“A lot of companies take existing e-commerce sites and try to replicate that experience within Facebook; that doesn’t make much sense, because there’s nothing new there,” says Anand Rajaraman, one half of an Indian duo building social- and mobile-powered commerce products for Walmart (the division prefers the Twitter-style moniker @WalmartLabs). Their Shopycat app looks at Facebook as a huge stream of data to predict what gifts your friends will like. It works (very roughly) like this:
Click here to read tips on how to work as a pair from Rajaraman & Harinarayan and Flavio Pripas & Renato Steinberg, No. 54 on our Most Creative People list.
Timeline
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1996
Both earn PhDs in computer science at Stanford University
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1996
Cofound Junglee, a shopping comparison site that Amazon acquires two years later for $250 million
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1998
Help create Amazon’s third-party marketplace
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2000
Found Cambrian Ventures, a venture capital firm that would invest in Yousendit, theFind, Mobissimo, and other tech companies
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2005
Cofound Kosmix, a social media search engine that Walmart acquires in 2011