tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84670446894528399942024-02-19T17:31:24.970-08:00@WalmartLabs BlogUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-64902023324454660572013-10-21T16:42:00.002-07:002013-10-21T16:42:59.111-07:00Walmart’s Back to Class Cyber Monday: The New Strike Force Approach<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">A new type of
cross-functional team is emerging: a short-term strike force to
address specific issues and produce results faster than ever. </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Cross-functional teams are nothing new in Corporate America.
A product of 1980’s business management theories, cross-functional teams have
been leveraged to improve communications between teams by minimizing silos, to
improve problem-solving and decision-making by collapsing production timelines
and, of course, to increase efficiency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Rather than teams working together over a period of months –
and in some cases, years – to assess and implement, a new type of
cross-functional team is emerging: a short-term strike force. These are formed
to address a specific issue and resolve it in a short period of time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What makes these teams effective is that their organizations,
and its leaders, have given the team members the authority and the
responsibility to make and implement decisions that move the project to a
speedy conclusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One example of this new cross-functional team in action is
Walmart’s recent “Back to Class Cyber Monday,” a program that came together <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in a
mere 14 days</i></b>, thanks to a highly effective strike force style team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">According to Walmart eCommerce Marketing Director Sarita
Yeldandi, “During a Marketing team meeting in late July, we reviewed retail
industry data, including projections that the back to school season was shaping
up to be a rather lackluster one. We started tossing around ideas to create
excitement among our customers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Someone asked why we couldn’t re-create the excitement and
energy of ‘Cyber Monday’, but instead of ‘Christmas in July’ as other retailers
have done, focus our event around back to school?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was a great idea, but a tough one to implement in a short
period of time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Said Sarita, “The team knew that they needed support from Merchandising,
Site, the @WalmartLabs Mobile team and Public Relations <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to address the biggest deciding factor with a
one-day event: ‘How can we do this, and how fast can we make it happen?’ The
clock was ticking – many school systems start classes in mid-August.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">With the target date for Cyber Monday set for August 12,
they needed a cross-functional team, and they needed one fast. They tapped associates
from Marketing, Merchandising, Site, @WalmartLab’s Mobile team and Public
Relations, with each team member serving as a lead for their respective area –
coordinating support efforts within their own teams – and empowered by their
leadership to resolve any and all issues which arose during frequent team
huddles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">According to Sarita, any
initial resistance the team encountered quickly turned to support.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“At first, we had mixed reactions. Some people thought it
was a good idea, but there was no way we could pull it off. Others just balked
at the idea in general. But our leadership team told us that they would help us
overcome any barriers we might encounter, which made it easier to persuade people
that this would work.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Time was the biggest challenge the team had to overcome. Walmart’s regular Cyber Monday event requires months to prepare for and test on
Walmart.com and the Mobile app. This team had 14 days from conception to
execution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Whoever said that ‘it takes a village’ was right,” said
Sarita. “We just asked everyone to believe in the idea and work as hard as
possible to make it happen.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sarita commented that the Walmart team was very happy with
the Cyber Monday results. “Back to Class Cyber Monday proved that we can pull
off the impossible, with the right people and the right support.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The success of Walmart’s Back to Class Cyber
Monday event serves as a great example of the benefits to any organization,
regardless of size, when business and technology teams work in close collaboration.</span></span><!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-54002006078073372092013-10-15T16:07:00.000-07:002013-10-15T16:07:35.685-07:00The Power of Crowdsourcing <div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bio: </i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ram Rampalli is a hands-on product manager working on large scale data projects
for @WalmartLabs and Walmart eCommerce. A true believer in crowdsourcing, Ram
has spent the past five years of his career leading and supporting initiatives
that use the power of the crowd to help solve problems for consumers and the
Walmart eCommerce business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of us know the saying “many hands
make light work,” meaning that the more people who work on something together,
the easier and faster it is to complete. This simple saying defines the concept
and the appeal of crowdsourcing in today’s digital world. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At a global company like Walmart, tapping into
the crowd around the world for online crowdsourcing helps us achieve things
more efficiently than we ever thought possible. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What does crowdsourcing at Walmart mean?
It means we’re working with people all over the world to help us with tasks like
quality evaluation and product data collection. We need this data to help make
sure the products on <a href="http://walmart.com/">Walmart.com</a> are easy to
find and that searches on the site deliver the best results. It also means that
tasks that once took weeks to complete are now ready in days. I rely on people
all over the world every day to help me solve global business problems like
this and more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">You can imagine how having a huge online
crowd to help with this is driving all retail companies to work faster and
smarter. At Walmart, it is helping us take a localized approach to solving
global issues, too, since we can work with crowds all over the world to address
needs in specific locations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our @WalmartLabs team uses
crowdsourcing all the time. The <a href="https://getontheshelf.walmart.com/">Get on the Shelf</a> program
encourages creative minds to submit product ideas, helping the team tap into
this audience to uncover the next big items to hit Walmart’s shelves. They rely
on crowdsourcing to test enhancements to walmart.com, help classify products
correctly and more. These are just a few ways the team uses people across the
globe in their everyday work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking ahead, I see crowdsourcing
becoming an even bigger part of the work we do @WalmartLabs and in retail. As
eCommerce software becomes more complex and global, we will rely even more on
the crowd to help us with things like product classification in multiple
markets. For instance, we’ll need crowds in Europe to help us find or validate EAN
numbers rather than UPC’s that we use in the U.S. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I believe crowdsourcing is a better way
of getting things done. By using the many hands – and knowledge – of the crowd,
we can work faster and smarter to benefit customers everywhere. Learn more
about crowdsourcing and the other work we do @WalmartLabs <a href="http://www.walmartlabs.com/">on our website</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-11775847785660257532013-10-11T16:31:00.001-07:002013-10-11T16:41:12.890-07:00Making the Leap: From Start-Up to the ‘World’s Largest Retailer’<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>@WalmartLabs' Vijay Raghavendra admits he had
questions about moving his 21-person start-up to a company with more than 2.2
million associates worldwide. But the opportunity to leverage his company’s
software to positively affect customer experience at the world’s largest
retailer – as well as his first exposure to the dynamic and collaborative
culture of Walmart eCommerce – overcame his initial concerns.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Vijay’s resume includes both large companies
(eBay/PayPal) and small (Nextag, Zynga); before joining @WalmartLabs he was one
of the co-founders of Palo Alto-based start-up Inkiru, a predictive analytics
platform for big data which was acquired by Walmart eCommerce in June. We asked
Vijay to give us his thoughts on making the leap from Inkiru to @WalmartLabs
and any advice he might have for anyone considering that type of change.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Q. Did you have any concerns about
culture fit, moving from a small start-up to a global retail giant?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A. “Just a few but they were quickly
addressed as we progressed through the due diligence and the first few months
post acquisition. I had worked with many of the @WalmartLabs staff
before, so I knew we would be working with top-level talent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">My concerns about culture fit were alleviated by
our interactions with the due diligence team prior to the acquisition, when we
spent a number of days at our Palo Alto office and in San Bruno working through
details of technologies and platforms. I was very impressed by the due
diligence team’s professionalism, business and technical acumen. It was great
to see our two teams respectfully debate opposing points of view (in the small
handful of instances where there were opposing points of view) and quickly work
through differences of opinion. Any remaining concerns I had about how a
small, nimble startup would mesh with such a large organization disappeared
post acquisition.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Q. It’s been four months since the
acquisition began. How are you feeling now about the decision to move to
@WalmartLabs?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A. “For the most part, the past four months
have been a blur. Three months from the date of acquisition (June 9) we were
live; our platform was fully integrated into the backend of walmart.com. I
think our progress has been phenomenal, and it certainly is a testament to the
fact that Walmart may be a big company, but it has the ability to function like
a start-up – nimble, collaborative and focused on achieving the end goal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps the biggest advantage of working in a
larger company that we’ve seen so far is that, in addition to having the
ability to pick and choose the best technology and tools, you have the
resources you need to get the job done.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There was a bit of a learning curve in the
beginning. We work with multiple people who own parts of a process. The result
is awesome support that allows us to collaborate at a scale and speed we hadn’t
experienced before.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Q. What would you say to anyone who is
considering making the jump from a small start-up to a larger company?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A. “I would tell them to look for large
companies that combine the best parts of a startup and a large company because
these organizations provide:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24pt;">The opportunity to positively affect the lives of millions of
customers/users on a daily basis.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24pt;">The ability to work with an amazing amount of data, cutting edge
technologies and algorithms to solve tough problems at massive scale.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24pt;">The opportunity to work with a talented team that works together to
make quick progress towards a common goal.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24pt;">A
collaborative, fun work culture that should be an easy transition for anyone
coming from a start-up.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24pt;">In short, I would tell them to look for a company
that will provide them with the opportunity to fit right in and start adding
value right away.”</span></li>
</ul>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-27211883460930370202013-07-24T09:59:00.000-07:002013-07-24T09:59:33.726-07:00Faster is Better: How We Are Optimizing Walmart.com<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">With the integration of Torbit we are thrilled to welcome four new talented engineers to the @WalmartLabs team. Joining us will be </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jon Fox</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, 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; <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Mike Damm</b>, the current head of network operations and the first engineer at OpenDNS with 14 years of experience in product and backend engineering; <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Tylor Arndt</b>, 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 <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Frederick Mayle</b>, a software engineer with extensive experience in information technology and computer software.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Once again, welcome everyone!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Jeremy Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14077398942731498738noreply@blogger.comSan Bruno, CA, USA37.6304904 -122.4110835000000237.5801839 -122.49176450000002 37.6807969 -122.33040250000002tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-20675856369025463012013-06-30T21:02:00.000-07:002013-06-30T21:02:23.356-07:00“Get on the Shelf” Comes Back for Year Two, Bigger and Better! <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9gnmn-8n2Or26ZqfH2FKLY2lf0UBmX5CDPMvnFNLzfQiasMg0qV6WENJXbG76hJ_gOxgRXf973Owuz3BZ12l9NGbLQen4AXQQQ717CaPkaHU9MBTsH82ibOJz5j6JDFcyPZzlD6oeCyc/s700/Y5eS8JLiZnP78xlxreuHTBTyTrnNreQ7UbZAkrU6X-s.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9gnmn-8n2Or26ZqfH2FKLY2lf0UBmX5CDPMvnFNLzfQiasMg0qV6WENJXbG76hJ_gOxgRXf973Owuz3BZ12l9NGbLQen4AXQQQ717CaPkaHU9MBTsH82ibOJz5j6JDFcyPZzlD6oeCyc/s700/Y5eS8JLiZnP78xlxreuHTBTyTrnNreQ7UbZAkrU6X-s.jpeg" height="400" width="112" /></a>Today marks the official launch of the second annual Get On the Shelf (GOTS) contest.
