@WalmartLabs Blog

The Community is pushing the Mobile Web Platform

2012-02-27T09:19:00.003-08:00

At @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.

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.

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 forming of W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group whose goals are clear:

Accelerate the adoption of the Mobile Web as a compelling platform for the development of modern mobile Web applications.

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.

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.

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.

Join us!

A Welcome to Guna, our new head of @WalmartLabs India

2012-02-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

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).

Our search attracted some of the top talent in India: 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).

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. 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.

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone from @WalmartLabs Silicon Valley who contributed to the founding of @WalmartLabs Bangalore. 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. 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.

Jai Ho!

Get Your Product on Our Shelves

2012-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

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 Get On The Shelf 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, Get On The Shelf offers anyone with a product the chance to make it to the major leagues and have their product carried by Walmart.

How does it work? Pretty simple actually. Submit a video of your product to Get On the Shelf 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 here .

Who will win to have their product carried for millions across the United States. It could be you!

Small is the New Big...

2012-01-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

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.
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:

Talent Matters
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.
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.
“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.

Product Matters
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
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.

Customers Matter
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.
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.
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.

The Next Angry Birds?

2011-12-08T17:24:00.001-08:00

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, 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.

The Hottest Holiday Toys at Walmart

2011-12-06T17:15:00.001-08:00

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 Walmart's Hot Holiday Toys.

Discussions about the LeapPad, the educational tablet from LeapFrog, and the competing Innotab 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!

Lalaloopsy, the magical rag dolls, have been popular in social discussions the entire holiday season but have breaking out this last week.

Have you seen the new Let's Rock Elmo? 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.

Here's how the other Hot Holiday Toys stack up on our Social Media Index.

Social Media Trend Alert: Hot Holiday Toys

2011-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

In case you are wondering, Air Swimmers (released July 2011) are remote controlled, helium filled clown fish and sharks that swim through the air in a very realistic swimming motion.

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.

Black Friday Leaderboard: Who Won?

2011-12-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

@WalmartLabs followed the top stories on social media during Black Friday, but where did the shoppers actually go? To answer this question, we turned to the Foursquare Check-ins.

Black Friday Door Buster Category

This year, several retailers started Black Friday earlier than ever. Walmart and Toys “R” Us started on 10pm Thursday night. While Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s and Macy’s opened doors for Black Friday shoppers at midnight on Thursday night. During the late night Door Buster period, we saw that Walmart got the highest share of Foursquare checkins (29%) with Target in second place (23%). Some retailers like Toys R Us and Macy’s had good showings as they encouraged shoppers to check-in on Foursqure by offering discounts and coupons.

Winner: Walmart

Black Friday Traffic Category

By the end of the day on Friday, Walmart (25%) and Target (20%) kept their leads in Foursquare check-ins.

Winner: Walmart

Black Friday Buzz Category

Black Friday has become pop-culture phenomena. Many opted to experience the intensity first hand by camping out outside to be the first in line or wading into the crowd to be the first to nab a special deal. Many more chose to observe from the sidelines and pass around Black Friday stories and observations. Which retailer was talked about the most during Black Friday?

Winner: Walmart

Shopycat: How To Find the Perfect Gift This Holiday Season

2011-11-30T21:01:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is the season of gift giving. A thoughtful and welcome gift is a source of joy both to the giver and to the recipient. Unfortunately, it is also a very stressful -- and often unsuccessful -- process to find the perfect gift for all the people in our lives.

The reason is simple: the way we find gifts today is simply not very efficient. We amble through stores and malls until a product we think might be a good gift for a friend, a family member, or a coworker catches our eye. This is a time-consuming, hit or miss process, more often than not resulting in gifts that match our tastes and interests rather than those of our recipients. The ubiquity of gift receipts and the number of store returns right after the holidays are testimony to this disappointing state of affairs.

Today at @WalmartLabs, we’re launching Shopycat, a Facebook app that makes gift- giving less stressful and more fun. There are two steps to finding the perfect gift. The first step is knowing the tastes and interests of the recipient. Shopycat infers the interests of each of your friends by analyzing their Facebook activity through likes, shares and posts using our Social Genome technology. For example, Shopycat notices that my friend Joe keeps posting about the Red Sox, and infers that he is a Red Sox-- and therefore, a baseball -- fan. Shopycat analyzes likes and shares to infer tastes as varied as Harry Potter, running, Angry Birds, sushi, yoga, and parenting to recommend gifts.

