Walmart Announces Acquisition of Social Media Company Kosmix
TechCrunch
According to a statement, Kosmix’ founders and team will operate as part of a newly formed group dubbed @WalmartLabs and remain based in Silicon Valley. Walmart expects them to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support its multi-channel strategy, thus blurring the line between offline and online shopping.
The founders of Kosmix, entrepreneurs and investors Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, can be considered ecommerce pioneers. Their first company, database tech company Junglee, was acquired by Amazon for a boatload of stock back in 1998.
They later created crowdsourcing Internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman, comments:
Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.
| Website: | kosmix.com |
| Location: | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Acquired: | April 18, 2011 by Walmart |
