Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Faster is Better: How We Are Optimizing Walmart.com


The @WalmartLabs team has been busy delivering the next generation of commerce combining online, mobile and stores to let customers shop when, where and how they want. To do this, we are focused on being one of the top technology companies in the Silicon Valley and the world, and we are expanding our very gifted team to continue creating best-in-class e-commerce technologies.

You may have heard about some of the amazing technologies and talent we have brought in-house recently including Inkiru, OneOps and Tasty Labs. Today, I’m happy to announce that Torbit will now be joining the @WalmartLabs team.

Silicon Valley-based Torbit is a Front-End Optimization (FEO) innovator that has been focused on making the web a faster and better place. They are known for developing measurement, analytics and performance improvement tools to help companies identify and enhance their overall site performance. These advanced tools will help us create a faster, more customized and flexible experience for our online customers.

With Torbit’s Site Optimization technology, we will be able to optimize our website experience no matter where our customers are shopping – be it on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Torbit’s technology drastically minimizes the time customers spend waiting for a site to load by applying state-of-the-art optimization to the contents of the Web page on-the-fly, as they are delivered to the customer's browser.  For example, this optimization can dynamically minimize and compress the files the browser downloads to best fit the browser's characteristics.  By rewriting the page to best exploit the performance behavior of the Web browser requesting the page, Site Optimization can help each browser fetch and render each page as efficiently as possible. This is important because image loading results in a site experience that helps customers find what they want faster.  

With the integration of Torbit we are thrilled to welcome four new talented engineers to the @WalmartLabs team. Joining us will be Jon Fox, an avid technology entrepreneur and web developer who has spent the last 7+ years building and scaling companies and providing better content and services for websites; Mike Damm, the current head of network operations and the first engineer at OpenDNS with 14 years of experience in product and backend engineering; Tylor Arndt, a software engineer with experience in product and backend engineering, who also built a map reduce-style framework that is 10X faster than Google's BigQuery; and Frederick Mayle, a software engineer with extensive experience in information technology and computer software. 

Once again, welcome everyone!