Las Vegas-headquartered Remark Media Inc. announced an expanded partnership Wednesday with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba as part of an effort to bolster KanKan, a mobile application that aggregates and organizes billions of data points from major international social networks.
The partnership coincided with the release of a new version of KanKan and the launch of a data mining platform that Remark Media hopes will facilitate targeted advertising and broaden its customer base.
With the goal of targeting millennials, Remark Media’s full portfolio includes a personal finance site, a mobile hotel-booking application, a beach apparel site and a Chinese-language education portal. The company also operates in Beijing and, according to a media release, has an office in Alibaba’s worldwide headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
Remark Media Chairman and CEO Kai-Shing Tao said in a release that an expanded partnership would provide his company with access to information about Alibaba’s 400 million shoppers and give Remark Media a dedicated gateway that bypasses an Internet firewall maintained by the Chinese government. That gateway will allow Chinese KanKan users to access U.S. social networks that might otherwise be blocked.
The partnership will allow the firm to see such detailed information as credit records and shopping habits, Tao said in an interview.
"We can be very specific in what type of information we can get,” he said.
KanKan, Remark Media’s core social media application, pulls data from major social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram and the Chinese microblogging website Weibo. It operates on two platforms, one for consumers and one for businesses interested in gleaning data insights. The updated release for consumers — KanKan 2.0 — allows users to make connections and view content on social media platforms across multiple networks at once. The app displays collections of photos and posts in geographic areas or tied to specific topics — for instance, a user could bring up a map and discover that a crafts festival was happening in his or her neighborhood based on photos being posted by the festival's participants. KanKan 2.0 also makes recommendations on lifestyle topics, including diet, fitness and travel.
The other platform, known as KanKan Data Intelligence Platform 1.0, uses data mining technology and is geared toward providing third-party advertisers with more information, Tao said.
Remark Media, for instance, plans to use the KanKan intelligence platform to enhance its website VEGAS.com by amassing data about potential users who have not visited the site. In an earnings call today, Tao said the platform could target tourists in Las Vegas, travelers who had visited in the last three years and those who had planned upcoming trips to Las Vegas.
“KanKan exponentially increases the number of people we can target,” he said in the call.
Remark Media acquired VEGAS.com from The Greenspun Corporation in August. Brian Greenspun is the publisher and owner of the Las Vegas Sun and VEGAS INC.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.