Walmart announced the launch of WalmartLabs in India today, which focuses on the intersection of social, mobile and retail. Anand Rajaraman, SVP at Walmart Global Commerce, speaking at the NASSCOM Product Conclave in Bangalore, said that in the last two-three years, there has been a fundamental change in consumer behavior, in terms of the importance of mobile and social, and for the first time, companies have access to information outside of consumer behavior on their own sites. Rajaraman was previously with Amazon, joining the company after Junglee.com, a company he co-founded, was acquired by Amazon. Notes from his talk: Social & Mobile Is Important: these are fundamental and massive shifts. about two quarters back, the number of smartphones went ahead of feature phones. People are spending more and more time on social media. Making Sense Of Unstructured Data On Social Networks: One of the key realizations that we had on amazon was that we can use data to improve customer experience. If you've used Amazon, you'll have people who bought this product also bought the other one. The interesting thing is that the data that most companies had access to was gathered at the company itself. I can use this information to make the site better. The change now is that there is massive data on Facebook and Twitter, much more than on my site. So Far, we've had data on how customers interact with us, but not what they're doing when they're not interactive with us. All this data,…
