The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten (Seite 213)

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Strong increases in the last quarters

Anzahl der Unique User IDs bei Viber bis Juni 2022

Veröffentlicht von L. Rabe, 16.08.2022

Diese Statistik zeigt die Anzahl Unique IDs bei Viber in ausgewählten Monaten zwischen März 2015 und Juni 2022. Im Juni 2022 lag die Anzahl der Unique IDs des Chat-Dienstes für Smartphones und Desktop-PCs, mit dem auch telefoniert werden kann, bei rund 1,38 Milliarden.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/548727/umfrag…

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The future of messaging starts here

The future of messaging starts here

Mariia Martyrosian
Global PR and Marketing Communications Lead at Rakuten Viber
October 20, 2022

Why do brands choose Viber?

A global leader in messaging communication, Viber has an active, payable audience around the world and in Croatia. It offers all business solutions a brand needs for each step of the customer journey: branded Stickers and Lenses, Viber Ads, Business Messages, and Chatbots—everything to help brands build awareness, influence consideration, drive conversion, and nurture loyalty.
As Noa Bar Shay, Senior Partnerships Account Director at Rakuten Viber, emphasized in her presentation, 89% of businesses today compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Viber designs its Messaging solutions with the goal to make these experiences better for its users and the brands’ customers.

Businesses can send personalized offers through promotional Viber business messages to encourage purchases, increase sales, nurture brand loyalty, and cut costs because Viber business messages are cheaper than SMS or any other messaging app. In turn, customers get relevant offers, timely suggestions, useful information, and easy-to-redeem discounts.

Brands can also keep their clients updated about the status of their order, new bank transactions, or delivery schedules—all thanks to transactional business messages, delivered conveniently through the customers’ favorite app. And tapping into the trend on real conversations, brands can establish a dialogue with their audience. Conversational messages help increase conversions, provide around-sales customer support, build loyalty, get customer feedback, and much more.

With Viber Chatbots, brands can now provide their customers with efficient customer service that’s available 24/7, offer opportunities to shop and pay for items right within the app, and provide immediate responses to customer queries—which is a perk that 82% of consumers expect today.
Based on the data collected from January to September 2022 versus the same period in 2021, Viber noted tremendous growth in Croatia: a 168% increase in its conversational business messages, 131% in transactional messages, and 40%—in promotional, all of which clearly shows the growing popularity of business messages.

https://www.forbusiness.viber.com/en/blog/post/the-future-of…

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Rakuten Viber at Digital 2022 in Serbia

Our Senior Sales Director in CEE & CIS, Konstantin Kostadinov, was a speaker at the #Digital2022 conference in Belgrade, Serbia. He opened his presentation by outlining the industry landscape and the latest global and local trends, then spoke about key Viber figures in Serbia, and concluded with four success stories highlighting Viber for Business solutions and their practical applications.

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RAKUTEN’S DOMESTIC STRENGTH WILL HOLD IT STEADY AS JAPAN REOPENS

26/10/2022, by Yeoh Siew Hoon

Rakuten Travel strengthened its hold in the domestic market through the pandemic, increasing its share of domestic travel nights per month from around 15-16% to 20% in 2022, and that consolidation should hold it in good stead even as Japan reopens and global OTAs begin their march back into the market.

Speaking at WiT Singapore 2022, Yoshiyuki Takano, Head of Travel & Mobility Business, of Rakuten Group, said that the key to compete is in securing good inventory and during the pandemic, Japanese OTAs such as Rakuten not only expanded market share but tightened relationships with hotels. “Therefore, our power to secure inventory has increased.”

The shift to online has also been phenomenal. “In fact, Japan was not that advanced a country in terms of internet service. Online share of all consumption was seven percent before the pandemic in Japan, which is very low compared with US/Europe. However, the pandemic accelerated the online shift.

“In Rakuten, e-commerce sites and fin-tech services have performed very well after the pandemic. As for the e-commerce site, its transaction volume became 1.5 times bigger than pre-Covid.”

And this plays to Rakuten Travel’s advantage, being part of the e-commerce giant. He said that Rakuten Group’s MAU has grown to 40 million and the fact that it offers 70 services makes it diversified and resilient.

