@WalMartLabs began after the acquisition of Kosmix. Kosmix was acquired for $300 million and was a company with deep roots in Social Media and mobile commerce. With the acquiring of Kosmix and subsequently changing the name of the company to @WalmartLabs. With this new step into social media and mobile commerce Walmart hopes to lead the way for buiness that would deeply intergrate social media with brick and motor stores. @Walmartlabs with study the impact of the way their products rank in social media and also the way search giants like Google rank them. They are also using mobile devices for in-store real-time research.
The tagline of @WalmartLabs is "Social + Mobile + Retail" indicating where the company wants to go with this new technology. Social Media seems to be very important as mobile devices are changing the rules and definitely to brick and mortar companies like Walmart the more they have customers who engage with their brand the more of those customers will walk into their stores. Business in social media is fast and great deals and product move very fast as we have seen with daily deal sites.
Kosmix used to be a search engine that would organize the internet into topics and allows users to explore the web by topic. Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix in 2005.
Links to find @WalmartLabs on the internet:
On Twitter
On Facebook
On the web