A new app targeted at the tech savvy U.S. Hispanic market hopes to provide a direct channel for major brands to Latinos' smartphones. Veo is a new promotional and advertising app meant to cut out the middle man between companies and Latinos' attentions.

The new app is a product of the Latinum Network, an organization and business network dedicated to helping companies reach consumers in the modern multicultural economy.

Its new app, Veo, is available for free on Android and iOS and is available in both English and Spanish. It's meant as a pipeline for companies to offer Latinos special deals from across the web, including giveaways, recipes, coupons, samples and trials, and a sweepstakes for big prizes. Companies can also send direct messages and highly targeted promotional deals to Veo users. For users, think of it as a Latino coupon book for deals where the companies can actually reach out to you personally as well.

For companies, of course, it's an advertising tool. Some of the brands participating in Veo's launch, according to Latinum's announcement, include the NBA, Comida Kraft, Daisy, Discovery en Español, General Mills' Latino subsidiaries, H&R Block, Nestle, American Family Insurance, and several others. 

Latinum Network's thinking behind Veo is that a larger percentage of Hispanics use the mobile web and own smartphones than any other ethnic/cultural demographic in the U.S. -- as we've previously reported. For example, according to Pew Research, three out of every five Hispanic adults in the U.S. accesses the internet through their mobile phone, which is considerably more than the general U.S. population's mobile internet use, at 34 percent.

"It is well known that U.S. Hispanics over-index in their use of mobile technology and Veo gives brands access to consumers this way," said David Wellisch, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Latinum Network in the company's release. "At Latinum, we can combine the value of all of our member brands to create a valuable app that provides equal benefit to brands and their customers."

After touring through the app for Android, it's clear that Latinum Network has a bit of a long road ahead of itself for getting brand participation every day, as well as getting the tech aspects down. While the app's Google Play page says that Android crash issues have been resolved, it hasn't for all versions, and the app runs very slow on Jelly Bean 4.3. A lot of the companies offered in the app also had no deals or promotions available, something that might either be a technical issue or due to the fact that the app just launched.

In any case, the idea of getting lots of deals and promotions in one spot -- eliminating the spam emails that flood your inbox after signing up for more than a couple shopping websites -- is a nice one, and gearing it towards Latinos is obviously a smart move, as the Latino population and its buying power continues to grow. It's just that, when you launch an app, it's got to have the big kinks worked out first.