Wal-Mart wants to make shopping more social and helping it to do so is a company founded by two Indians, which the world’s largest retailer acquired for a reported $300 million in April this year. Venky Harinarayan, one of the two founders of Kosmix, now called @WalMartLabs, says the innovation they are working on now will be ready for launch later this year, ahead of the holiday season. It will leverage social media data to make the shopping experience much better.

“We are not in a position yet to talk about exactly what product we will be launching or the timeframe. But what I can tell say is that we are definitely close to launching some stuff. When you think about how retailers around the world approach the holiday season and the importance of the season to their sales, it is equally important for us as well. Therefore, we are looking at that season as the right time to launch some products,” Harinarayan told Financial Chronicle from California.

While Harinarayan declined to give what specific products will drive the mega retailer’s social strategy through @Wal-MartLabs, he says the aim is to address the two very disruptive platforms: social media and mobile.

According to him, it was their categorisation technology that was able to categorise and organise data on the social web, which attracted Wal-Mart’s interest.

“We are able to apply the categorisation technology to social media firehouses, so we could really make interesting databases of how people, places and things are connected to each other. And this information will ultimately help Wal-Mart provide better recommendations for people to make purchases,” he said.

On how the categorisation technology will be used, he said, “Suppose if someone tweets about a particular Indian cricketer and the Test match at Lord’s, what we know is the person, his or her interest in cricket and the place. And we make connections and build a profile of the person, the place and thing like that. As more updates come in, we make stronger profiles of the person and the place. From that, we build amazing interconnected graphs of how people, places and things are related to each other and what is really interesting, and apply that to a shopping context. So, we could help people make better buying decisions, gift better, make better recommendations, and a whole bunch of applications based on how people are interacting with other places and things. This is what attracted Wal-Mart.”

Shopping, according to him, is about helping customers in their buying decisions and not about pushing products to them.

Harinarayan says there are shopping experiences or shopping occasions where you are in the process of connecting with your friends using products, like during holidays, giving gifts, gift buying and gift giving. “How do you make the experience different? Can we recommend products for your friends much more efficiently? That is one of the things we are working on,” he said.

“If Amazon leveraged the transactional data to make the shopping experience much better; today what we are doing is leveraging social data to make the shopping experience much better. Social data, in my opinion, is a much richer set than transaction data. Transactional data, at some level, is a reasonable predictor of future transactions,” he argues.

“What you bought in the past is not a great indicator of what you are going to buy in the future. What you are interested right now tends to be a better indicator of what you are going to buy in the future,” he says.

In fact, Harinarayan and his co-founder Anand Rajaraman (both are from IIT-Madras) are early pioneers of online shopping. They founded Junglee, the company that pioneered internet comparison shopping, in 1996, which online retailer Amazon acquired in 1998 for over $250 million.