India Internet News
Walmart Acquires Kosmix To Enter Social Media Network
02 August 2011
For these two e-commerce initiators, producing and selling off has been the ruling model of their enterprising journey. Anand Rajaraman (38) and Venky Harinarayan (44) had begun Kosmix around 6 years ago, only to be caught by the largest retail company worldwide during last April.
Walmart has purchased Kosmix since the company had a social media platform for passing through and organizing social network data, known as Social Genome, and Kosmix' group would be the part of the new @Walmart Labs, the social media research giant and digital strategy unit. The brick-and-mortar retail giants interest also comes from the reality that members of the Kosmix group had experience with e-commerce players like Amazon. The collaboration between the two geeks started when they used to go carpooling to grocery stores and fortunately found Junglee, a virtual database acquired by Amazon in 1998.
After handling Amazon's technology strategy for a while, they set up a venture capital firm, Cambrian Ventures that invested in startups later bought out by Google, Teradata and Juniper. As part of Walmart Labs, one expects Rajaraman and Harinarayan are expected to shake things up in the e-commerce space since the twosome, who moonlight as professors at their alma mater Stanford University, will shape Walmart's digital strategy globally.
They will have their work cut out leaving Walmart versus Internet monsters such as Facebook and Google. But how does their tech work? In other words, the social genome technology knows information created on the Internet. It does semantic analysis of the information, in this case social elements such as photos, places people and events.
The platform manages three separate products: Tweetbeat, a social media for live comments which became a huge success during the 2010 soccer World Cup; RightHealth, a repository of health-based information and Kosmix.com that allows users to explore net information relevant to a topic and displays videos, photos and news connected to it. "Kosmix' technology will be the nucleus of Walmart Labs," said Rajaraman.
Harinarayan states, "As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform e-commerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level." When it was purchased for $300 million, the three properties served 17.5 million unique users.
Rajaraman thinks that e-commerce is now operated by mobile devices and social networking sites, which will be the important component to all the products for the release of Walmart Labs.
The vice-chairman of Walmart, Eduardo Castro-Wright says, "Social networking and mobile applications are becoming a part of our customers' day-to-day lives. We are expanding our capabilities in today's rapidly growing social commerce environment." Kosmix investor and previous president of Sun Microsystems, Edward Zander says, "@WalmartLabs has the opportunity to redefine shopping for users around the world."