ReadWriteWeb

One of the more interesting presentations this morning at Web 2.0 Summit was Moneyball for the Consumer Web, from Aileen Lee of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lee used the Michael Lewis book, Moneyball, as inspiration for how to improve a consumer Web startup. Moneyball is the real-life story of Billy Beane, current Oakland A's GM, who got "radical with data" and successfully built a data-obsessed culture in a pro baseball team.

Lee referenced a startup called RentTheRunway, which rents designer dresses. She showed how this startup used data in order to vastly improve its service to consumers.

In April, social media startup Kosmix was acquired for $300 million by retailing giant Walmart. Kosmix had built a Semantic Web platform called the Social Genome, which organized social media data. The platform powered 3 products: TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a topic-based search engine; and RightHealth, a health search portal. The URLs for TweetBeat and Kosmix now re-direct to a new site called @WalmartLabs.

The tagline of @WalmartLabs is "Social + Mobile + Retail" and it's an indicator of where Walmart wants to go with the technology it acquired. Walmart wants to tap into social data - for example from Twitter - and entice mobile phone toting customers to its stores. Walmart also wants to beef up its online operations, traditionally a laggard compared to Amazon.com.

While the U.S. economy is still puttering through a recession, a new marketing study from the National Retail Federation's Shop.org and Forrester Research found that at least some online retailers have been able to take greater marketshare in the last few months. About 46% of the 117 retailers polled in this study also said that they had no plans to scale back their original budgets for 2009, though 54% of all respondents expect their overall growth to slow during the next 12 months. Over the last few months, shoppers have become increasingly price-sensitive, and this has clearly helped some online retailers to outperform their brick-and-mortar competitors.

Given the current economic climate, everybody is looking for some positive news, and according to the latest data from online metrics service Compete, the top online retailers in the U.S. are faring quite well during this holiday season. Compete looked at the statistics for total unique visitors to the top ten online retail sites and found that they are significantly ahead of last year's performance.