The second step is to search across a large universe of products to find the one “wow” gift that doesn’t break the bank. Shopycat matches users’ interests to a giant catalog that includes products from Walmart.com, Walmart and sites including Barnes and Noble, RedEnvelope, ThinkGeek, and Hot Topic. For users who are not very active on Facebook, Shopycat will recommend appropriate gift cards from Walmart, iTunes, Starbucks, and Zynga. And for last minute shoppers, the app also shows the location of the nearest Walmart store to pick up your gifts.

Shopycat’s gift recommendations for my friends include:

The “DC Comics Original” logo blanket from Walmart.com for a comic book lover.

The Oster Electric Wine Bottle Opener with WineChiller (a steal at $20!) from Walmart.com for a wine aficionado.
The “No Soup for You” mug from the NBC Universal Store for a Seinfeld fan.
The Beatles Trivial Pursuit Game from Spencer’s for fans of the Beatles.
The Angry Birds Red Peruvian beanie from Hot Topic for an Angry Birds addict.
The TARDIS Mug from ThinkGeek for a fan of Dr. Who, the BBC TV series.

Human beings are inherently social and gift giving is one of the most social activities we engage in. The “perfect gift” is a complex and subjective notion and depends as much on the giver as it does on the recipient. Shopycat shows a diverse array of gift recommendations for each friend; not all of these will be the perfect gift, but our hope is that for each friend, there is one recommendation that makes you go “wow.”

We will measure our success by the number of smiles Shopycat brings this holiday season. Yet this is only the first step of a long journey as we reinvent gift-giving for the way we live now. Please take Shopycat for a spin and send us your feedback to help us improve. After all, there are birthdays, graduations and anniversaries just around the corner.

Here's a short video we made that shows off Shopycat at work.

Welcome Grabble!

2011-11-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

The mobile team here at Walmart has been hard at work figuring out how mobile technology can be used to change the way people shop. We've hit some key milestones recently with the launch of our new iPad app and the introduction of Smart Shopping Lists for the iphone which we announced earlier this week. Yet, we are just getting started. Mobile isn't just an extension of e-commerce to mobile devices, but rather a guide that will impact all of a customer's purchases, from groceries to electronics and everything in between.

A few months back we met the Grabble team -- a small team that was started in the proverbial garage in Woolongong Australia. The Grabble founders had a vision that was very similar to ours in terms of how shopping could be transformed using mobile devices. After many long conversations and paired programming over multiple time zones, we are thrilled that the Grabble team is now a part of our mobile efforts. They will be moving to our offices in San Bruno, California, and we look forward to working together to build products that seamlessly integrate the shopping experience between brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce for millions of customers around the globe.

We are excited to have Stuart and Anthony aboard.

SocialSense Smackdown: Battlefield 3 vs. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3

2011-11-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

@WalmartLabs is working on ways to help Walmart interpret social media to predict trends and learn more about what our customers want. We are mining social media sources like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, search activity, as well as Walmart transaction data to find useful insights. We'll be posting some of our insights here on the @WalmartLabs blog. Please let us know your thoughts.

Today we saw this interesting article in WSJ about the holiday sales war between the blockbuster video game franchises: Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty and Electronic Art’s Battlefield. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hit stores yesterday while Battlefield 3 went on sale October 27th.

We took a look at how these two games are doing head-to-head in social media buzz. Battlefield 3 saw a sharp temporary spike in the SocialSense Index the week of launch. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has surged this week and appears to be overtaking Battlefield 3. However, Call of Duty 3 doesn’t appear to have the buzz strength that Call of Duty 2 had the same time last year. Will this translate into softer sales than last year? We’ll revisit this post in the coming weeks to see how it plays out.

@WalmartLabs += OneRiot; // Welcome aboard, Team OneRiot!

2011-09-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, a small team from @WalmartLabs visited the offices of OneRiot in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot.

As a part of Walmart, we're continuing to work with the intensity of a technology startup. Today I’m pumped to share the news that, within 30 days of that first meeting, we have closed a transaction to acquire the key assets of OneRiot. The technology team at OneRiot will move to Silicon Valley and become part of @WalmartLabs in September.

