The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten (Seite 80)

[FlankerStan]

CTV Content Marketplace Reaching Millions of European Streamers

Rakuten Advertising Unveils CTVision+, its CTV Content Marketplace Reaching Millions of European Streamers

16 Oct, 2023, 09:00 BST

LONDON, Oct. 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Rakuten Advertising has launched CTVision+, a new Connected TV (CTV) portfolio of premium content and brand-safe advertising inventory from top-tier European CTV publishers. From riveting dramas to adrenaline-pumping sports events, CTVision+ will empower advertisers to showcase their brand messages at scale alongside a wide variety of captivating content—all accessible by a white glove service from experienced Rakuten Advertising media experts. CTVision+ is initially available in the UK and will debut soon in other parts of Europe.

CTVision+ offers a one-stop shop for CTV ad buyers to navigate a fragmented industry and deliver results in a brand-safe environment. Agencies and media buyers can leverage Rakuten Advertising's local strategic specialists to plan and buy CTV ad inventory using advanced audience-targeting capabilities across a curated range of publishers in the CTVision+ ecosystem.

Additionally, CTVision+ delivers premium inventory alongside high quality content from trusted CTV brands, including Samsung TV Plus, Virgin Media, Filmzie, LoveTV Channels, and wedotv. This is in addition to advertising inventory from Rakuten's owned and operated platform, Rakuten TV, which has long established itself as an effective advertising channel for top brands thanks to its 500+ FAST TV channels and vast on-demand library of premium movies and series.

"Rakuten Advertising has been an excellent partner of ours, and their top-tier services and expert insights have been invaluable," says Mitchell Cocker, Strategy Director at Guerillascope. "We're excited to see how CTVision+ expands on those services and helps us make the most of Rakuten Advertising's full portfolio of premium media inventory."

With the launch of CTVision+ in the UK, Rakuten TV inventory is now only available as part of the new CTVision+ rate card from Rakuten Advertising.

https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/rakuten-advertisi…

[FlankerStan]

4G uplink and 5G downlink/uplink exceed the average of 3 carriers

According to Opensignal’s research, 4G uplink and 5G downlink/uplink exceed the average of 3 carriers.

Monday 16th October 2023 12:05 AM

Communication quality is a concern, but research company Opensignal investigated the communication quality of four carriers and found that the 4G download speed was lower than the average of the three carriers, but the 4G upload speed, 5G download speed, and upload speed Rakuten Mobile’s results were higher than the average of the three carriers.

https://japan.postsen.com/business/102461/Rakuten-Mobile%E2%…

[FlankerStan]

Successful Viber Business Solutions

Viber’s free offering for small and micro businesses was inspired by its successful Viber Business Accounts product for enterprise-sized-level companies. In 2023, Viber recorded a 26 percent increase in business accounts created and a 31 percent year-over-year increase in delivered business messages.

New features include:
• Public business profile: Businesses can create a public, searchable business page featuring all essential information. The profile can be shared with customers inside the app or even with people who are not Viber users yet.
• 1:1 customer chats: Businesses can respond to customer requests right away over instant messaging.
• Discoverability through Viber search: Businesses can find and retain loyal customers on their preferred day-to-day conversations app where customers can discover local products and services by searching for the business name or category.
• Dedicated chat folders: Businesses can conveniently store customer messages separately from personal messages with family and friends. Users will also have easy access to a separate Business Inbox folder for storing their conversations with businesses.
• Product catalog: Business owners can effortlessly add new products or services to their business page's catalog. Customers can explore and inquire about the items by sharing the link to the product directly in the chat.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/update/2023/1010_01.htm…

[FlankerStan]

Schwierige Lage im Wohnungsbau verschärft

Die schwierige Lage im Wohnungsbau verschärft sich weiter. Wie das Münchner Ifo-Institut am Montag mitteilte, ist die Stimmung im deutschen Wohnungsbau ist so schlecht wie noch nie seit mindestens 32 Jahren, dem Beginn der Erhebung. Im September berichteten 21,4 Prozent der befragten Bauunternehmen von stornierten Projekten im Wohnungsbau, nach 20,7 Prozent im Vormonat.

https://www.msn.com/de-de/finanzen/top-stories/immobilien-if…

[FlankerStan]

Shortsellers and Competitors

New Street Research publishing nonsense about Rakuten and Rakuten Mobile ordered from shortsellers and competitors of Rakuten.

[FlankerStan]

Bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments

Bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments, which are expected to grow at a double-digit rate

To support its E-commerce business, Rakuten Group established a financial services division to provide mobile payments, credit cards, consumer loans, and other related services. Later on, the financial business spreads to banking, securities, and insurance. Owing to its fast-growing e-commerce business, Rakuten marked a robust result in financial services, with revenue rising by 7.2% YoY to JPY 0.6 trillion and operating profit growing by 10.8% YoY to JPY 98.7 billion.

