Walmart snaps up OneRiot
The giant retailer is building its war chest of social analytics
In its quest to analyze and make sense of the social Web, Walmart late Tuesday said it's just acquired the assets of OneRiot, which analyzes streams on sites like Facebook and Twitter to deliver relevant ads to consumers.
The deal comes about five months after Walmart paid $300 million for Kosmix, whose Tweetbeat property has done an impressive job aggregating Tweets and making sense of the Twitter data hose. After the purchase, Kosmix became @Walmart Labs, the division of Walmart that the OneRiot team will be integrated into.
Boulder, Colorado-based OneRiot, which had raised some $30 million in funding, was formerly a provider of real-time search technology. It had even tried its hand as a video-search engine. The financials were not disclosed.
In an interview with VatorNews, Venky Harinarayan, who co-founded Kosmix and who is now heading up @Walmart Labs for Walmart, said that his goal is to use technology to help recommend the best products to Walmart customers. The way to do that is to analyze the countless conversations and threads across social media.
"For instance, if someone is Tweeting about Lady Gaga, and they're a Walmart customer that's opted into offers from Walmart, then it's likely Walmart might serve them up an advertisement promoting Lady Gaga's new album, or other products that are being Tweeted about by Gaga influencers," said Venky, in that interview.
While it's unclear exactly what the OneRiot technology will be used for or how the team will be integrated, it's pretty clear that the team has built a pretty good analytics engine to help @Walmart Labs get a little further in its quest.
Here's what the @Walmart Labs team said about the acquisition.
Bambi Francisco Roizen
Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.
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Venky Harinarayan
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