Walmart Buys Social Media Company Kosmix To Become Walmart Labs

Ok let me get the humor out of the way here first, I wondered about branding and Walmart Labs sounds better than Facemart <grin>. We have information organized by topics here.

From the Kosmix website:

“Every two days the world creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. If you’re worried that you’re missing the best social media content, it’s probably because you are: On any given day, people share 830 million items on Facebook, upload 6.1 million photos to Flickr, add 2.1 million minutes of video to YouTube and send 65 million tweets.”

Yes they have a healthcare section too called RightHealth with a lot of aggregated material from many partners and a general “Health” page.

There’s a lot of competition on the health care side with many other sites that kind of do the same thing and they sell their services to publishers to drive more traffic and look who I found as one of the latest Kosmix publishers, one of the MD rating services, HealthGrades that makes their way around the web. If you have read here often enough there’s some information on MD commercial ratings versus the CMS government ratings.

So it looks like WalMart wants to be social and get more traffic like everyone else is doing out there today so I might guess we could see some of their content out there working with WalMart retail mobile pages too from what is stated in the press release, perhaps more coupons. BD

BRISBANE, Calif., April 18, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kosmix, underscoring its commitment to social and mobile commerce. Kosmix, based in Mountain View, Calif., has developed a social media technology platform that filters and organizes content in social networks to connect people with real-time information that matters to them.

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, early pioneers of online shopping, whose first company, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. The founders and the Kosmix team will operate as part of the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley. Walmart plans to expand the @WalmartLabs team and expects this new group will create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support Walmart's global multi-channel strategy, which integrates the shopping experience between bricks and mortar stores and e-commerce. Walmart operates retail businesses in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries.