The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten (Seite 464)

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Alfa-Bank on Viber

Alfa-Bank rolls out services across Whatsapp, Telegram, Viber & Facebook Messenger

• February 8, 2021

Russia-based Alfa-Bank announced today that it has started serving its clients in popular messengers such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Viber and Facebook Messenger. The company stated that users can click a link, access the Alfa-Message channel on a messenger, and receive a virtual card.

Alfa-Message can be used to transfer money using a card or phone number, to receive money by QR code, to pay for purchases from offline and online stores, to apply for a loan, to register as a self-employed person, or to start a company. All that can be done quickly and without downloading mobile applications. Alfa-Message is currently available to clients with Russian phone numbers.

“We expect more efficient client capture by launching this technology. In the short run, we are going to integrate the messengers in a wide range of our business processes; in particular, convenient messengers will be used for cross-selling, closing deals and to inform clients of their pre-approved offers,” said Alfa-Bank Digital Business Director, Executive Board member Ivan Pyatkov.
Alfa-Bank is a universal privately-owned bank in Russia. It serves more than 850 thousand corporate clients and 18.7 million retail customers. The bank is developing “A New Generation Branch Network” with recognition based on biometrics and geolocation without refusing live communication with customers.

https://ibsintelligence.com/ibsi-news/alfa-bank-rolls-out-se…

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A Year of the “New Normal” – How People Stayed Connected

By Lior Hadar MARCH 24, 2021

People had to adjust to this new world we were in. Where social distancing and lockdowns became the “new normal” and find new ways of staying in touch with loved ones and working from home.

The shift to the virtual space was quick – and soon everyone was “meeting-up” via video. Viber felt this as well, with a 170% increase in all group-related activities, including chats, calls, and Communities.
Looking back at the past year, Viber CEO, Djamel Agaoua reflected on how Viber had to adjust as well. “We work tirelessly to make communication better, especially during these challenging times, while always keeping your privacy a top priority. We thank you for choosing Viber as your messaging app and are grateful for your continued trust in us.”

Viber stepped up with a solution. Official Communities created by governments and health organizations as a way of reaching millions of people no matter where they live. These Communities allowed official and verified information to reach millions of people quickly and effectively.

Communities were opened all over the world, including in the Philippines, Greece, and Sri Lanka – where they saw huge waves of people joining. Today, they stand at 2.2M, 740K, and 450K members respectively.

The World Health Organization, with whom Viber has a long-standing relationship, also opened a chatbot on Viber. It helped people stay safe and informed, which quickly gained over 2.3M subscribers.
As people flocked to Viber, we quickly doubled the number of participants in group video calls from 5 to 10. Soon, 10 became 20, allowing even extended families and large groups of friends to see each other in one call.

To start a video call in any group chat, tap the video icon and select up to 19 participants.
Luckily, Viber has many tools and options that make working remotely simple and easy. One being Viber for Desktop. It allows for all your messaging and calling needs to be on the same device as all your other tasks. This way you don’t need to switch from your phone to your computer throughout the day.

All the while never you never have to compromise on your privacy because Viber for Desktop is not web-based. Unlike solutions offered by other apps, Viber for Desktop has end-to-end encryption by default on all private and group chats and on private calls.

Easy and clear communication when working remotely is difficult. This is why many teams and companies opened group chats on Viber. Group chats have up to 250 participants, and to start a call, just select up to 19 people from the group.

Large companies can open Communities, where there is no limit on the number of members and newcomers can see the chat history when they join.

In groups and Communities, everyone can react to messages, create polls and quizzes, and send GIFs and stickers.

Quick to their feet, millions of teachers and instructors around the world, started running classes via video calls and turning Viber group chats into their main form of communication with their students.
Teaching via a group video call on Viber is easy. There is no time-limit and video calls are completely free. This means your yoga class can be as relaxing as it needs to be, without a session expiry message waiting to interfere.

Having adjusted to the “new normal”, teachers and instructors have new routines centered around virtual classrooms and group chats, to great successes – showing the importance of innovation and resourcefulness.

