Kosmix Buy Out Amidst Walmart’s Massive E-commerce Transition
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is acquiring Mountain View, California-based social media platform Kosmix, highlighting Wal-Mart’s social and mobile strategy. Kosmix’s social media technology platform filters and organizes content according to what matters to the searcher.
“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. Kosmix cuts through this noise to find content that matters to you.”
The terms and of the agreement were not disclosed but the acquisition is expected to close before the first half of the year end. Kosmix will still be based in Silicon Valley and will become part of WalmartLabs. The initiative aims at bridging the gap between bricks and mortar stores, and e-commerce. Walmart currently operates physically in 15 countries and in 9 countries e-commerce-wise.
Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman 6 years ago, and has raised a total of $55 million in funding from investors Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jon Miller, and Ed Zander. Harinarayan and Rajaraman were also dubbed as the pioneers in online shopping whose first company, Junglee, was sold to Amazon.com back in 1998.
Kosmix is widely known for powering Tweetbeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a place for social content discovery by topic; and finally, RightHealth, reported to be one of the top three healthy and medical information sites. It’s safe to look at this approach as Walmart’s way of protecting itself from the downside of e-commerce, already positioning itself before it gets outpaced by competitors. E-commerce could boom beyond its precedent in the next 5 years or so, stripping many physical stores of their popularity–apparently WalMart’s assault on small businesses has gone digital, too. However, how exactly Kosmix can help Wal-Mart is still unclear. Iit could have more than just e-commerce as a motive.
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