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Tuesday, 16 August 2011 |
In order to make shopping more social and helping Wal-Mart, the world’s largest
retailer has acquired a firm pioneered by two IITians. Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman (both from IIT-Chennai) are pioneers of online shopping. They devised a technology that categorizes and organizes data on the social web. Their firm Kosmix, now called @WalMartLabs, helps the retail chain in profiling the whole shopping experience. The categorization technology to social media firehouse helps in creating databases to see how people, place and things are connected to each other. This way Wal-Mart can provide better recommendations for people to make purchases. The whole idea is to help customers in their buying decisions and not force products on them. The duo also founded Junglee in 1996, which was bought by Amazon in 1998 for over $250 million.
Kosmix has a platform called the Social Genome which organizes data around “social elements” such as people, places, topics, products, and events. For example, when someone tweets “I loved Veer Das in Delhi Belly,” the tweet connects the user to Veer Das and to the movie. By which a profile of the person, can be built. As more updates come in, stronger profiles of the person and the place can be built. From that, a data can be sourced with amazing interconnected graphs of how people, places and things are related to each other and what is really interesting, and apply that to a shopping context. By analyzing the huge volume of data produced every day on social media, the Social Genome builds rich profiles of users, topics, products, places, and events. In other words social data is leveraged to make the shopping experience much better.
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