creating a Nomcast are fairly simple: once you have an account, you can create and customise your own Nom channel. Then you can go live though your iOS device or while signed into the web version. Simple eh? What this means of course is that, should this catch on, pretty soon you’re sure to be seeing some wild amateur cooking shows – some that may give you insights into hitherto unheard of techniques and ingredients, and some that, well, are just going to go viral (Nomcasts are archived) very quickly for all the wrong reasons.
The Nom homepage. Image: Nom
Regulation
Nom say that they currently "monitor all live content to ensure it is appropriate and allow users to flag any content that they find inappropriate/offensive", so that they can "flag it for removal or ban the user if necessary." They declined to comment on current active user/download figures; however, according to Business Insider, they recently secured $4.7 million in their first significant round of financing.
So, rather than an irritatingly ubiquitous caption for food-related social media posts, ‘Nom Nom Nom’ may soon be an actual command in itself.