Over the long term, given a less than 80% coverage ratio for E-commerce in Japan by the end of 2022, we believe Japanese E-commerce could be able to remain a high growth rate in the years ahead and continue to be bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments, which are expected to grow at a double-digit rate.

https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/article-detail/idea-of-the…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten is an important owner of Carousell

Carousell says it’s ‘on track’ to profitability, plans to reduce losses this year

PUBLISHED MON, SEP 25 20239:14 PM EDT

KEY POINTS

Secondhand goods marketplace Carousell expects to reduce its losses this year as it capitalizes on the recommerce opportunity.

“We feel confident that we can actually continue to generate healthy growth towards this very meaningful direction of recommerce growth,” co-founder and CEO Quek Siu Rui told CNBC.

The Singapore-based firm was founded in 2012 as an online classified advertisements marketplace where users can list and sell their used goods for money.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/carousell-says-on-track-to-p…

[FlankerStan]

Affiliate Insights for Publishers: Preparing for Q4 in ever-shifting e-commerce landscape

October 11, 2023

https://blog.rakutenadvertising.com/marketing-strategies/q4-…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Group’s E-commerce business is moving aggressively

For a long time in the past, the pace of development in E-commerce is relatively slow and lagged behind most developed economies due to low acceptability by Japanese consumers. However, E-commerce is rapidly growing in recent years, and the total market size has been ranked third in the world.

Rakuten Group’s E-commerce business is moving aggressively, as total GMV rose from JPY 15.3 trillion in 2018 to JPY 33.8 trillion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 17%. The number of monthly active users also swelled from 10 million to 39 million over the same period. As a consequence, the Group's revenue from the e-commerce business grew by 12.6% year-on-year to JPY 0.8 trillion in 2022, while operating profit surged 36.6% year-on-year to JPY 95.6 billion.

https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/article-detail/idea-of-the…

[FlankerStan]

Symcloud Storage advantages – the better storage paradigm

A significant benefit of the software-defined storage provided by Symcloud Storage is in the abstraction it introduces, distancing applications from the underlying infrastructure's complexities. Symcloud Storage unifies application-to-storage lifecycle management and automation.

Historically, interfacing with storage systems involved intricate knowledge of the underlying hardware, network configurations, and vendor-specific protocols. Kubernetes sought to unify this experience by introducing abstractions, such as Persistent Volume (PV) and Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), allowing developers to declare their storage needs without drowning in the minutiae of infrastructure specifics. But the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), on its own, provides minimal functionality for stateful applications and volume persistency.

With Symcloud Storage, we go beyond the mere provisioning of storage. Our design philosophy and user experience take into account the holistic lifecycle of applications and their data. Consider scenarios like backup, snapshot, clone, disaster recovery, and data migration, with application-to-storage consistency. In traditional setups, these were often storage-centric operations, disjoined from the application’s lifecycle. There was no application-awareness to the storage.

These abstractions don't dilute the power and flexibility of Symcloud Storage. On the contrary, they empower developers and operators by offering enhanced vanilla Kubernetes features like Storage Classes, which describe and categorize storage types based on various attributes, like storage performance policies, placement policies, resiliency metrics, and backup policies. Applications can thus be paired with storage solutions that precisely match their requirements, in a multi-organizational environment, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.

By leveraging existing Kubernetes constructs like PVs, PVCs and Storage Classes, and combining them with application awareness, environmental awareness and intuitive automation, Symcloud Storage guarantees that applications receive the appropriate storage based on their declared needs, irrespective of the underlying infrastructure or storage backend. This consistent storage experience, from edge to core to the public cloud aids in maintaining the application state, performance, and data resilience across different environments. From development to production and for any lifecycle event, developers and operators can predict how applications will interact with storage, allowing for better performance tuning, troubleshooting, and scaling decisions.

While some Kubernetes solutions enable self-service, they still require a lot of command-line coding and developer expertise. This is also addressed with Symcloud Storage. Anybody can wield its application-to-storage constructs across any number of desired lifecycle outcomes, without being an expert. True self-service is now at your fingertips with no expertise required, delivering application portability, allowing one to migrate across clusters, cloud providers, or even hybrid environments, with full, easy-to-use, automation.
Our approach to storage is a profound departure from traditional paradigms. We are breaking away from the status quo of storage as a detached, static entity and embracing it as an intrinsic, dynamic component of the application ecosystem. Symcloud Storage heralds a new era of cohesive, agile, and efficient application deployment and management. This fusion of application and storage architecture underscores our mission to empower operators and developers by streamlining operations, and ensuring that applications, along with their data, thrive in a harmonious, resilient, and scalable environment.

https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/symcloud-storage-driving-t…