Walmart has acquired a social start-up, OneRiot, for their Walmart Labs unit where they join another kindred spirit, Kosmix. Both of these acquisitions were done in an effort to analyze and understand the massive amounts of data coming in from social networks and sites.
Anand Rajaraman was the co-founder of Kosmix and is now in charge of Walmart Labs. Applying his skills and knowledge in data mining and analysis, he takes the semantic approach to deciphering data in real time.
This interesting topic was inspired by the Gigaom article, “What media companies can learn from Walmart.” It seems odd to me and probably others that Walmart, of all organizations, is interested in social data. They haven’t exactly tried to be the popular kid on the block – the cheapest maybe?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
