Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,
the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of revenue
according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through
the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining
Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to the
introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies
that will help it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of
millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and use it to
understand consumer trends so that they can plan their product assortments,
including new products to introduce and supply to secure. Wal-Mart acquired
Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical
search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million
and transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create
technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.
According to Anand
Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a social
genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics,
products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet
or a post. WalmartLabs defines
the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures
entities and relationships of the social world." Wal-Mart has been
building their own in-house Social Genome since past few years with both public
and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, You
Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs
created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using
large clusters of machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their
"crown jewel." Wal-Mart is essentially looking to combine data on
purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction
history.
Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega
player and it is investing millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new
tools, applications and technologies and also acquire companies who are
actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post Kosmix and its
transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale app
maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app
company called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the
Democratic National Committee and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press
release the
@WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for
browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past year, the group has created
Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to make
back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to
unearth new products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use
social chatter to select items to be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next
great shopping experience by melding physical stores with online search and
social media input.
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