By Kevin McCauley
Wal-Mart Stores signed a deal to acquire Kosmix, the Mountain View, Calif.-based social and mobile commerce company in Mountain View, Calif.
The firm was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, whose first company Junglee as sold to Amazon.com in 1998.
With completion of the acquisition slated by the end of June, Kosmix will become part of @WalmartLabs, the retailer’s Silicon Valley think tank.
Wal-Mart vice chairman CEO Eduardo Castro-Wright says the deal was made because "social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming part of our customers' day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping both online and in retail stores."
Kosmix, a platform to break down social content by topic, is paired with RightHealth, health and medical information, and TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events that attracted more than 5M visitors last year.
Wal-Mart registered fiscal 2011 revenues of $419B.
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