Walmart plans to launch several new projects this holiday season, based on technology he acquired from social media launch Kosmix back in April. Kosmix in previous food platform several services, including Twitter search site called TweetBeat, health vertical called RightHealth and home page where users can search the Web on the topic. But the essence of Kosmix was construction was something called "social genome" is a way to organize content in social networks to connect people with information, which is important for them.
Now that same technology is in the hands of Walmart, the world's largest retailers.
These days, Walmart.com makes about $ 6 billion a year in sales against Amazon.com 34 billion dollars, according to analysts. "Walmart fell in e-commerce," said Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix now SVP Walmart global ecommerce Division and the Board realized that the matter is serious.
Something had to change.
In April, when Walmart purchased Kosmix, he had already raised $ 55 million in funding from a number of investors over the years. What made Kosmix attractive not only of technology itself, but also the people behind the technology: the founders of Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, a successful e-commerce pioneers who sold their previous company, Junglee, Amazon. They have worked with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos turn Amazon's retail platform and invented the technology that now powers the Mechanical Turk.
When it was acquired by Kosmix, became the nucleus of a new group at Walmart, known as @ Walmart Labs based in Silicon Valley. The WalmartLabs founders have been busy in developing projects that will integrate technology Kosmix in Walmart in the Internet and mobile offerings, including its e-commerce Web site, Facebook page and more. There are three main areas of activity for: search, recommendation and Serendipity.
Social search and recommendations
Kosmix search technology will request the data from Facebook and Twitter to improve your search experience on Walmart.com. For example, keeping track of your changing interests on such topics as your favorite sports team or group, Walmart will have the opportunity to serve the best recommendations for your site. It could work this way: you are looking for a new smartphone, and Walmart recommends you friend just like on Facebook.
Walmart plans to use your social data outside of the search, too. He plans to directly recommend products on your home page. At Amazon there Rajaraman explains too much emphasis on your purchases for the recommendations. Purchase window in your interests, "he said," but they have a small window. Anyone who has ever bought a gift at Amazon only for use in similar elements after each subsequent login knows the problem. Instead of recommending more guides to Paris, for a long time after the completion of your trip or more power tools, long after the birth father passed Walmart plans to recommend things it actually knows that you like. Or may not succeed when so many others would soon come to the test.
And these tools can be used to analyze the behavior of your friends too, so as to enable the wish list suggestions based on their interests. Assuming that they get it done as Walmart just use Twitter and Facebook here may be an industry first.
Personalized alerts
If this kind of deep immersion in your personal preferences sounds creepy, well at least it's opt-in System. Rajaraman said that Walmart would never be used by consumers in any way outside of what he has permission for and the control your'e. But he thinks consumers will be willing to share information in exchange for tangible benefits. Benefits, like discounts? While Walmart has no plans to introduce huge discounts as Groupon offers (is happy to give "everyday low prices," said Rajaraman), it will be able to set up alerts for items, it puts the "undo" their own system to promote the sale of items.
Instead of trying to spam you with notifications, Kosmix's technology will be able to determine what kind of setbacks, the people want. This is what he means by "Serendipity" – warning, surprise and delight consumers.
You can even have the opportunity to one day receive notification in the store, you pass by questions of interest that match those pulled from Kosmix system. With regard to what technology will be used on the mobile side Rajaraman couldn't say. However, the company is experimenting with several approaches for the provision of mobile services, including such as NFC (near field communication), scan bar codes and store GEO fencing. However, they fall outside the domain commands @ WalmartLabs: they are more focused on data.
The first projects built with Kosmix to launch this holiday season.
Image credit: code poet on flickr
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