BizSugar.com › Products and Services › Wal-Mart Buys Social Media Site Kosmix

Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s largest retailer, has agreed to buy Kosmix, a social media start-up focused on e-commerce, for an undisclosed sum, as valuations for social media companies like Groupon soar.“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” Eduardo Castro-Wright, vice chairman at Wal-Mart, said in the statement on Monday. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping.”Kosmix, based in Mountain View, Calif., was founded in 2005 by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, and acts as a social media filter aggregating information by topic from Web sites, Twitter messages and other sources in real time — a potentially important new way to give shoppers information, and get it from them.