As I have written before, here at @WalmartLabs we’re doing some amazingly interesting and impactful work at the intersection of social, mobile, and retail. The technology at the core of what we do is the Social Genome, which enables us to connect millions of consumers with the best products based on their interests at any given moment. The OneRiot technology will enrich the Social Genome, and the OneRiot team adds to the already deep expertise we have around social data analysis.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Tobias Peggs and the OneRiot team to @WalmartLabs!

Goodbye, Kosmix. Hello, @WalmartLabs

2011-05-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I announced the exciting news that Kosmix had agreed to be acquired by Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. At that point, the deal was signed but subject to customary closing conditions. Today, I’m delighted to announce that the closing conditions have been fulfilled and that the deal is officially closed.

Today is the last day in the life of Kosmix as an independent company. It is a day to look back with pride at our accomplishments. I’m proud of our pioneering development of breakthrough semantic analysis technology, and of applying it to real-time social media streams to create the Social Genome. I’m proud that we built RightHealth into one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach. I’m extremely proud that we touched so many people each and every day: in March, our properties RightHealth, Tweetbeat, and Kosmix.com together served over 17.5 million unique visitors worldwide, who spent over 5.5 billion seconds on our services. But most of all, I’m proud of being part of the Kosmix team, and having the privilege of working with a team of extremely talented and passionate individuals who, over the course of the past several years, went from coworkers to family.

Today also is the first day in the life of @WalmartLabs. As I wrote in my prior post, our mission is to invent the next generation of ecommerce: integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue. We are at an inflection point in the development of retailing. Social media and the mobile phone will have as profound an effect on the trajectory of retail in the early years of the 21st century as did the development of highways in the early part of the 20th century. @WalmartLabs, which combines Walmart’s scale with Kosmix’s social genome platform, is in a unique position to invent and build this future.

I’m also delighted that the entire Kosmix crew, without exception, will be part of this exciting new journey. If you are interested in joining a talented and passionate team working at the crossroads of social media, mobile, and commerce, give us a holler. @WalmartLabs is hiring!

P.S. To stay tuned, follow @WalmartLabs on Twitter.

Retail + Social + Mobile = @WalmartLabs

2011-04-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

Eric Schmidt famously observed that every two days now, we create as much data as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. A lot of the new data is not locked away in enterprise databases, but is freely available to the world in the form of social media: status updates, tweets, blogs, and videos.
At Kosmix, we’ve been building a platform, called the Social Genome, to organize this data deluge by adding a layer of semantic understanding. Conversations in social media revolve around “social elements” such as people, places, topics, products, and events. For example, when I tweet “Loved Angelina Jolie in Salt,” the tweet connects me (a user) to Angelia Jolie (an actress) and SALT (a movie). By analyzing the huge volume of data produced every day on social media, the Social Genome builds rich profiles of users, topics, products, places, and events.
The Social Genome platform powers the sites Kosmix operates today: TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a site to discover content by topic; and RightHealth, one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach. In March, these properties together served over 17.5 million unique visitors worldwide, who spent over 5.5 billion seconds on our services.
Quite a few of us at Kosmix have backgrounds in ecommerce, having worked at companies such as Amazon.com and eBay. As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform ecommerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level.
That’s why we were so excited when Walmart invited us to share with them our vision for the future of retailing. Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with 10.5 billion customer visits every year to their stores and 1.5 billion online – 1 in 10 customers around the world shop Walmart online, and that proportion is growing. More and more visitors to the retail stores are armed with powerful mobile phones, which they use both to discover products and to connect with their friends and with the world. It was very soon apparent that the Walmart leadership shared our vision and our enthusiasm. And so @WalmartLabs was born (official announcement here).
We are at an inflection point in the development of ecommerce. The first generation of ecommerce was about bringing the store to the web. The next generation will be about building integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue that binds the experience. Walmart’s enormous global reach and incredible scale of operations -- from the United States and Europe to growing markets like China and India -- is unprecedented. @WalmartLabs, which combines Walmart’s scale with Kosmix’s social genome platform, is in a unique position to invent and build this future.
It is every technologist’s dream that the products they build will impact billions and will continue on to the next generation. The social commerce opportunity is huge, and today is day zero. We have liftoff!