So we’re calling all entrepreneurs, business owners, and inventors to submit their products for a chance to sell them on Walmart.com and potentially on shelves in select Walmart stores.
The @WalmartLabs team created the GOTS platform as an experiment last year and it was such a success we’re bringing it back.<br />
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The @WalmartLabs team prides ourselves as inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs so we’re thrilled to have created this platform that celebrates and offers other inventors the chance for their products to reach new customers on a Walmart scale.<br />
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Last year’s program was widely successful and we received more than 5,000 product submissions and more than 1 million votes for the grand prize winner, Humankind Water. Runners up PlateTopper and SnapIt Eyeglass Repair Kit also were carried on Walmart.com and you’ll see them available at select Walmart stores. Armed with such enthusiasm, our team wanted to roll out a bigger and better program for this year.<br />
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The platform we created for the program is scalable and robust enough to process a high level of product entries, votes and traffic. We also have easy to use administrative tools that will provide both front-end and back-end users a seamless and fun user experience.<br />
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And because this platform is so customizable, scalable and flexible, it allows us to expand Get on the Shelf and select more finalists and ultimately more winners. This year, we’ll unveil the final group of products and inventors via a series of webisodes to give the public a chance to hear from inventors and their products and vote for the winners.<br />
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And we’re not stopping here. The same platform that powers Get on the Shelf is being used across our global operations. So far we’ve used it to power our global Walmart Associate Talent Program, which processed entries and votes across 30 countries, and we hosted a similar program to Get on the Shelf in China last fall. In fact, the Get on the Shelf platform is continuing to help the team in China source new products. Here in the U.S., the Get on the Shelf platform was also used to source greeting card designs, which were submitted and voted upon by our customers. One of the winning designs was among our top-selling greeting cards last holiday.<br />
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So if you have a product that is not being carried by Walmart, but you believe it should be, please enter! Just create a short video showcasing your product and upload it to <a href="https://getontheshelf.walmart.com/">https://getontheshelf.walmart.com</a>. Video submissions will be accepted from now until July 31 11:59 p.m. EST. The first round of public voting will take place later this summer and the second voting round will begin in early Fall.<br />
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We’ll share more details about the second round of voting in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! We encourage everyone to submit products today and begin rallying friends, family and supporters around your submission now. If last year’s program is any indication, competition is sure to be steep!<br />
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To learn more about last year’s Grand Prize winner and the impact Get On The Shelf had on his business visit <a href="http://getontheshelf.walmart.com/">getontheshelf.walmart.com</a>.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comSan Bruno, CA, USA37.6304904 -122.4110835000000237.5801839 -122.49176450000002 37.6807969 -122.33040250000002tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-74442680620242129962013-06-10T11:55:00.002-07:002013-06-10T12:07:52.931-07:00We Predict Big Data Will Move Much Faster<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">@WalmartLabs has been speeding along building best-in-class
e-commerce technologies that combine with the assets of the world’s biggest
retailer to deliver a unique customer experience. And, we’re finding
great opportunities to go even faster by bringing in new teams and technology.
We’re thrilled to announce that Inkiru will be joining @WalmartLabs, the
technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce.<u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Inkiru has developed an active learning system that
combines real-time predictive intelligence, big data analytics and a
customizable decision engine to inform and streamline business decisions.
The similarities between Inkiru and @WalmartLabs are uncanny, with both having
an innovative spirit and the ability to leverage big data to improve the
customer experience.<u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Inkiru‘s predictive analytics platform will enable us to
further accelerate the big data capabilities that @WalmartLabs has propelled
forward at scale…including site personalization, search, fraud prevention and
marketing. Walmart’s data scientists will now be able to work with big data
directly and create impact faster than ever before.<u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are also pleased to welcome Inkiru’s many talented data
scientists and infrastructure engineers who are helping to shape the future of
commerce.<span class="apple-converted-space"><b><i> </i></b></span>Among
those joining us are<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>Vijay Raghavendra, </b>a technology executive with expertise
in building and scaling commerce, payments and risk management platforms and
applications for virtual goods and traditional online retailers; <b>Jaya Kolhatkar,</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>a preeminent data scientist who has held many<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>successful roles building and leading
data science teams in commerce and payments; and <b>Yitao Yao</b>, a
software architect and visionary with 20+ years of experience in architecting,
designing, and implementing large scale software systems. <span style="background: white;">In addition, Inkiru’s founder, <b>Alok Bhanot</b>,
will join @WalmartLabs as a full time advisor to help the team deliver the next
generation predictive analytics platform.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With this latest addition, we are taking<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://walmartlabs.blogspot.com/2013/05/continuing-to-accelerate-in-e-commerce.html"><span style="color: purple;">another big leap forward</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>in delivering great customer
experiences…anytime, anywhere.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><u1:p></u1:p></span></div>
STS Prasadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03098323882013251046noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-41374869719548848772013-05-20T17:51:00.001-07:002013-05-20T18:09:45.082-07:00Discovery shopping with Pinterest’s more useful “Product Pins”<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">An experiment we’re “inspired” to explore here @WalmartLabs
is discovery shopping. How can we offer solutions that make the shopping
experience visually inspiring, fun and helpful? That’s why we’re excited
Walmart.com is among one of the first websites to unveil “product pins” today
on Pinterest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">With these more useful pins, people can now view more
product information on Walmart’s pins, including the product’s every day low
price. Get started by <a href="http://pinterest.com/walmart/">following us on Pinterest</a>.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CofBMtj3OAEyhUJbvjHZ44s3ng1_SAZuXLvepX-KHzW0HjRp9Sd9wfzfxyysovr-Zk6-QXLFZZjc4UsLtkLV_2cb76yfifYg1OBUb9k6_h0uYV7q2Wuv8D01uj5HerusG03KkhgoBvg/s1600/Pinterst+Product+Pin+Example.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CofBMtj3OAEyhUJbvjHZ44s3ng1_SAZuXLvepX-KHzW0HjRp9Sd9wfzfxyysovr-Zk6-QXLFZZjc4UsLtkLV_2cb76yfifYg1OBUb9k6_h0uYV7q2Wuv8D01uj5HerusG03KkhgoBvg/s320/Pinterst+Product+Pin+Example.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve started experimenting with discovery shopping when we
noticed Pinterest users were pinning product images from Walmart.com without
our help. Products that were pinned ranged from everyday products to </span><a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/15692298671216368/" style="font-family: inherit;">surprisingly practical
discoveries</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For one of our first Pinterest experiments, we curated
popular Walmart.com pins into an inspired shopping experience called </span><a href="http://spark.walmart.com/" style="font-family: inherit;">Spark Studio</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Here, shoppers could be
inspired by Walmart shoppers on Pinterest. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve heard some amazing feedback
from our users so far about their discoveries. Comments like “I never knew
Walmart sold that” or “I discovered this product was much less expensive than I
realized” demonstrated the power of the crowd and the thrill of discovery
shopping.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re also experimenting with Pinterest and discovery
shopping on our Walmart.com </span><a href="http://www.walmart.com/" style="font-family: inherit;">home page</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. When
we launched a new design for Walmart.com earlier this month, we unveiled a <a href="http://www.walmart.com/?page=trending&povid=P1171-C1110.2784+1455.2776+1827.2768-L0">new “Trending” tab</a> that provides a dynamic snapshot of Walmart.com products that
are currently trending based on recent pins from Pinterest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re excited to continue leveraging these better product
pins to inspire our shoppers and direct qualified traffic to Walmart.com. Watch
for more inspirations to come out from @WalmartLabs this year. </span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08349723611247637492noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-60143466438437741082013-05-14T10:31:00.003-07:002013-05-14T10:31:56.030-07:00Continuing to accelerate in e-commerce with some new additions – welcome OneOps and Tasty Labs!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For those that have followed our journey, you know we’re focused on building best-in-class ecommerce capabilities and combining them with Walmart’s best-in-class retail assets to deliver unmatched customer experiences. And we’re moving fast by building our team organically and by strategically adding technology and talent through key acquisitions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Along those lines, we’re excited to announce two new additions to the @WalmartLabs (the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce) family that will help us further accelerate our ability to innovate and bring new experiences to our customers around the world. The first is the acquisition of OneOps, which has developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that enables us to significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) strategies. <u><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://walmartlabs.blogspot.com/2013/05/oneops-is-joining-walmartlabs.html">Click here</a></span></u> for more information.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The second is the acquisition of Tasty Labs, a software applications developer based in Mountain View, CA which has pioneered more effective ways to connect people via social software.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ll be adding some of Silicon Valley’s brightest innovators to accelerate our delivery of new products, both within the Products organization as well as our Mobile team led by Gibu Thomas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <a href="http://walmartlabs.blogspot.com/2013/05/walmartlabs-has-good-taste.html"> </a></span><u><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://walmartlabs.blogspot.com/2013/05/walmartlabs-has-good-taste.html">Click here</a></span></u> for more information. