“Walmart has acquired Portland, Ore.-based Small Society, a mobile application development firm that has created apps for the 2008 Obama campaign, Starbucks, Zipcar, Amazon.com, Whole Foods, Live Nation and others,” Marshall Kirkpatrick reports for RCR U.S. Wireless News.
“It’s one of a number of high-profile recent acquisitions of small startups as Walmart builds out its Mobile Labs with a team of developers,” Kirkpatrick reports. “Walmart believes it can create mobile apps that radically change how shopping both in and outside of stores is experienced.”
Walmart’s Mobile Labs have been bolstered by recent acquisitions of Kosmix, OneRiot and Grabble and its hiring of former Yahoo technical standards community leader Eran Hammer-Lahav, all lead by power-nerds Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer,” Kirkpatrick reports. “About Walmart’s plans for mobile, Hammer-Lahav said the company is ‘focused on building amazing apps for all the major platforms that are not just mobile catalogs or lite versions of the Web store, but change the way customers interact with the brand; from organizing your shopping list based on where the items are in the store you just walked into, to giving you more shopping options while at the store, to highlighting promotions and reviews as you drive through the aisles.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Quick, somebody send crap tablet peddler Jeffie Bozos a new pair of undies!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]