WalmartLabs acquires Tasty Labs | Hacker News Reader

WalmartLabs acquires Tasty Labs

walmartlabs.blogspot.com

71 pointsjazzychad24 comments

1. Walmart paid $300m to buy Kosmix/RightHealth to create @WalmartLabs http://techland.time.com/2011/04/19/walmart-purchases-kosmix...

2. The original Kosmix founders left in a year - http://gigaom.com/2012/06/22/walmartlabs-loses-kosmix-founde...

3. Rinse and Repeat with "Tasty Labs"

Looks like an acquihire. The things Tasty Labs were working on are not very related to Walmart.

I feel like Joshua is just good at acquisitions. I noticed he updated his position to advisor @ walmart labs today on my LinkedIn feed so I knew something was up. Nice job.

TastyLabs in the Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TkuH07z...

Based on this, it looks like they had an app called Jig. Jig.com redirects to the Walmart post, but the blog is still live. http://blog.jig.com/

Weren't those guys building some sort of complicated forum software that sort of worked like SO?

Jig was excellent, some very clear talent involved there. Curious to see what comes next. Best of luck to all of you!

"HousingMaps was a pioneer of the Ajax revolution"

It was?

HousingMaps was the first to reverse engineer Google Maps, which helped Google realize the potential of an API and motivate them to make it a real thing. That API was one of the first very popular JS APIs on the web (it was #1 on programmableweb.com for years), and may have been many developer's first introduction to AJAX(JSONP) based APIs/UIs. (I worked on the Maps API for 4 years, so that's based on what I remember).

I think it would be more appropriate to say it pioneered mashups; it was one of (if not the) first mashups.

Mashups are much easier when APIs exist. As such, gp's point still stands.

so what's Tasty Labs?

Good question. I read the article and I still don't think I know.

Impressive back-patting going on there, though.

Crunchbase -- 'Tasty Labs is a startup founded by the founder of Delicious, Joshua Schachter, and ex googler Paul Rademacher and former Mozilla Director of Add-Ons, Nick Nguyen. Tasty Labs goal is to try and put “the useful back into social software”.'

skills.io, human.io, jig.com seem to be relevant to Tasty Labs, which are now redirecting to said article.

So that still doesn't tell us any more. From this, it reads like a scheme to sell some social app to stupid industry behemoths like WalMart.

After seeing enough things that meet that description I'm starting to think that, no, really, that's it. That's exactly, and all, it is.

Apparently "Scheme to sell some social app to stupid industry behemoths" is in fact a thing.

yes, that's really not helpful :(

human.io was cool and has a lot of potential.. did it just go offline? :'(

http://human.io

There is some information here... http://www.forbes.com/sites/quentinhardy/2011/01/26/is-tasty...

I guess is like stackoverflow. But you are allowed to make recommendations or post subjective opinions.

Wonder if Marissa Mayer, who is on Walmart's board, had any influence on an acquisition like this.

Lots of subdued excitement in the Walmart post. Sounds very coporatespeak. But good for them...

So, what is Walmart paying for? Talent, or they really have an insight that is going to make Wallmart more competitive?

congrats joshu!

What's next for joshu?

and OneOps also

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