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">These additions show our commitment to delivering best-in-class technology by attracting some of the best people in Silicon Valley…because we offer the unique opportunity to innovate at a massive, global scale and solve interesting challenges that improve the lives of millions of people at a time. Our journey continues, with even more wind in our sails.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Jeremy Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14077398942731498738noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-62983748775602286922013-05-14T10:30:00.000-07:002013-05-14T10:30:08.152-07:00@WalmartLabs has Good Taste<div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The other start-up, Tasty Labs, was founded by our fellow Mozilla colleague Nick Nguyen together with </span><a href="https://delicious.com/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">del.icio.us</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> creator Joshua Schachter and </span><a href="http://www.housingmaps.com/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">HousingMaps</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I'm pleased to announce that as of today, @WalmartLabs gains some additional flavor as Walmart Global eCommerce has acquired Tasty Labs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">With this acquisition, we're accelerating our efforts to bring delightful and innovative e-commerce experiences to our customers worldwide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Ben Galbraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05396142218343879804noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-43687017016664992652013-05-14T10:29:00.000-07:002013-05-14T10:29:14.653-07:00OneOps is joining @WalmartLabs<!--StartFragment--><br />
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We are delighted that <a href="http://www.oneops.com/">OneOps</a> is now part of @WalmartLabs, the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce! This company has put an innovative twist on the way product releases are managed – offering technology that automates and accelerates many processes related to environment management, application deployment and the monitoring of datacenter operations. OneOps will help us deliver on our plans to bring together best-in-class retail with best-in-class e-commerce to create amazing experiences for customers. We are proud to have them on-board and joining our talent-filled team.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We’re not the only ones who think this technology is great. OneOps was a finalist in the GigaOM LaunchPad Competition and was recognized as one of the 12 Hot Cloud Computing Companies Worth Watching by NETWORKWORLD. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Co-founders <b>Kire Filipovski</b>, <b>Vitaliy Zinchenko</b>, and <b>Mike Schwankl</b> – technology veterans with proven experience developing software automation solutions – have re-imagined application management in the era of cloud computing. Their expertise and track record for success are welcome additions to a high-performing team helping millions of people “save money and live better.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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With OneOps, we will continue to find new and exciting ways to serve customers. Please join us in welcoming OneOps to Walmart! <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05456275134840639602noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-4175906773326444222013-02-20T07:52:00.000-08:002013-05-14T10:16:13.763-07:00Get On The Shelf: Ongoing Innovation<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">At WalmartLabs, we’re always trying to innovate. And we enjoy creating opportunities for innovators, whether they work for Walmart or not. The GOTS (Get On The Shelf) team pushes the envelope in creating initiatives that give a stage to interesting products, spread public awareness of suppliers and Walmart through new engaging channels, and entertain and empower our customers.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br />Last year, as an experiment, @WalmartLabs built a contest that <a href="http://youtu.be/ci96EshpuBI">invited</a> individuals and businesses to submit online video pitches for their products not currently carried by Walmart and asked people to vote for their favorites. Entrepreuners and small business owners from around the country competed shot for the opportunity to sell their product through Walmart.com and/or Walmart Stores. The results of that first <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/">Get On The Shelf</a> contest were astounding. There was a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/23/v-wireless/4359637/contest-will-put-top-innovations.html">groundswell</a> <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2012-01-24/walmart-get-on-the-shelf-contest/52782444/1">of</a> <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/wal-mart-starts-inventors-contest-16075135">interest</a> with over 4,000 submissions from all over the country. Contestants campaigned through social media and other channels. The contest went viral online and also saw an enormous amount of traditional media coverage in both <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/wal-mart-starts-inventors-contest-16075135">national</a> and <a href="http://blog.al.com/press-register-business/2012/03/get_on_the_shelf_local_entrepr.html">local</a> media, both <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-03/water-wins-wal-marts-new-product-contest">print</a> and <a href="http://www.myfoxorlando.com/story/18065407/local-company-gets-chance-to-sell-their-product-in-walmart-stores">broadcast</a>.<br />
</span> </div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Today, the Grand Prize winner, Humankind Water, is selling in hundreds of stores in the Northeast. This bottled water brand donates 100% of its net profits to developing clean water sources around the world. They have seen a massive boost to their efforts since the launch of the contest. The other winners, <a href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/PlateTopper-Microwaveable-Suction-Plate-Cover-Set-of-2/20752045">PlateTopper</a> and <a href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/SnapIt-Eyeglass-Repair-Kit/20750763">SnapIt</a>, won the opportunity to be carried on Walmart.com. In addition to selling these winning products online, Walmart has also begun to offer them in stores. PlateTopper is available in stores nationwide and SnapIt has received a commitment to be carried as a promotional item in all Walmart optometry centers nationwide. Even contestants who did not win have reported large benefits from the visibility they received from participation in the contest. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">For the engineers out there, there are very big challenges with running a large scale contest, including handling large volumes of votes reliably and without downtime, not to mention tools for administration. Not many people have ever done anything at this scale.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Since the initial U.S. GOTS contest, the team has been focused on applying our experience and state-of-the-art contest technology to various additional initiatives. The first thing we did was to go global. <a href="http://www.yihaodian.com/1/">Yihaodian</a> in China launched a contest in October, announcing the winners in conjunction with the Chinese Golden Week holiday. We are scheduled to help several countries all over the world run contests in the coming months!</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">We have also developed similar initiatives here in the US. This past Holiday season, we partnered with Walmart.com photo card merchants to help them find new and promising greeting card designers. The <a href="http://photocardchallenge.walmart.com/">Walmart Holiday Photo Card Design Challenge</a> had some amazing designs entered. The winning designs went on sale within a matter of days and performed well (in fact, one became of the top selling cards)! Be on the look out for some new and exciting designs from these designers soon!</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">And right now, we are supporting a Home Office team in starting the first worldwide <a href="http://walmarttalent.walmart.com/">Walmart Associate Talent Search</a>, a showcase to help discover and appreciate the amazing talent of our 2.2 million associates in 27 countries around the globe. We’re also exploring how we can use our expertise to execute contests designed for companies whose products we sell at Walmart.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In the end, we love the opportunity to innovate and attempt to provide visibility, empowerment, and opportunity to suppliers and customers worldwide. Without giving away too much, in addition to the several international contests, talent show, and U.S. initiatives, we can definitely promise that bigger and better initiatives are in the works, including some things that may surprise you… Stay tuned!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-3027101989840056762013-01-11T14:56:00.000-08:002013-01-11T14:56:10.847-08:00The @WalmartLabs Social Media Analytics project<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Firstly, let me wish you all a happy new year. 2012
was definitely very exciting for us all. While scientists at CERN were sifting
through a whopping 200 petabytes of data analyzing 800 trillion collision
events to detect the Higgs boson, we at @WalmartLabs started out on a little
hunt of our own. I’m talking about an insights-mining project we started
working on last year.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Social Media Analytics is all about mining retail-related insights from
social channels, a perilous and personally exciting task to us. When our team spent the 22nd of November
feverishly following the social retail pulse on Black Friday, we knew the world
wasn’t preparing for an apocalypse.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlgN83JxHDVDXxS86ubgPvJLavAUa86gk4Xdhgs8fBEgg_M-ZQoWpcaBC0TudEwY2A8yZ0ZV9uJ5ASa7qROU3PsOy1FsHQNv9npkZAyQwEf59MBiGcaxpUWDivut7nZDNY7_QuAMDmYSw/s1600/Walmart+blackfriday+trend.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="116" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlgN83JxHDVDXxS86ubgPvJLavAUa86gk4Xdhgs8fBEgg_M-ZQoWpcaBC0TudEwY2A8yZ0ZV9uJ5ASa7qROU3PsOy1FsHQNv9npkZAyQwEf59MBiGcaxpUWDivut7nZDNY7_QuAMDmYSw/s400/Walmart+blackfriday+trend.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As we watched the incredible surge in Walmart related
social buzz on that day, we were only gently reminded another time of the
promise that lay hidden deep within the treasure of the social data goldmine – the
promise of social media analytics that is only emphasized all the time today,
almost to the point of a cliché. The potential itself is nevertheless, still
largely untapped. We are only barely beginning to scratch the surface of all the
great tales that the data has to tell us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Social buzz typically
precedes retail buzz. People are constantly expressing about upcoming stuff on
social apps - the hot new video game whose trailer just released, the cool
gadget about to be launched, or a new upgrade to that toy that your child
always </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">loved. There are good things said, and bad things
too. And thus, social media is really a direct real-time feedback channel
to us from our many customers. I am still only stating the obvious.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Our goal is to tap into this social buzz and
help Walmart with decision making on aspects like inventory and assortment. As
an example, the figure below shows a reasonable spike in social activity about Sony's new Android phone Xperia Z, few days ahead of its actual launch. Such insights can help our