Another big shift is to cashless. “Before the pandemic, Japan was not advanced in cashless transactions, but the pandemic has accelerated contactless payment methods, and QR code payments are increasing. QR payments such as Rakuten Pay, Paypay, LINEpay, and Melpay are available everywhere.”

https://www.webintravel.com/rakutens-domestic-strength-will-…

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Rakuten Symphony to roll its RIC dice in Vegas

By Ray Le Maistre

Sep 27, 2022

Rakuten Symphony didn’t exist until about 14 months ago. Though its foundations had been building for a few months before that, the pace at which Symphony has grown, developed and influenced the market, as well as landing a multibillion-dollar deal in Germany to build and run the greenfield network of newcomer 1&1, is almost unprecedented. And Amin is hungry for more.

He believes that doubts about the viability of Open RAN will start to fade away as soon as the industry has a “enough cases in which the TCO [total cost of ownership] is validated, then I think people will stop talking about this”, he said. “Four years ago, I was criticised that I will never succeed in Japan – every day was negative news. But for me, it was nonsense. I understood that, technology wise, this is not a complicated science. We just need to put a bit of effort to uplift the radio workload and move it into high-performance commodity appliances… I just think that the knowledge needs to improve a bit in our industry to appreciate the possibility of such an architecture. A few cases will happen this year that I think might actually trigger people to think, well, this is imminent. I have no doubt this will succeed,” he added confidently.

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/open-ran/rakuten-symphony-…

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Sun Drug Group working together with Rakuten Edy/Rakuten Payment

payment.rakuten.co.jp/news/2022081500/

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Open and Virtual RAN is the fastest-growing segment of the overall RAN market over the next five years

According to Omdia, the market for Open and Virtual RAN (“Open vRAN”) technology - including systems implementing O-RAN ALLIANCE architectures and standards - is the fastest-growing segment of the overall RAN market over the next five years. Growth projections in the market have skyrocketed, with Omdia’s year-over-year projections for Open vRAN revenue over the next four years increasing 65%. Omdia also projects that by 2026, Open vRAN systems will represent 16% of the overall RAN market, a 128% increase representing $23.5 billion of spending over the next five years.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/10/26/254175…

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Real-time Rocky Linux OS is Validated on the Rakuten Mobile Network in Japan

October 26, 2022 News, Partnerships by the CIQ Team

We are thrilled to announce that Rakuten Symphony, Inc., and CIQ are supporting open source Rocky Linux to deliver a real-time high-performance operating system for Distributed Unit (DU) radio processing software.

Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms, and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven, modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security.

In modern telecom networks, DU deployment results in a large number of sites that today require individual operating system licenses and support. This does not economically scale. In addition, the high-performance requirements demanded by the radio processing workloads for 5G and Open RAN mean generic operating system solutions are not applicable. This is true for any latency-sensitive workloads running at the edge in any industry.

Since Rocky, like its predecessor CentOS, is 100% RHEL compatible, it’s a perfect fit for 5G deployments. Open source software and communities driving open development are critical for the success of the architectures 5G operators rely on, like Open RAN. The industry needs an open, real-time Linux operating system, and Rocky Linux has filled that vacuum.

That’s why Rakuten Symphony chose Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux is proven ready for the Rakuten Mobile network in Japan and is available as part of Rakuten Symphony deliverables to its customers. In addition, Rocky Linux is foundational in the planned deployment of 30,000 units of Symware™ in Rakuten Mobile and contributes to the projected 50% cost savings. Rakuten Symphony will establish a dedicated team within its cloud business unit focused on Rocky Linux distribution and is also working closely with a broad spectrum of third-party vendors and technology partners within the telecom industry to make Rocky Linux the standard operating system for running large networks.

https://ciq.co/real-time-rocky-linux-os-is-validated-on-the-…

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Nishitetsu Store und Rakuten vereinbaren die Einführung von Rakuten Point Card und Rakuten Edy E-Geld

Ab etwa Herbst 2022 wird es nacheinander in 91 Geschäften wie "Nishitsu Store" und "Spina" erhältlich sein.

https://payment.rakuten.co.jp/news/2022011400/

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Rakuten goes down Rocky road for Linux OS

By Keith Dyer 26 October 2022

Ditches Red Hat as it takes up with new Linux OS distribution for real time radio processing at the edge.

Rakuten Mobile is ditching Red Hat as the provider of its Linux based OS for the edge cloud that supports its mobile network, and instead is deploying Rocky Linux OS, from open source distributor CIQ.

Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, says that the decision will cut the cost of that part of his network by 80%, and give him a real time kernel to support his edge-based DU deployments. Rakuten Symphony will also deploy the technology as part of its stack, which it offers to other operator customers, and Amin also wants to spread the distribution through the Rakuten Group.

https://the-mobile-network.com/2022/10/rakuten-goes-down-roc…