Kobo, the Canadian e-reader, tablet and e-book company owned by Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten, today unveiled its newest device, the Aura HD, a limited-edition e-reader it’s aiming it at power bookworms, with a 265dpi resolution on a 6.8-inch screen, 4 gigabytes of storage and a two-month battery life for the premium price of $169.99 (£139.99). The announcement, made in London to coincide with… → Read More
Apple will launch an ebook service in Japan fueled with content from top local publishers, according to Japanese financial publication Nikkei (via The Digital Reader).
Apple will begin selling Japanese language ebooks later this month for reading on iPhones and iPads. iPads currently hold about a 60% share of that country’s tablet market in terms of units shipped in April to September. → Read More
Today, at Y Combinator’s Startup School at Stanford University, Rakuten Founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani took the stage to talk about the company’s culture, acquisitions and its crazy growth over the last year.
Mikitani said that Rakuten was currently seeing about $5 billion/year in revenues and that 25 percent of that revenue was coming from mobile mobile phones, both feature and smartphones. → Read More
A changing of the guard at Buy.com, which was bought by Japan’s Rakuten in May 2010. Long-serving executives CEO/president Neel Grover and COO Greg Giraudi are stepping down from their roles, effective September 1. Grover had been instrumental behind the sale of the e-commerce site to the Japanese giant for $250 million.
The memo does not make clear why the pair are leaving, but it coincides… → Read More
Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.
First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes… → Read More
Amazon, take (another) note.
Rakuten, a massive consumer and business-focused Internet service company, this morning announced that it has acquired e-commerce site Play.com, one of the UK’s largest online retailers.
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by Rakuten’s board, the e-business giant is paying approximately £25 million (3.3 billion yen or roughly $39.2… → Read More
Panasonic is prepping an Android 2.2-powered e-book reader/tablet hybrid [JP] that’s specifically designed for the Japanese market. The device will offer e-books through a store set up by Rakuten, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, with the initial line-up including a total of at least 10,000 titles. → Read More
Japanese online retail juggernaut Rakuten is expanding its reach to South America with the acquisition of a 75% stake in Ikeda, a provider of e-commerce services to many of Brazil’s largest retailers.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Rakuten, Japan’s biggest e-commerce company ($10 billion market cap), and Chinese search leader Baidu have today opened a new online shopping mall in China. Dubbed Lekutian (“Happy Cool Day” in Chinese), the launch of the site was announced back in January. Both web powerhouses will invest US$50 million over the next three years in their joint venture. → Read More
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten this morning announced that it is buying France’s e-commerce website operator PriceMinister for about €200 million, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The news comes less than a month after word got out that Rakuten moved to acquire US-based Buy.com for approx. the same price ($250M). → Read More
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten this morning announced that it is buying France’s e-commerce website operator PriceMinister for about €200 million (roughly $250 million), reports the Wall Street Journal.
The news comes less than a month after word got out that Rakuten moved to acquire US-based Buy.com for about the same price. → Read More
When I covered Rakuten back in July last year, I called it “the biggest e-commerce site you never heard of”. And in fact, the eponymous Japanese company behind the B2B2C market place (which is currently used by over 33,000 Japanese merchants) generated less than 10% of total sales overseas at that time. But that’s about to change very soon.
Rakuten (which, in its home market, is much bigger than… → Read More
Chinese search leader Baidu and Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce player, have announced an agreement to jointly invest US$50 million over three years in a joint venture to build a huge online ‘B2B2C’ shopping mall for Chinese Internet users.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rakuten will become majority shareholder of the new, yet to be named joint venture (51%) with Baidu owning the remaining… → Read More
The term “e-commerce” still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it’s a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%). For the US alone, B2C sales are expected to grow from $130 billion this year to over $200 billion by 2013… → Read More
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