What Do Set Direction and Walmart Have In Common?

About one month ago, Walmart’s Global Electronic Commerce division (i.e., Walmart.com) acquired our entire Set Direction team–the start-up that Dion and I created in late 2010. We’re now anxiously engaged in a multi-year effort to energize Walmart’s efforts in mobile e-commerce.

If you had told me six months ago this would be Set Direction’s outcome, I wouldn’t have believed you. Dion goes into some of the details surrounding the deal, including how we came to know the folks over at Walmart and the steps that led us here.

Joining Walmart.com was a no-brainer once we grasped the size and scope of the opportunity. In my role as Vice-President of Mobile Engineering and Dion’s as Chief Mobile Architect, we’ll tackle together the challenge of creating the world’s best mobile retail applications for some of the biggest and most exciting markets in the world, such as the US, China, Brazil, and many others.

How are we going to create top-quality products for a variety of mobile platforms across all these markets? How will we be able to evolve the apps fast enough to out-maneuver our formidable competitors when we have a gaggle of platforms and markets to support? Will Node.js scale to our needs? 🙂 These are some of the interesting problems we’ll be solving. Sound fun? We think so too.

While Walmart is the world’s largest company and has an army of people already hard at work on managing its extensive software systems, we’ve been given the opportunity to build our own mobile team with a start-up culture within the Global E-commerce group. Think small teams of incredibly talented people being supported by the resources of the world’s largest company.

Want to join us? Drop me a line.