Evernote, LinkedIn, Mint….Walmart? The retail giant is now among Mountain View’s leading startup companies following its purchase of Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix. The company has now been transformed into Walmart’s @WalmartLabs division, which aims to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, as well as the entire Kosmix team, are expected to stay on-board as part of the newly formed @WalmartLabs. Walmart hopes this division will better integrate the shopping experience between bricks and mortar stores and e-commerce.
“The world of social media is exploding and for millions of consumers their social connections matter hugely in their daily lives,” said Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix. “Our work has focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post. We are thrilled to join one of the world’s largest companies and combine our work with
Samsung has hired HP's former president of PSG marketing Raymond Wah to run its PC business and is considering a purchase of WebOS, according to a DigiTimes report.Last week, Samsung denied rumors that it wanted to buy HP's PC business. This new report from DigiTimes speculates Samsung is going after WebOS instead.
The future of WebOS is in limbo. HP says it is still considering using the OS to power PCs. It's also possible HP will license WebOS to other manufacturers.But the most likely scenario is that HP will sell off WebOS altogether.WebOS could be a lot more attractive to Samsung now that Google owns Motorola. Since it's very likely Motorola will get first dibs on Google's Android updates and new features, Samsung could be looking for an alternative OS.
The still-unacknowledged iPhone 5, expected to make its debut in October, is now expected to sport a metal back instead of glass, and its screen size will not exceed 4 inches, contrary to earlier reports.Instead, the next iPhone will have a display size between 3.5 and 3.7 inches -- the current model has a 3.5-inch display -- and may also have a thinner bezel along the sides of the device to make the screen look larger than it actually is.
Other than those changes, the next iPhone is not expected to be remarkably different from the iPhone 4, sources inside Apple's supply chain have reportedly told Taiwan-based DigiTimes. Shrinking Screens Suggestions the next iPhone would have a 4-inch screen have been circulating for some time. In February, DigiTimes claimed the iPhone 5 would have a 4-inch screen, and a similar report followed a month later in the China Times. DigiTimes is apparently backing off its original report, and now says the next iPhone's display will not be much larger than the usual 3.5 inches.
