In November 2010, three ex-Mozillians founded two different start-ups in Palo Alto: Set Direction and Tasty Labs. The former, created by Dion Almaer and myself, joined Walmart just six months later as part of a series of acquisitions that have formed @WalmartLabs, the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce.
The other start-up, Tasty Labs, was founded by our fellow Mozilla colleague Nick Nguyen together with del.icio.us creator Joshua Schachter and HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher. Dion and I compared notes with Nick as we progressed on our journeys, and we watched with interest as Tasty Labs released a series of innovative products over the past two years.
I'm pleased to announce that as of today, @WalmartLabs gains some additional flavor as Walmart Global eCommerce has acquired Tasty Labs.
It's hard to overstate my excitement to work with this crew! Nick is a super-star product leader who made his mark at Yahoo! and later Mozilla, gaining the respect of his colleagues and the loyalty of his teams for his hard-working, humble approach to getting great results.
While working on animated features like Shrek 2 at DreamWorks, Paul Rademacher created a little side project named HousingMaps, that combined Craigslist and Google Maps to plot rentals on a map. HousingMaps was a pioneer of the Ajax revolution and spawned the mash-up category that Douglas Crockford has called the most exciting development in modern web development. Both he and Nick are joining as full-time associates.
Joshua Schachter is also well-known for a side project: he created del.icio.us, itself a highly influential innovation that pioneered what Tim O'Reilly and others have called "folksonomies." He will join as a consultant.
With this acquisition, we're accelerating our efforts to bring delightful and innovative e-commerce experiences to our customers worldwide.