We want to thank the hundreds of millions of people around the world who put their trust in Viber, to keep them connected to their loved ones during these challenging times.

https://www.viber.com/en/blog/2021-03-24/a-year-of-the-new-n…

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Using the Viber app to keep in touch with family

March 12, 2021

In our current travel-limited world, staying connected to our loved ones is more important than ever. For Katya, a Market Trainer for Cellular Sales in the Kansas City area, the Viber app has kept her in close contact with her parents in Russia.

“With the pandemic happening, plus being so far away from my parents, Viber has been a lifesaver,” Katya said. “I’m able to talk to my parents in Russia every single day.”

What’s Viber?

With Viber, users from anywhere in the world can send texts, make voice and video calls, and start group chats and more, all for free. You can also transfer calls and chats from one device to another, like your smartphone, tablet, or computer.

“I came to the U.S. when I was only 16 to attend college and play professional tennis,” said Katya. “Between being so far away, being in different time zones, and being a typical broke college student, it was hard to stay in touch with my parents in the beginning. Now that we use Viber, we’re able to talk every day and my parents can see their granddaughter (who just turned one!) whenever they want.”

Security comes first

In addition to being easy to use, Viber takes your security seriously. All messages are encrypted so no one – not even Viber – can read your messages except you and the recipient. You can also add a “self-destruct” timer to your messages, so they disappear after a certain amount of time.

“We’ve tried other apps over the years, but Viber is by far my family’s favorite,” Katya said. “It helps having a reliable smartphone or tablet, too. That’s a huge part of why I love my job – I love helping our customers find the perfect device so they can stay connected to their families, as well.”

www.cellularsales.com/blog/using-the-viber-app-with-family/

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Important for Rakuten Kobo

• Revenue in the eBooks segment is projected to reach US$15,635m in 2021.

• Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2021-2025) of 3.18%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$17,723m by 2025.

• User penetration will be 13.6% in 2021 and is expected to hit 14.9% by 2025.

• The average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to amount to US$15.34.

• In global comparison, most revenue will be generated in the United States (US$6,071m in 2021).

https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/epublishi…

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Strategic cooperation across digital entertainment and eCommerce with Tencent could deliver big progress

Martin Lau, executive director and president of Tencent, said Rakuten has developed “a vibrant ecosystem” via membership and rewards, and will soon extend its “unrivaled strength” in eCommerce to FinTech and digital content. “Tencent shares Rakuten’s aspiration of creating value through innovation and empowerment for users and partners. … We look forward to pursuing strategic cooperation across activities including digital entertainment and eCommerce, creating value for users and building the internet ecosystem together,” Lau said.

https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2021/rakuten-…

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Khabarhub and Rakuten Viber launch Nepal’s first-ever interactive Newsbot

Khabarhub
March 26, 2021

In an innovative approach to reach out to its audiences, Khabarhub, together with Rakuten Viber, has launched Nepal’s first interactive Newsbot to get instant breaking news, interviews, exclusives, and updates, no matter where they are.

The Khabarhub Newsbot will help subscribers get instant news/stories, including political, business, sports, health, technology, lifestyle, social, and interviews/opinions in both Nepali and English.
Subscribers can choose between English News, Nepali News, Horoscope, Forex, Bullion, and also interact and share content directly through their mobile phones.

Viber is known to provide its users exciting new features and unlimited access in their quest for the latest information and experiences. This partnership with Khabarhub is yet another step in the right direction in the mobile-first-world we live in.

Khabarhub is one of Nepal’s most trusted digital news agencies with a strong digital presence and a reach of over 1.8 million across various platforms.

https://english.khabarhub.com/2021/26/173076/

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Rakuten owned more than 5% before the IPO of Upstart

Market Cap 10.524B

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UPST?p=UPST&.tsrc=fin-srch

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Framework and web-scale structure can compete with a standard RAN method and supply new ranges of automation to the community

Rakuten Cellular hits 1.77 Gbps on mmWave community in Japan

March 26, 2021

Rakuten Cellular achieved 1.77 Gbps throughput in a current take a look at on its millimeter wave community in Japan.

Altiostar touted efficiency and automation capabilities of the virtualized cloud-native 5G community, which launched in September utilizing the seller’s Open vRAN software program. Rakuten has an fairness stake in Altiostar.

