Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world and arguable the most controversial. Labor disputes and being in the news not for financial results seems to happen fairly often.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., (NYSE: WMT) serves customers and members more than 200 million times per week at more than 9,600 retail units under 69 different banners in 28 countries. With fiscal year 2011 sales of $419 billion, Walmart employs more than two million associates worldwide. Walmart continues to be a leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity.

When Walmart bought Kosmix in April I immediately thought that there is something bigger than a social media element behind this. Why would a traditional retailer buy a company that does social media? Inhouse campaign management or social networking management anyone?

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, early pioneers of online shopping, whose first company, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. The founders and the Kosmix team will operate as part of the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley. Walmart plans to expand the @WalmartLabs team and expects this new group will create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support Walmart’s global multi-channel strategy, which integrates the shopping experience between bricks and mortar stores and e-commerce. Walmart operates retail businesses in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries. Kosmix’s innovative technology platform searches and analyzes connections in real-time data streams to deliver highly personalized insights to users. The platform powers TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events with more than five million visits last month; Kosmix.com, a site to discover social content by topic; and RightHealth, one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach. “We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.”

Well it turns that my suspicions were right.

As I wrote in my prior post, our mission is to invent the next generation of ecommerce: integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue. We are at an inflection point in the development of retailing. Social media and the mobile phone will have as profound an effect on the trajectory of retail in the early years of the 21st century as did the development of highways in the early part of the 20th century. @WalmartLabs, which combines Walmart’s scale with Kosmix’s social genome platform, is in a unique position to invent and build this future.

Amazon is the defacto standard for online retailers. The fact that Walmart made $419 billion in 2010 but only $6 billion of that came from ecommerce must concern the Bentonville, Arkansas crowd.

These days, Walmart.com does around $6 billion per year in sales vs. Amazon.com’s $34 billion, according to analysts. ”Walmart had fallen behind in e-commerce,” says Anand Rajaraman, Kosmix Co-Founder now SVP of Walmart’s Global e-Commerce division, “and the board realized the issue was serious.”

@WalmartLabs – The big retailer moves into digtital

For me when I look at all of the quotes here I sense that potentially @WalmartLabs can become a huge play for Walmart. Having the ability to learn about your customers is priceless and being able to use it in a retail environment is a game changer. Think about it for a moment, the Kosmix acquisition has the potential to make Walmart a legitimate challenger to Amazon in the online retail space.

And there is no question that shopping is rapidly morphing into a pursuit that will increasingly combine mobile devices, social networks and physical stores in a blur of consumerism. Everyone is trying to get a piece of what some are calling SoLoMo, for social (as in networks), local (as in nearby stores) and mobile (as in smartphones). And it turns out, the work Rajaraman and Harinarayan were doing at Kosmix has all sorts of potential for mining social media chatter to figure out what Wal-Mart customers are interested in. That information could be used to steer shoppers to products based on their hobbies, for instance. Or the Kosmix technology could be used to analyze Twitter tweets in neighborhoods surrounding specific Walmart stores. That intelligence could help store managers decide on inventory. Should they expand their sporting goods department or maybe their video gaming offerings? “Retail is being transformed by technology,” says Gibu Thomas, a senior vice president who oversees Wal-Mart’s mobile commerce efforts globally. “What we’re trying to do is be as good in technology as we are in retail.”

Big data is one of the next big steps for eCommerce in my opinion.