Shared by louisgray
$300 million? Wow. I'd have taken that too.

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jon Miller, and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

Shared by katyhuff
it was only a matter of time. h/t peter kropf

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Earlier in February we had reported on UberMedia’s acquisition talks with TweetDeck, a land grab move that would have given Bill Gross’ UberMedia control of nearly 20% of all tweets served.

Shortly there-afterward Twitter shut down and then reinstated three UberMedia apps (Twidroyd, UberCurrent and UberSocial) for violating TOS policies. Hmm …

The WSJ is today reportingthat Twitter and UberMedia have crossed paths once more, and that the status update giant is also in talks with TweetDeck, offering around $50 million for the Twitter client. We had reported that Ubermedia’s TweetDeck offer was between $25-$30 million.

This move (and overbid by about $20 million) if true, would seem to be a defensive one by Twitter, especially in light of a CNN report that Gross is “outlining plans” to build a Twitter competitor. UberMedia currently has $21 million in funding to Twitter’s $360 million.

I’ve contacted all parties involved including TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth for more information and will update this post if they respond with anything useful.

Memolane, the social media aggregation startup, has launched an embeddable version of its social web activity timelines. This launch represents the first clear potential revenue source for the year-old startup, which left private beta last month.

Memolane pools together a user’s various social web identities from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Blogger into one searchable timeline. The company — which has staff in San Francisco and Copenhagen, Denmark — has raised $2 million in venture capital from Atomico Ventures and August Capital. Because Memolane is such a uniquely visual product, it’s best understood by looking at it, so I’ve embedded Memolane’s corporate timeline into this post:

The code necessary to embed a Memolane timeline is so simple anyone could use it on a personal blog, but Memolane is hoping this feature will be especially compelling to larger organizations, such as news publications, nonprofits, schools, and companies. Those entities could pay to have highly customized Memolanes on their official websites that catalog daily web activities — press releases, blog posts, Tweets, YouTube videos — in one coherent public stream. Memolane could start generating revenue by providing these more customized embeddable services to paying clients, CEO Eric Lagier told me in an interview last week.

Lagier is determined to avoid making money through targeted ads, which is how social networking giants such as Facebook and Twitter pull in cash. “We will not be using our customers’ data to make money,” he said.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide

DokDok, a Montreal-based startup, has had an email attachment management application on Google Apps some time. To make this work, it made an API to use internally that intelligently uses email accounts as if they were datastores. Recently, the company announced that this API would be renamed Context.IO and available to all.

Here’s how Context.io described the service in its announcement post:

Context.IO is an email API that opens up instant access to years of important data: conversations, business information, attachments, etc with one simple HTTP call. Our API allows you to build apps that leverage this data in a way that wasn’t previously possible without a series of complex sequences of IMAP requests.

Context.IO is a RESTful service that provides developers easy access to the information inside emails, including attachments. One of the neatest tricks it has is a facility to compare two attachments side by side, marking the differences, for use something like a versioning system.

TheNextWeb described another fun use of the API:

In November during hackMTL, a one day hacking event held in Canada, a developer used DokDok’s API to create an app that transformed his inbox into a visual representation of his social graph. DokDok says that Nicholas Kruchten’s app is the most unexpected case use for the API so far.

A PHP library for using the API is already available on github.

Like many APIs, you’ll need a developer key to get in on the fun. The service is currently in closed beta, but you can request access on the site.

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foursquare has always been about not just where you are, but also who you’re with and what you’re doing. That’s why we show who you were with on your history page, and it’s why you can add shouts and pictures to your check-ins. But until now we’d never combined the ‘where you were’ and ‘who you were with’; it was hard to get back to all of the photos your friends took at an event. So how to remember that restaurant when your distressingly flash-less iPhone 3GS couldn’t take a picture in the dim light, or the critical moment during the birthday party when your baby nephew put his pants on his head?

As luck would have it, we recently had our first internal hack day at foursquare HQ (we took a day off from our main projects to play around with ideas to make foursquare better). We worked on a ton of different things, and the first thing to make it out the door is a way of seeing all the pictures your friends took, right on your check-in detail page.

It works wonderfully for parties, elaborate brunches, and things like concerts. More context and photos for your memories. And, when your friends look at the same screen, they see their mutual friends who were there with you, and those people’s photos, too. Everything in one place. We’ll continue to hack at things to make improvements, but wanted to point this out so everyone can more easily enjoy their memories.

Data marketplace Infochimps is enabling devs to build more interesting Twitter-powered applications. Recently, the three new apps below were built in a weekend. But the speed to produce Twitter apps isn’t the only thing that’s fast. So is the Infochimps Twitter API, according to one developer.

“Infochips API has a response time of 0.2-0.4 seconds, where other industry leaders are as long as 2-4 seconds,” Andreas Krohn, API Specialist at Dopter, said. “When handling 60K Twitter users this difference is a major factor to consider.”

So what kinds of apps will we see with this level of speed and power backing an application? Well, check these three examples out.

Plum.ly

Using the Links, TrstRank, Conversations, and Qwerly API calls, Austin-based developer Steve Odom built Plum.ly. Plum.ly lets you do profile keyword searches, making it easy to find people to follow and other users in your field that you may be worth following. Plum.ly, while it has a number of uses, is great for finding people for potential meetups. Just throw a keyword and your location in and let Plum.ly do its thing.

TweepleFight

Flip Kromer (Infochimps’ CTO) put this together to instantly gauge the Twitter community to find out which topics are more popular. Simple enter two topics and hit the button. You are then shown a breakdown of how popular each topic is and a declared winner. I’ve used this to settle 2 disputes today, alone. Very handy and a very fun resource to keep in the bookmarks.

TweetDegree

There are a lot of tools for finding people to follow on Twitter, including Twitter’s own “Who to Follow” section. Developer group Taecho uses InfoChimps’ Strong Links and TrstRank APIs. The way TweetDegree works is that you simply enter a Twitter username and then you are shown a comprehensive breakdown of the top people they follow and essentially what their Twitter relationship is like. Using this information, you get a better idea of who people aren’t just following, but interacting with and “trust” more.

These three applications are an excellent use of Infochimp’s APIs and a powerful example of just how fast the data gets around. If you’re looking to build a Twitter-driven app, Infochimps is the way to go.

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