Viber is Rakuten's latest acquisition following Kobo, Wuaki.tv and Viki.
Japan's Rakuten will acquire instant messaging and calling app developer Viber Media for US$900 million, the e-commerce giant said Friday, highlighting its moves to penetrate new markets.
Rakuten's purchase of the messaging and VoIP company follows its acquisitions of Canada's e-book platform Kobo, Spanish video service Wuaki.tv, and Viki, a digital content platform.
The company aims to be the world's number one Internet services company, and buying Viber compliments its strategy in the digital space.
Founded by CEO Talmon Marco, Viber adds some 300 million registered users to Rakuten Group's user base, which numbers about 225 million across its 40 services around the world.
Viber has rocketed in popularity as a potential rival to Skype, announcing 100 million worldwide users in September 2011, and then more than 200 million in May of 2013.
The Viber app is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows, Windows 8, Mac, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or Wi-Fi connections. Besides providing access to Rakuten to new markets, the deal will offer new potential markets for Viber through Rakuten users.
Creating a strong company culture may sound like a daunting task, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. In fact, company culture is created in exactly the same fashion as a religion or democracy. Behaviours created from the organisation’s inception are reinforced over time by leadership, attracting like-minded people and eventually reaching critical mass to become an accepted ‘truth’.
The question I get asked most regularly these days is: ‘Do I need to rebuild my company’s systems on Blockchain?’ And the answer, every time, is ‘No, you’re asking the wrong question’.
Throughout my career, I have witnessed a litany of brand names that profess to have a unique customer value proposition (CVP). In reality, however, they’ve had little more than a ‘value proposition’: A simple list of benefits applied to a general audience.
In this bonus last episode of this new podcast series, BrandHook MD, Pip Stocks, talks with former ANZ group general manager of marketing, Louise Eyres, talks about the importance of thinking like a customer and using intuition to solve customer painpoints.
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