@WalmartLabs
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Formerly called
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Kosmix (2005–2011) |
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | Mountain View, California (2005) |
| Founder |
Venky Harinarayan Anand Rajaraman |
| Headquarters |
San Bruno, California, United States |
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Key people
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Jon Miller (Board) Theresia Ranzetta (Board)Ravi Mhatre (Board) Jeffrey P. Bezos (Private Investor) Ed Zander (Private Investor) Bill Miller (Private Investor) |
| Products | Kosmix RightHealth MeeHive Tweetbeat |
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Number of employees
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50+ |
| Parent | Walmart (2011–present) |
| Website | www |
@WalmartLabs (formerly named Kosmix) is an American privately held company in Mountain View, California. Their website earns revenue from advertising related to its categorization engine. The engine organizes the Internet into topic pages allowing users to explore the Web by topic, "presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics".Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix in 2005. In April 2011 Walmart acquired Kosmix and formed @WalmartLabs, a research division, out of it.
Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. They later created Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk and started an early-stage VC fund, Cambrian Ventures, that backed several companies later acquired by Google.
Kosmix initially introduced health site RightHealth, a vertical search engine, to demonstrate their approach to Web navigation. Kosmix expanded its focus from vertical to a horizontal search engine in June 2008, covering all subjects. For a key word or topic that a user enters, "Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. The company has built a taxonomy of nearly five million categories on a wide range of topics. The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories."
Kosmix launched a personal news site called MeeHive in March, 2008 which is similar to Google News or MyYahoo!, but allows users to customize their interests to a greater degree. Meehive was shut down in October 2010. Kosmix launched tweetbeat in June 2010 as it entered the social media arena.
Kosmix was acquired by Walmart in April/May 2011 as it opened @WalmartLabs for a rumored amount of 300M US$. In June 2012, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they would be leaving the company to take some time off, with no immediate plans.
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Wikipedia