OneRiot may not be a name you are familiar with, but the company was a major player in the real time search industry. The company eventually gave up that aspect of its research and concentrated on a social mobile advertisement network.
The company has just been acquired by Wal-mart and the employees will soon be part of the retail giant's Silicon Valley operation, known as WalmartLabs.
Anand Rajaraman notes on the Walmart blog that OneRiot is known for its cutting edge technology that analyzes the information from such sites as Facebook and Twitter. The signals that are monitored are then used to provide ads that match specific interests. Rajaraman goes on to say that the Walmart team looked at machine learning technologies, Fast Data and Big Data and decided that OneRiot was the best option.
Rajaraman also points out that some important and relevant work is being carried out at WalmartLabs, work that addresses retail, mobile and social aspects. He explains that one of the most important parts of the technology is the Social Genome, which allows consumers to be effectively matched with products and services, based on what they like. This technology will be added to by the OneRiot team to improve the process even further.