merchants make smarter decisions ahead of time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Social data mining comes with incredible
challenges, which only makes it all the more exciting for our super smart
engineers to come to work every day. Data volume is formidably huge. We are
talking about petabytes here. Real-time social data processing requires
sophisticated data stores and blazingly fast algorithms. The noise levels are
exorbitant, the language used in social forums is heavily informal,
unstructured and often ungrammatical, and filtering out that helpful insight
out of the huge amount of noise is super hard. Just consider algorithmically
parsing - <i>“OMG!!! dis is sooo coool! i luv ma new fone. i cant believ ma
luck 4 chosin this! #wellwhatdoyathink”. </i>Popular text analytics and natural
language processing techniques based on standard language models simply fail.
We need altogether different techniques to filter out and focus on social data
that is relevant to us, which in itself is a daunting task. The next step is to
map this to meaningful retail products. All of these are difficult tasks. As a
quick sneak-peek, a new technique we are trying out today is to look for any of
several hand-verified n-grams around brands in a large time window. Several
more schemes are to follow. It is only after conquering all of these multifold
challenges that meaningful recommendations can be made.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Today, our social media analytics project operates on top of a searchable index of
60 billion social documents and helps merchants at Walmart monitor sentiments
and popular interests real-time, or inquire into trends in the past. One can
also see geographical variations of social sentiments and buzz levels. There
are also tools that marry search trends on walmart.com, sales trends in our
brick-and-mortar stores and social buzz all in one place, to help make
correlations. Together, these tools provide powerful social insights today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As we step into another fantastic year, we are
excited to be taking up more audacious goals. On one hand, we aspire to improve
the quality of our insights and work with our merchants to expedite them effectively.
On the other, we aim to map our interest trends to demand levels for actual
products and come up with insights for assortment and inventory management. And
all of this, well ahead of time, while we can make a difference. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is going to be an exciting year indeed.</span></div>
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Arun Prasathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12734893201638954566noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-84212690406291317082012-11-26T09:45:00.000-08:002012-11-27T14:00:56.193-08:00Targeting @WalmartLabs<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Humans are profoundly efficient at ingesting a wide array of disparate signals and internally aggregating these patterns together to form “profiles” of objects, events and actions that can be recalled when confronted with analogous situations in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Consider the following: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most of us from a young age are quite comfortable playing catch with a baseball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The brain has been exposed to catching baseballs under different lighting conditions, various velocities and spin in which a partner might be tossing the ball to you, and consequently has established mental profiles of varying resolutions of what is needed, mechanically, to successfully catch this baseball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, if someone were to toss you a dog bone in lieu of the traditional baseball, you’d likely be able to catch this a-spherical object with ease (assuming it wasn’t the femur of an extinct mastodon!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fast forward to the modern world in which the amount of data that is being generated in a day or two is equivalent to all information generated up until the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. Humans are often times overwhelmed with reasoning under this bombardment of signals and often times rely on machines to comb through the vast amounts of data to form aggregates, which humans can leverage as useful information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This explosion in data is particularly present in modern eCommerce, for example Walmart.com.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Customers are quite good at recognizing products and brands that they have had a previous affinity to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, as the number of items in retailer’s catalogs seem to be increasing an order of magnitude every few years, it becomes a challenging problem, especially in the digital world, to help customers sift through the vast space of items they and their family might enjoy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fortunately, big data tools largely developed to handle processing of the immense amounts of data being generated by the consumer web allow us within @WalmartLabs, to improve the online customer shopping experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These big data tools, in conjunction with the appropriate machine learning and information retrieval methodologies can profoundly improve the eCommerce shopping experience by helping customers navigate through the noise of millions if not tens of millions of items to present a set of relevant and delightfully discovered products that an individual might enjoy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The targeting team within @WalmartLabs ingests just about every clickable action on Walmart.com: what individuals buy online and in stores, trends on Twitter, local weather deviations, and other local external events such as the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We capture these events and intelligently tease out meaningful patterns so our millions of Walmart.com customers have a shopping experience that is individually personalized.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Given the enormous amounts of data collected it often poses the question of what does one do to understand all of it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our big data tools help us personalize the shopping experience and our psychological analysis helps us to dissect even deeper meaning behind patterns in the data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We apply behavioral economics to find clarity behind both the rational and irrational behavior shoppers exhibit. By integrating a psychological approach we provide a holistic experience that takes in data and reflects an accurate picture of customer activity and what consumers might be seeking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our targeting team comprised of PhD’s in computer science, statistics, signal processing and behavioral psychologists, has developed methodologies which aggregate all this disparate data together (in the “right” way) to formalize “good” recommendations or implicit “neighbors”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Historical buying patterns of our customers provide wonderful insights into items these customers are also likely to enjoy by utilizing collaborative filtering methodologies, e.g., correlation structure. However, transaction patterns alone can be enriched by also incorporating items which were browsed prior to any purchase as well as location areas shoppers might be in across the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Due to block structure in these large covariance matrices (and auto-correlation), you end up with a scenario in which the “relevance” of the recommended items to users ends up being greater than the sum of the parts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, the model produces more relevant recommendations when trained on all these data sources (when appropriately aggregated) than any one in isolation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the same spirit in which a customer may seek out the counsel of her closest (and likely most similar friends) when assessing the right pair of head phones, our high-dimensional statistical models can implicitly replicate this process of inheriting items by “close” individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The targeting team will often times take each user, represented by every item they’ve ever interacted with on the Walmart.com site, as well as demographic and geo data, and project users and items to the “appropriate” low-dimensional subspace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This projection enables us to believe that users who behave similarly in all their patterns are likely to be nearby similar users.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Additionally, items which are similar end up being nearby each other in this lower dimensional space. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are then able to establish who are a given users “closest” friends in this subspace (geometrically speaking</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">), and then allow this particular individual to “inherit” the items interacted by these very similar neighbors, often times resulting in spot on recommendations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Regarding the head phones example, such a procedure often times results in recommending the niche higher-end head phones rather than lower quality ones based upon this projection and neighborhood derivation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The @WalmartLabs targeting team is able to replicate an age old process of seeking out item recommendations from their trusted peers and friends and extend this to the digital age in which a user receives a highly relevant and delightful head phone recommendation via email while being completely unaware of their implicit, geometrically similar “friends”, who helped make this recommendation a reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Fdq7n9V3LQJXVgNbiu_WuU3kFvKMdsU2KQZkjWWB3vtdCC5AdcdfsgKu98M3Lx_cnweMlezuDWB2BAc2px0u02uvcYccu3twWOS4xlXIqeqeFED0s_qkGTIEF_Y1vJ55Zy_zNa6pyrk/s1600/a.Goodies+Co+Logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Fdq7n9V3LQJXVgNbiu_WuU3kFvKMdsU2KQZkjWWB3vtdCC5AdcdfsgKu98M3Lx_cnweMlezuDWB2BAc2px0u02uvcYccu3twWOS4xlXIqeqeFED0s_qkGTIEF_Y1vJ55Zy_zNa6pyrk/s1600/a.Goodies+Co+Logo.jpg" height="166" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> is here to
help you discover new foods you’ll love.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you’re anything like us, you often find yourself
thinking, “I’m so tired of eating the same old thing.” But branching out can
always be difficult. Why? Because trying new foods is expensive, time-consuming
and risky. What if it doesn’t taste good? It’s money down the drain, not to
mention a dull and very disappointing meal. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s no way to live.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that’s where <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies
Co.</a> comes in. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For just a $7 per month subscription including taxes and
shipping, the <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> box features
5-8 delicious new foods hand-picked and delivered directly to your doorstep. We
always try to get you as much value as possible for your $7, and are proud to
say that our box costs less than half of the sum of its parts if sold
individually. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You get to receive a surprise every month, sample new foods,
and expand your palate without breaking the bank. We always try to include a wide variety of
foods, from healthy, organic, artisan, and international, and definitely steer
clear of being too niche (all organic, all gluten-free, etc.). We want everyone
to be able to enjoy Goodies Co! And whatever you love most from a Goodies Co.
