Walmart acquired Kosmix, a social media startup, in April. Now the mega-retailer is planning to put some of the data from that deal to good use in the service of e-commerce. Walmart does about $6 billion dollars in online sales per year.
Kosmix had raised about $55 million in startup funding to develop its “social genome” idea, a way of gathering information from different networks and using it to direct Internet traffic. Since Walmart acquired Kosmix, the company has been working to integrate the startup’s technology into Walmart.com, narrowing searches by using data gathered from an online shopper’s social networks.
Outside of augmented search capabilities, Walmart.com will also use social media data to featured targeted products on its homepage.
Read more at TechCrunch.
