Junglee

What Wal-Mart Has in Store for Social Commerce

Tricia Duryee in Commerce on June 15, 2011 at 5:00 pm PT

Wal-Mart’s social and mobile plans are starting to take shape only two months after acquiring Kosmix of Mountain View, Calif.

Exclusive: Wal-Mart Paid $300 Million-Plus for Kosmix

Kara Swisher in News on April 18, 2011 at 5:46 pm PT

According to sources close to the situation, retail giant Wal-mart paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix, an acquisition announced earlier today. That’s a big price for the six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic and had raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

New Yorker: Bezos' Initial Google Investment Was $250K in 1998 Because "I Just Fell in Love With Larry and Sergey"

Kara Swisher in News on October 5, 2009 at 9:30 pm PT

Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant. But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! There’s a great excerpt in the New Yorker this week.