box is always available for purchase in full size from our online storefront. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We also believe in rewarding our loyal customers, and offer
points for reviews our customers leave about products on Goodies Co. Points can
soon be redeemed for discounts on future boxes and items in the store, ensuring
that Goodies Co. subscribers keep getting new products they’ll love. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Products that are considered for inclusion in a Goodies Co.
Taster’s Box are always tasted by the <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies
Co.</a> team, and tasted by volunteers from our <a href="https://www.goodies.co/about#tasting-lab">Tasting Lab</a>, where each
potential product is <a href="https://www.goodies.co/about#goodies-grade">graded
for ultimate deliciousness</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> is a new
experiential ecommerce site developed by @WalmartLabs in Silicon Valley. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Given Walmart’s tremendous reach in the grocery sector, we
saw an opportunity to build upon the market in new ways. <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> was born out of Walmart’s firm
ties to food, while also innovating and refining upon the core pillars of
discovery commerce. <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> is
bridge-building between physical fulfillment of a subscription box, and a rich
associated experience on the <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies Co.</a> site
and social channels. The opportunity ahead of Goodies Co. is tremendous; by
reaching both those that love the emerging discovery commerce sector and
subscription boxes, while also getting interesting foods to customers in new
ways. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Try us out, and let <a href="https://www.goodies.co/">Goodies
Co.</a> show you just how good life can be. Sign up with your email address now
at Goodies Co, and feel free to follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/GoodiesCompany">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://www.facebook.com/goodiesco">Facebook</a> for more delicious
surprises. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYC3vOWvFrSj5kmSbBRpwEnIWUj578yOaIx89rgV4wQw7iSsxTL6CFrfHloJv3SvHCz6seapNDzUHl08gYfo_hA8lay4KNngc0hLXOP1KjmP4yUskrBfXbmPhYGzT4gPZ2l1RoXXuRU2I/s1600/howgoodiescoworks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYC3vOWvFrSj5kmSbBRpwEnIWUj578yOaIx89rgV4wQw7iSsxTL6CFrfHloJv3SvHCz6seapNDzUHl08gYfo_hA8lay4KNngc0hLXOP1KjmP4yUskrBfXbmPhYGzT4gPZ2l1RoXXuRU2I/s1600/howgoodiescoworks.jpg" height="108" width="400" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-60318676093389934422012-09-12T19:42:00.001-07:002012-09-13T19:37:46.905-07:00Mupd8 – The @WalmartLabs Real-time Platform<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
In recent years, the world has seen an explosive growth in the volume of real-time data streams. Once the preserve of stock markets and day traders, real-time data is now ubiquitously available to consumers through popular services such as Twitter and Facebook. With the availability and growth of real-time data comes the inevitable problem of real-time data overload, and the need for systems that can separate the signal from the noise.<br />
<br />
As we began working with firehoses from various social media sites, we recognized the need for a general-purpose real-time stream processing platform that could address the issues of scale and performance -- and enable our stream processing applications to focus on the quality of their generated content. “Mupd8” came into existence to fulfill that need. At the highest level, Mupd8 does for Fast Data, what Hadoop and the MapReduce computation model do for Big Data. Mupd8 was formerly known as Muppet within @WalmartLabs and in our peer-reviewed publications.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ7lakTQsQPVOxhfxChQ2-FK07OHFys7lIN6mVJuPY4KAg6sR3fU_JzB9YKAVGl5T3m_74pD5-vVjk6jbrwaR9dL1u9UBmcfw7EJRpMaPiaLguIm05uhLJz3-k4QvzR3JiglrWDdF3mnE/s1600/app-examples1-a-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ7lakTQsQPVOxhfxChQ2-FK07OHFys7lIN6mVJuPY4KAg6sR3fU_JzB9YKAVGl5T3m_74pD5-vVjk6jbrwaR9dL1u9UBmcfw7EJRpMaPiaLguIm05uhLJz3-k4QvzR3JiglrWDdF3mnE/s1600/app-examples1-a-1.png" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
A MapUpdate application is a workflow of map and update operators.</div>
<br />
With Mupd8, you can easily write applications to process these (or your own) firehoses using the MapUpdate framework, a simple way to express streaming computation. By writing your application as a collection of customized operators map and update, you can focus your programming on your application logic and let Mupd8 handle the load-and data-distribution across multiple CPU cores and machines for you. For example, an application can be written to subscribe to the Twitter firehose of every tweet written; such an application can analyze the tweets to determine Twitter's most influential users, or identify suddenly prominent events as they occur. Alternatively, an application can be written to subscribe to a log of all user activity on a Web site; such an application can detect service problems users face as they occur, or compute suggestions for users' next steps based on up-to-the-moment activity.<br />
<br />
Mupd8 enables @WalmartLabs to leverage Walmart’s business data and product taxonomy to extract valuable content in real-time from the largest streams of social media content. As an example, we extract and collect videos, images, location information and status updates from these massive flowing streams. We then categorize them and track such information as key influencers, relevant videos, images and web pages for each product.<br />
<br />
To be effective at separating the signal from the noise in real-time, Mupd8 not only has to provide a simple computation model for stream processing applications, but also has to be highly available since any downtime causes loss of real-time information. This, in turn, requires persistence of the rapidly changing content generated by the applications. Low latency -- the time between receiving an update and updating the affected nodes -- is a key requirement, since the half-life of social media content is short. Lastly, Mupd8 has to be scalable across three dimensions -- increasing stream rates, the size of the taxonomy and the complexity of supported applications.<br />
<br />
To address these requirements for high availability, low latency and scalability, the current Mupd8 architecture leverages open-source solutions, including Cassandra, which has proven to be a high-performance and scalable key-value store (though Mupd8 adds a caching layer to minimize the impact of its higher network read latency).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
The @WalmartLabs Mupd8 platform has already supported more than a dozen sophisticated stream applications processing over 300 million status updates per day, gathering real-time information on our product taxonomy. Learn more about our experience (<a href="http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1814_wanglam_vldb2012.pdf" target="_blank">see our VLDB 2012 paper</a>) and check out the newest version, available under the Apache License 2.0, for yourself at <a href="http://github.com/walmartlabs/mupd8">http://github.com/walmartlabs/mupd8</a>. Get started on your application with "Starting a New Application in MUPD8," available in the Mupd8 source tree and <a href="http://walmartlabs.github.com/mupd8/quickstart.html">http://walmartlabs.github.com/mupd8/quickstart.html</a>.</div>
Amy Lamparskehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15987962290894607355noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-43066026066495039552012-05-30T21:37:00.001-07:002012-05-30T21:37:21.064-07:00Mobilizing our store customers<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
As we continue to improve the mobile commerce experience, we’re very excited to roll out major updates to our iPhone and iPad apps for Walmart in the United States. For the iPhone, it’s all about in-store aisle location and our new In-Store Mode. For the iPad, we’ve introduced a new interactive Local Ad feature. These new mobile enhancements put more power at the fingertips of our customers, allowing them to shop our brand anytime, anywhere.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="color: black;">iPhone: In-store Aisle Location</span></b><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">We’ve expanded the in-store aisle location feature to help customers easily find products on their shopping list</span>s<span style="color: black;"> in our stores. As customers add items to their mobile shopping list, they can also see the aisle where they’ll find their product. </span>Previously a limited beta, we now offer the in-store aisle location feature for all U.S. stores and thousands of products across consumables, grocery, electronics and toys.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In addition,<span style="color: #1f497d;"> c</span><span style="color: black;">ustomers can set their local store within the app, plan their visit and create a shopping list at home by scanning, typing, or speaking items to buy. One of the unique features of our app is that we pull item prices from your local Walmart store and calculate total price in real-time as items are added to shopping lists. We’re able to do that for any of our 3,800 Walmart stores across the U.S. so no matter where you happen to be, only our app helps you see the estimated total of your Walmart shopping trip before ever leaving home. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="color: black;">iPhone: In-Store Mode</span></b><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">This tool was specifically created to help customers while they’re shopping in our retail stores. Now, when you launch the Walmart for iPhone app from one of our stores in the U.S., you will be prompted to enter In-Store Mode. Features include scanning – price checking from product barcodes or learning more about products and special offers displayed in-store as QR Codes</span><span style="color: #1f497d;"> – </span><span style="color: black;">and easy access to the Local Ad product list and general store information. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="color: black;">iPad: Local Ad</span></b><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">We’ve introduced an interactive Local Ad experience that presents our customers with a preview of store specials and featured products. The format of our iPad Local Ad will be familiar to customers who are used to flipping through our printed Local Ads. They will be able to browse our Local Ads from their iPad page-by-page, with the ability to tap on a product to view more information, and purchase the item online or by visiting the store.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">You can download our iPhone and iPad apps from the App Store.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Walmart for iPhone:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart/id338137227?mt=8" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart/id338137227?mt=8</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Walmart for iPad:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart-for-ipad/id473539089?mt=8" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart-for-ipad/id473539089?mt=8</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Happy shopping!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>Raven Zacharyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15719182250979318962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-84879209070313392302012-05-03T10:58:00.003-07:002012-05-03T11:27:30.503-07:00Get on the shelf Contest Winners Announced!<br />