“This can be a important milestone for the Rakuten Cellular and Altiostar partnership in the direction of industrial realization of a excessive performing, cloud-native 5G RAN structure,” mentioned Ashraf Dahod, CEO of Altiostar, in a press release. “The Altiostar container-based answer permits Rakuten Cellular to rapidly provision new websites and switch up service for a buyer in file time.”

The announcement was mild on particulars concerning the take a look at, which passed off in December, however famous the obtain pace was a gigabit increased than common obtain speeds in Japan primarily based on Q3 pace assessments from Ookla. These outcomes confirmed the quickest 10% of customers in Japan noticed common obtain speeds of 719.42 Mbps.

That’s an enormous leap from 4G LTE as Opensignal in September confirmed Rakuten Cellular’s person speeds have been a lot slower than the typical of Japan’s three different wi-fi carriers – at simply 21.6 Mbps in comparison with 46.9 Mbps. A November report from Tutela confirmed customers have been getting a greater expertise when related to Rakuten’s personal 4G community, however speeds dragged as customers roamed on different service’s networks greater than 45% of the time due to restricted protection.

Extra just lately in February, Opensignal reported massive will increase within the share of connections to Rakuten’s personal community because the operator continued to construct out – and nonetheless reported higher on-net speeds versus when customers roam. The report famous that radio deployments have been targeted in places the place Rakuten might deploy the complete 20-megahertz of 4G LTE spectrum, however the service can leverage solely 5-megahertz in lots of places.
“Rakuten has been a disruptor within the cellular area and our 4G and 5G Open vRAN deployments mirror this technique,” mentioned Tareq Amin, EVP and Chief Know-how Officer at Rakuten Cellular, in a press release. “The efficiency and stability of the 5G community reveals {that a} cloud-native framework and web-scale structure can compete with a standard RAN method and supply new ranges of automation to the community.”

https://homeofficetoolsdaily.com/rakuten-mobile-hits-1-77-gb…

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Service monetization in the consumer and enterprise segments of Rakuten Mobile

Q: Considering what Rakuten Mobile has done and will do in Japan, and what other operators are doing globally in regard to 5G, what do you see as some of the key elements that will lead to service monetization in both the consumer and enterprise segments?

A: I tell you the struggle that I personally had is trying to explain, especially for technology and operation team, that we are here because of the customer. How do you take every hing that you build, you develop, and you evolve, with a customer-centricity mindset. It’s been like honestly a struggle, a challenge to say an engineer that’s on the front line understanding as they are building whether it is responsible for core or for radio that all of the work you are doing today to drive service agility and enhancements on offering, are also all done just to address a big, important segment in our organization which is focus on customer-centricity.

When we look at 5G, you know I’ve always said that for the first time I feel there’s a technology that has the essence to fundamentally transform the way that consumers consume data allocation, new age applications, and not just for consumers but also for enterprises. And in that context we focus on ensuring that the 5G platform architecture built is not just about super big highways in terms of massive bandwidth capability at the radio side. You must also build an edge platform architecture that is able to deliver to you an ultra low latency application.I think the construct of organizational awareness about software, the construct of service agility, I believe that is going to really unleash a level of innovation in telecom that maybe we haven’t had in a while. The ability that you could introduce services in days not months–just think about the process, I’ll give you an analogy about the process of a software upgrade in a traditional network for a large element, it could be a packet core, an IMS core, or even the radio. And what happens if this upgrade happens in almost real time? What happens if this upgrade doesn’t need to wait for maintenance windows? What happens if we could do this inline upgrade during the day with the objective to drive faster delivery of services and agility to consumers. I think we are really on that edge, the edge of trying to find a big breakthrough in this industry. It’s a really exciting time in my opinion to be in telecom because I can see the benefits of what most global mobile operators are hard working on to deliver new 5G services to their consumers. I think we will see shortly, much faster than what we’ve seen with 4G, I’d say advanced applications that demand ultra low latency and advanced applications that will benefit from the standalone architecture that are being built and as well as the enablement of true end-to-end network slicing into especially the enterprises. I think the construct of both the organization, the people, and this architecture that modern networks is built on is going to help substantially advance services and mostly service agility into consumers and businesses.

https://www.rcrwireless.com/20210226/5g/rakuten-mobile-on-5g…

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DE_CAFFEINE - Fall/Winter 2021-2022 - Rakuten Tokyo Fashion Week