Walmart, the largest retail chain in the world, formed its tech shop, @WalmartLabs, last year and is now preparing to release its first apps that focus on mobile commerce and social shopping.
Several of the upcoming apps are based upon deep data technology, which was first created by Kosmix. MapUpdate was developed by that start-up, and was based upon a technology infrastructure that would allow tremendous amounts of social media data to be tracked. It was loosely based upon MapReduce technology, which was created by Google in order to track huge volumes of web pages.
According to the @WalmartLabs group, which is led by the co-founders of Kosmix, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajarman, they are working venture portfolio model-type projects. Though some of these projects are on the experimental side, with a high risk, but the potential for an equally high reward, some of the other projects are much more practical and are designed to improve the way Walmart.com can be searched, for example.
The hope is to turn the Walmart.com website, as well as the retailer’s efforts with social media, their physical stores, and their mobile apps to be integrated with one another.
According to Harinarayan, @WalmartLabs is also hoping to work on Facebook to form a shopping experience that will be “inherently social”. One of the team’s ideas, which they are currently testing, is the creation of Shopycat, a Facebook app that will allow people to send gifts to one another. So far, the @WalmartLabs team isn’t willing to divulge too much information about the app, but they have released its tagline, which is “Get the gifts they REALLY want.”