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<a href="http://walmart.com/getontheshelf" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvMVG5hkjcBPm5s2OEADvUGFznung9IkqhLvNc7L58YdSjkHVj_rLbaKgrHd_oBXkeCpPKgJrnTbl722ocbrezy3lnTiNtZ4aeo17ARKwnS5lMy8A6UA-2T3DLpDUFl_uy1RaECs5DlCLm/s200/gots+banner.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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Today we announced the final winners of our popular <a href="http://getontheshelf.com/" target="_blank">Get on the shelf</a> contest: <a href="http://youtu.be/M9ncSgh2fqg" target="_blank">HumanKind Water</a>, <a href="http://youtu.be/zVp2AjMDYIo" target="_blank">PlateTopper</a> and
<a href="http://youtu.be/Pg55HyQ5FWY" target="_blank">SnapIt Eyeglass Repair Kit</a> which will be sold at
<a href="http://walmart.com/getontheshelf">http://walmart.com/getontheshelf</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMqE1TsPa9QulnlEHI3eKc1I6i6BdYAynrsbTnnuNtRj11f-rvR4fjvhQyrCl59DVuVHfMDEjsGl1lt15pxxAVwt4nLFAvDUNg_l3xAHQcbUVEhyphenhyphenEIRE-VeTQcdJKnxOD2XI103F2lGlx/s1600/gots+graphic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMqE1TsPa9QulnlEHI3eKc1I6i6BdYAynrsbTnnuNtRj11f-rvR4fjvhQyrCl59DVuVHfMDEjsGl1lt15pxxAVwt4nLFAvDUNg_l3xAHQcbUVEhyphenhyphenEIRE-VeTQcdJKnxOD2XI103F2lGlx/s640/gots+graphic.jpg" width="189" /></a>More than 4,000 inventors, entrepreneurs and small businesses
from across the country entered the contest to have the opportunity to be
carried on Walmart.com and in Walmart U.S. stores. The most popular products ranged
from categories entered were home
improvement, to personalized products
items and health and wellness. Over one
million votes were cast by the public to compete for the opportunity to be
carried at Walmart.com and in Walmart U.S. stores. The public cast over one
million votes through Facebook or text.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Throughout the contest, the winning inventors went the
distance to market their participation through word of mouth. Humankind Water
transformed its <a href="http://humankindwater.org/" target="_blank">homepage</a> into a “war room”
completely dedicated to getting votes. PlateTopper deployed humorous videos and
social marketing tactics to raise visibility, including a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DuYw5hOB_8&feature=related" target="_blank">YouTube video</a>, which has
been viewed more than two million times. Nancy of SnapIt even went to the NBC
Today Show’s plaza in New York where her assistant <a href="http://www.walmartstores.com/download/5181.jpeg" target="_blank">dressed as a giant screw</a> and
was seen on national television with a sign asking for votes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We are now at the end of an amazing adventure. Get on the Shelf surpassed our expectations
and surprised us all here. We
congratulate the winners for their creativity and passion and thank every
single one of the 4,000 contestants for taking a leap to join in the first
contest ever of this kind from. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Get on the shelf, launched in January of this year where
contestants sent in videos of their latest inventions to be voted on by the
public. During contest voting, nearly 95
percent of the participants received a vote via Facebook or text. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We thank all contestants for their participation and
enthusiasm for the "Get on the shelf" contest. We congratulate them
for their creativity and passion. We are amazed by the visibility so many have
received for their products, whether online or through traditional news media,
and we hope the boost in awareness We hope the GOTS experience accelerates
their your business going forward. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Walmart Get on the shelf team<o:p></o:p></div>
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For more information, visit <a href="http://getontheshelf.com/" target="_blank">http://getontheshelf.com</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-58351266754352783832012-04-05T06:05:00.007-07:002012-04-05T09:03:22.463-07:00CONGRATULATIONS GET ON THE SHELF FINALISTS!!!<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDY1LpdUJ6LGS6w6W71dAPuuW0s-is3cAF0MzC8Z2T4CgU0H5PmUqVGiYpumFr2R7xTz6P3yVYxgU0DlSxIICZNzgpaqmDFIX2PudvWrx_NLRaVrObj8oX_pDUnYEajoC2peam0m55r4-5/s1600/TOP10+GOTS+300x250%5B6%5D.jpg" /></a></div></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">Back in January, we announced a nationwide contest called </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://getontheshelf.com/">Get on the Shelf</a></span><span style="font-size: small;">. Get on the Shelf allows anyone the chance to get their product on Walmart shelves. </span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">We have been inspired and amazed at the products entries from around the country.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Over 4,000 contestants participated with products ranging from household and food items to wellness and green ones.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">Every product, from the <a href="http://getontheshelf.com/product/1140/My-BFF-%28My-Best-Friends-">fork designed specifically for a dog</a>, to the gadget that turns an <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/1383/-Baby-Flipple">ordinary water bottle into a baby milk bottle</a>, reflected the creativity and passion of our contestants.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">After the first round of voting where over one million votes were cast, here are the ten finalists that move to the next round listed in alphabetical order:</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/5062/Bios-Clinical-Acne-Syste"> </a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/5062/Bios-Clinical-Acne-Syste">Bios Clinical Acne System</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/5062/Bios-Clinical-Acne-Syste"> </a>is an acne system that uses topical probiotics to treat adolescent and adult acne.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/4829/Humankind-Water">Humankind Water</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> gives 100 percent of its net profits to provide clean drinking water for some of the one billion people in this world dying without it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/4154/Mr--Spritz-Mysterious-Sh">Mr. Spritz Mysterious Shirts</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> are entertaining t-shirts containing hidden images that appear when the garment gets wet and disappear when dry. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/643/PlateTopper">Plate Topper</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> transforms dinner plates into airtight food storage containers to save meals, leftovers and snacks. They are dishwasher-safe, microwave-safe and 100 percent BPA-free. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/3703/Sola-Bag-Forever-Carry-R">Sola-Bag Forever Carry Refrigerator</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> is a lunch bag that stays cold forever by generating energy from solar power and indoor lighting. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/3188/Soleeze-Spring-Loaded-In">Soleeze Spring Loaded Insoles</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> are spring-loaded insoles and shock absorbers that fit into any shoe or boot and last for years. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/656/Snapit-Eyeglass-Repair-K">SnapIt Eyeglass Repair Kit</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> is an easy way to fix your sunglasses or eyeglasses in 30 seconds.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/4959/SUSIE-Magazine">SUSIE Magazine</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> is a bimonthly Christian print magazine and online sisterhood for teen girls promoting healthy relationships, good role models and positive self-image. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/4970/Veterans-Farm-Datil-Pepp">Veterans Farm Datil Pepper Salt</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> is a datil-infused kosher salt created at a Veterans Farm, where disabled combat veterans are taught farm skills to help them overcome physical and mental barriers and get jobs. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal; margin-left: 39pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: small;">- </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/323/%22Bill-of-Rights%22-Silver-">We the People Bracelet</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"> features silver sterling beads with ingrained detailed descriptions of the Amendments to the Bill of Rights.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Thank you to all for your participation. </span><span style="color: #1b1b1b; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">We hope you have enjoyed the experience and made new connections along the way.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">The final round of voting for the contest begins April 11. Please cast a vote for your favorite via text message or Facebook.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Let's have a fun race…and may the journey be the best reward of all.