There will be a lot of Big Data talk at the upcoming SemTechBiz event in San Francisco.

The opening keynote, for example, will be given by Abhishek Gattani, senior director at Walmart in the WalmartLabs. In a conversation in advance of the event, Gattani told The Semantic Web Blog that he’ll be focusing on the idea that businesses should embrace the mindset of using external data – social and web data – to solve internal problems. “This is what happens when you run an enterprise – external factors influence your market,” he says, whether that’s a new product being launched or a lower-priced competitor coming into play or a natural disaster or economic event taking place. The data about those things exist outside your own company’s realm, but combining your information with that could lead to interesting prospects and extraordinary results.

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Walmart is looking for a Big Data Engineer in San Bruno, CA. The post states, “Do you like big data? Like really big data? Like multi-terabyte data sets with billions of rows? Do you like the idea of pulling, pushing, slicing and dicing this data in real-time using using Hadoop, Hbase, Hive and more? Now let’s add some intelligence to the mix using machine learning, data mining and predictive analytics and shazam – you have the underpinnings of @WalmartLabs.” Read more

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With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  Read more

Ryan Kim of GigaOM reports that Walmart has built its own search engine called Polaris. He writes, “Walmart is deploying a new internally-built search engine to power Walmart.com and ultimately increase sales conversions from searches. The Polaris search engine, developed by @WalmartLabs over the last 10 months, has been in use for the last few months onWalmart.com and has already boosted conversions to sales by 10-15 percent, the company said.” Read more

A recent article reports, “In April, Walmart dropped $300 million on social media startup Kosmix to compete against Amazon with @WalmartLabs. Specifically, the retailer was targeting Anand Rajaraman, 38, and Venky Harinarayan, 44, who founded Kosmix, the creator of TweetBeat. The Stanford grads also founded Junglee, an e-commerce company that Amazon bought back in 1998 for more than $250 million (where they then worked for two years, building its marketplace division).” Read more

According to a recent article, “Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix. The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms… Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs.” Read more