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">For more information and to vote, visit </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><u><span style="color: #1a75cf;"><a href="http://getontheshelf.com/">http://getontheshelf.com</a></span></u></span><span style="color: #333333;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-52005463534605266952012-02-27T09:19:00.003-08:002012-02-27T09:23:55.893-08:00The Community is pushing the Mobile Web PlatformAt @WalmartLabs, our focus is to develop technologies that provide an innovative shopping experience to millions of users around the world. Our customers spend their time on a variety of platforms of their choosing, so we aim to be where they are. One of the key platforms is the Web, and much effort has been spent over the last few years to ensure that users visit Web sites via rich Web runtimes. The mobile Web used to be about feature phones getting minimal content, but that world has changed quickly over the last few years and the mobile device in your hand has an amazing engine that has the power to do as much as your desktop computer.<br /><br />There have been a number of efforts to standardize features for the mobile Web, but none of them have taken off. Partly, this is due to the fast evolution and change from the world of WAP to the world of HTML5 on the phone. Today, it has reached a point of critical mass where people are looking to push development of the mobile Web platform. This push won't happen with only certain perspectives, and needs broad participation across the industry.<br /><br />We have been talking to Facebook about the issues surrounding the mobile Web for quite some time, and I am very excited to have @WalmartLabs be a part of a new community effort, the <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/02/27/helping-improve-the-mobile-web/">forming of W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group</a> whose goals are clear:<br /><br /><blockquote>Accelerate the adoption of the Mobile Web as a compelling platform for the development of modern mobile Web applications.<br /><br />The Community Group will bring developers, equipment manufacturers, browser vendors, operators and other relevant members of the industry together to agree on core features developers can depend on; create related conformance test suites; and provide to W3C (and non-W3C) groups use cases, scenarios, and other input to enable successful mobile Web app development.</blockquote><br /><br />A critical topic to address is for most important specs to be supported across a wide range of browsers. But, support is only half the battle. The quality and performance of a feature is crucial as well. This is why we are looking forward to seeing rich test suites that go into that side of things too.<br /><br />We love the Web, but users -- and thus developers -- demand that the platform evolves faster than it has to date. As we push the boundaries of the mobile Web at @WalmartLabs, we look forward to the opportunity to discuss the needs of users and developers as we work with community members to make the Web a better place.<br /><br />Join us!Dion Almaerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05217443551408401547noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-41224076934216347892012-02-08T16:29:00.000-08:002012-02-08T16:29:13.053-08:00A Welcome to Guna, our new head of @WalmartLabs India<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Just a few short months ago, we announced our intention to set up @WalmartLabs India. Since then, we’ve added several incredibly talented people to our Bangalore team in the areas of machine learning, social analytics and big data infrastructure. Today, I’m delighted and excited to welcome the newest member of the Labs India team, who will also be its leader: Gunaranjan Pemmaraju (aka Guna). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our search attracted some of the top talent in India:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>people who have set up and managed large operations in India for globally recognized Internet and technology companies. As part of the process, I met many of these incredibly talented individuals. What attracted me most to Guna is the combination of his technical depth, leadership skills, business acumen, passion for excellence, and, of course, his love for cricket (Ok, I was just kidding about the cricket).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Guna is a seasoned technology leader who comes to @WalmartLabs from Amazon.com Bangalore, where in his role as Director of Engineering responsible for global payments, he set up and grew teams that delivered business-critical technology and services. Prior to Amazon.com, Guna was vice president of product development at i2 Technologies, where he held various product, technology and leadership roles in an 11-year career spanning across Dallas and Bangalore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guna holds a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a master’s degree in business from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I would like to take a moment to thank everyone from @WalmartLabs Silicon Valley who contributed to the founding of @WalmartLabs Bangalore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their efforts under the guidance of STS Prasad, our Vice President of Infrastructure here in the Valley, enabled us to move from vision to reality in record time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I welcome Guna to our group, I am confident that he will hire, develop and deliver innovative technologies that will accelerate the new generation of e-commerce for millions of Walmart customers around the world. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Jai Ho!</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-81690873228810100172012-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:002012-01-18T14:56:00.993-08:00Get Your Product on Our Shelves<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Have a great product that you wish you could sell through Walmart? Do you wish Walmart carried your favorite product, but does not today? Wish no longer! Just in time for the premiere of the new season of Americal Idol we have launched our own contest. Welcome to <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/">Get On The Shelf</a> a new contest similar to American Idol where we are searching for the next great product. The latest in a series of innovations from @WalmartLabs, <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/">Get On The Shelf</a> offers anyone with a product the chance to make it to the major leagues and have their product carried by Walmart.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">How does it work? Pretty simple actually. Submit a video of your product to <a href="http://www.getontheshelf.com/">Get On the Shelf</a> and then, when voting starts, rally your family, friends and fans to vote for it. The product video with the most votes wins. That's it. Simple. Any product in any category currently covered by Walmart is eligible - from housewares and electronics to toys and apparel. Learn more <a href="http://walmartstores.com/pressroom/news/10802.aspx" target="_blank">here</a> .</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Who will win to have their product carried for millions across the United States. It could be you! </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-77830406138765627612012-01-04T10:29:00.000-08:002012-01-04T17:12:22.470-08:00Small is the New Big...I’m excited to announce that Small Society, a highly respected mobile agency, is joining the @WalmartLabs mobile team. Small Society embodies what has made us successful in 2011 and will help us accelerate that success in 2012.<br />
As I reflect on why this is such a great opportunity, it is clear that there are three things that matter most to building great teams:<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>Talent Matters</b><br />
The power of current mobile SDKs means that small groups of talented people can deliver incredible products. This has always been true in software development, but the concentration factor is even more pronounced in today’s smartphone apps. When looking to expand our team, we were incredibly selective. <br />
As we got to know the Small Society founders, they impressed us with their understanding of mobile platforms, their passion for building great products, and their awareness of the unique opportunities for mobile in the retail space. They’ve delivered apps for huge brands, from the Democratic National Committee to Starbucks, all from a small office over a kebab restaurant in downtown Portland. We quickly realized that Small Society could be a potent addition to our existing @WalmartLabs Oregon office.<br />
“Portland?” you say? Yes–Portland! When we acquired Set Direction in April 2011, one of their employees was a crack iOS developer based in Portland. Since then, we have recruited a few more talented developers in the area. Our Portland office works closely with the rest of the team here in Silicon Valley, and together we will deliver world-class experiences for all of Walmart’s global businesses.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>Product Matters</b><br />
What we loved about our first interactions with the Small Society founders was their laser focus on product. They showed us their portfolio and they critiqued ours; it was refreshing to meet a team with concrete ideas on how to make our experiences stronger. The conversations were facilitated with working software more than PowerPoint–it was great! We didn’t talk about abstract “this is the way it should be done” concepts; instead, we looked at what they had already done and how their product development skills could be applied to our businesses. We came away impressed. One example we looked at was the Zipcar app. The app is a spot-on intersection of technology, brand and business. Named one of Time Magazine's “50 Best iPhone Apps for 2011,” it enables Zipcar members to find and book a Zipcar quickly, but also to honk the horn and lock or unlock the doors—all from their iPhone<br />
From the other side of the table, with our millions of weekly customers across dozens of countries and businesses that range from groceries and pharmacy to financial services, we offered them an unparalleled variety of challenges, and they too were impressed.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>Customers Matter</b><br />
At Walmart, our target market is one of the broadest in the world. If you go to Walmart every week for all your groceries or if you live 100 miles from the nearest Walmart but want everyday low prices shipped to your front door, we want to be your mobile experience be your mobile experience be it iPhone, iPad, or Android. <br />
We’re here to serve people with busy lives and much bigger concerns than the coolness of our apps. If we provide them a way to save time, save money, and get done with their shopping so they can enjoy their loved ones, we’ve achieved success. We obsess over the small details so our customer doesn’t have to. We saw that clear customer focus in the Small Society portfolio and in the people we met.<br />
A focus on talent, product, and customers embodied in small teams of talented people – this is what has mattered most to us as we have built the @Walmartlabs mobile team. Our ambitions aren’t small – we believe that mobile can have an impact on every part of the shopping experience for Walmart customers, whether in-store or online. We’re very excited to have such talented new team members to help us make that impact.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-88709455266227942692011-12-08T17:24:00.001-08:002012-02-08T10:49:18.418-08:00The Next Angry Birds?<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cfo2ck_qPx8A6BhPZzpyjHCFk6k4ewle_mduutRTHz_BlqvJVT8U6EIxP6qEuMP6WRljryScxARgB2z6ya7H8MpcwGmuANkByND7xMAWi3wCvue8o6_CcvgP5L1gaO7QMj5bt3Y4YMw/s1600/games.png"></a><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2NJVywOKXVHB93V8KYPXgvyJpyh988jw7-7j6r__9WG8OlcdCUk2Mw9fFwHaT4PZLJpsv_9s7u1vCrnk9YDsUFsnV-T0jsyHXKTLNb57kjxrb98hrhhyphenhyphenF3KT93ElZFjU8glWSK5cz_-s/s1600/angrybirds.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 316px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2NJVywOKXVHB93V8KYPXgvyJpyh988jw7-7j6r__9WG8OlcdCUk2Mw9fFwHaT4PZLJpsv_9s7u1vCrnk9YDsUFsnV-T0jsyHXKTLNb57kjxrb98hrhhyphenhyphenF3KT93ElZFjU8glWSK5cz_-s/s400/angrybirds.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683933548686463538" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The mobile game sensation Angry Birds has spawned a whole industry of plushies, games, shirts, costumes, and even these flip flops! What is the next game to capture the public imagination? Our Walmart.com toy merchant</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">, was pitched by a vendor on Fruit Ninjas. Like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninjas is a fun and whimsical game and it is ranked as the #4 game on the Apple AppStore right now. According to social media trends, it has a quite a bit further to go until it’s a real pop-culture phenomena like Angry Birds. For now Angry Birds still rule the roost.</span><div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span><span style="line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cfo2ck_qPx8A6BhPZzpyjHCFk6k4ewle_mduutRTHz_BlqvJVT8U6EIxP6qEuMP6WRljryScxARgB2z6ya7H8MpcwGmuANkByND7xMAWi3wCvue8o6_CcvgP5L1gaO7QMj5bt3Y4YMw/s400/games.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706838566198937010" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 221px; " /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><u><br /></u></span></div></div></div>Tracy Chuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00752669675573655313noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-83700829671033576652011-12-06T17:15:00.001-08:002012-02-08T10:52:58.080-08:00The Hottest Holiday Toys at Walmart<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://socialsense.walmartlabs.com/?attachment_id=1046" rel="attachment wp-att-1046" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; text-align: left; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); "><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1046" title="WMT Toys" src="http://c802719.r19.cf2.rackcdn.com/2011/12/WMT-Toys.png" width="237" height="256" style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); line-height: 1.5; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 4px; margin-right: 24px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; float: left; display: inline; max-width: 100%; height: auto; " /></a></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif;font-size:12px;"><p style="font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><span >What are the must-have toys that everyone is talking about this season? To figure out what to add to our shopping lists, we tracked the social media chatter about </span><a href="http://www.walmart.com/cp/toys/4171)" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; ">Walmart's Hot Holiday Toys</a><span >.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; ">Discussions about the <span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 1.5;">LeapPad</span></span>, the educational tablet from LeapFrog, and the competing <a href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/VTech-InnoTab-Learning-App-Tablet/16672573" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; ">Innotab </a>from VTech continue to surge and from the looks of it are selling out fast. There must be alot of parents who are afraid to hand over their iPads to their 3 year-olds! </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><a href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/Lalaloopsy-2-Pack-Sir-BattleScarred-and-Lady-StillWaiting/15734384" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; ">Lalaloopsy</a>, the magical rag dolls, have been popular in social discussions the entire holiday season but have breaking out this last week.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; ">Have you seen the new <a href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sesame-Street-Playskool-LET-S-ROCK-Elmo/16621633" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; ">Let's Rock Elmo</a>? He sings, he dances, he wirelessly interacts with his musical instruments. In short, Elmo rocks! It's no wonder that Elmo social media buzz has been climbing fast.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; ">Here's how the other Hot Holiday Toys stack up on our Social Media Index.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXEY-48rSszBxQ1Vsbzm66qONQjtEjithPV5dr8PPQtY4dri0ySvQFQvFPf1YOTWUBjXpc8EN25XdwT5HZfh5fU0CZNKtxp_GHO4mvPrp5SDjNqxKnGCE5-kSiKm2RexrGQ7SMUTyPmEc/s1600/toys.png" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: normal; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXEY-48rSszBxQ1Vsbzm66qONQjtEjithPV5dr8PPQtY4dri0ySvQFQvFPf1YOTWUBjXpc8EN25XdwT5HZfh5fU0CZNKtxp_GHO4mvPrp5SDjNqxKnGCE5-kSiKm2RexrGQ7SMUTyPmEc/s400/toys.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706839621349677666" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 290px; " /></a><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p></span></div>Aparna Dixithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00657183054155857968noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8467044689452839994.post-4703785490025834562011-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:002012-02-08T11:01:57.798-08:00Social Media Trend Alert: Hot Holiday Toys<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; text-align: left; "><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; text-align: left; ">Over the Thanksgiving holidays, shoppers lined up at stores like Toys "R" Us to snag some of the hottest toys of the season. With the black friday shopping frenzy behind us, we looked into the social media buzz behind some of the most popular toys.</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif;font-size:12px;"><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><a href="http://socialsense.walmartlabs.com/2011/11/30/flying-sharks-and-smart-phone-controlled-helicopters/air-swimmers/" rel="attachment wp-att-954" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; "><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-954" title="Air Swimmers" src="http://c802719.r19.cf2.rackcdn.com/2011/11/Air-Swimmers.png" alt="" width="174" height="218" style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 4px; margin-right: 24px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; float: left; display: inline; max-width: 100%; height: auto; " /></a>After looking at this holiday season's most desired toys, it's clear that there is a rising trend in remote-controlled toys. These toys, such as Air Swimmers, Air Hogs, and Syma Helicopters are climbing to the top of many children's (and adults') holiday wish lists.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; ">According to the trends over the past 90 days, Syma Helicopters are at the top of the list with the strongest Social Media Index. Evident in the graph below, remote-controlled toys, especially Air Swimmers, seem to be trending upwards and could turn out to be among the most popular holiday gifts this year.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; ">In case you are wondering, <a href="http://youtu.be/vIJINiK9azc" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; ">Air Swimmers</a> (released July 2011) are remote controlled, helium filled clown fish and sharks that swim through the air in a very realistic swimming motion.</p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsPVJ_vmBl8nWN6ssKmDZOuFdt4j_o5q6WhQhvtAhNGeToI0HSqqw1a-bpBpEK_pfE_S-EAJtIpqfO4apuuWzqHSraLRHmY0RvP6knRd8cX58aYsdg39iAYrm90UXty575vUMS5CkK310/s400/trend_toys.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706841153377280738" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: normal; text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 263px; " /><span>The chart below provides a breakdown of the social media buzz for some of the top trending toys this season. Syma Helicopters have the strongest share of the social media buzz, followed by LeapPad and Air Swimmers.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "><a href="http://socialsense.walmartlabs.com/2011/11/30/flying-sharks-and-smart-phone-controlled-helicopters/holiday-toys_share-of-voice/" rel="attachment wp-att-948" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 204); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; "><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-948" title="Holiday Toys: Share of Voice" src="http://c802719.r19.cf2.rackcdn.com/2011/11/Holiday-Toys_Share-of-Voice.png" alt="" width="1032" height="773" style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: auto; display: block; clear: both; max-width: 100%; height: auto; " /></a></p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p><p style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; "> </p></span>Aparna Dixithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00657183054155857968noreply@blogger.com