
Rakuten to Buy Voice-Call App Maker Viber - coloneltcb
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304315004579382014046629596-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj
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k-mcgrady
Even as a Viber user I find it strange that it took off. Most phone plans here
come with unlimited texts and basically unlimited calls. Most people are also
on Facebook which has a great messenger app. And yet my friends use Viber
(which means I have to). And every time I ask them why, their reasoning is
free calls. Most of these people have unlimited minutes. Not only is this
strange but annoying as to contact them I now have to send my communications
through yet another company.

~~~
koopajah
For me Viber is great because I live in another country so I can send/receive
text/pictures/call easily to most of my family as if I was still living there.
And for them it is just a matter of installing either Viber or Whatsapp and
then everything works almost the same. Facebook messenger or skype or others
are harder to use mostly because you need to create an account and always have
it connected, etc.

~~~
msvan
Same here. Cross-border calls are still unreasonably expensive without
Viber/Skype. Is it there some limitation to the GSM infrastructure that
prevents cheap international calls from ever becoming a reality, or are the
phone companies just trying to milk us?

~~~
koopajah
Some new rules are supposed to take action in Europe and end roaming charges
and has been discussed before [1][2] so this might help a lot when it is in
place

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892957)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339434](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339434)

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Sukotto
/tangent

I'm considering applying to Rakuten in Tokyo in some sort of
IT/Programmer/Engineer capacity (I'm a native English speaker who doesn't
speak any Japanese...yet. Already in Japan and have a work visa).

Anybody who is working/used to work there interested in talking to me about
what it's like there? I'd love to take you out for a coffee and chat for 15~20
min. Email's in my profile.

~~~
altxwally
Hey! I can brief you up, just sent you an email. cheers.

~~~
datamatt
Fellow Rakuten Eng here - high five!

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rblatz
Still can't believe that they rebranded buy.com to rakuten. I get it that they
have a large international brand, but in the US it still seems spammy and
weird. I still need to double check how to spell it everytime it comes up.

~~~
w1ntermute
I don't know of anyone in the West who knows of Rakuten, let alone uses it. I
can't imagine their presence outside of Japan is very large.

Rakuten has done a pretty poor job of expanding out of Japan. For example,
there was their failed "Lekutian" Chinese venture, in partnership with Baidu.
Then they purchased Kobo, a Canadian e-reader company, but it's gained no
traction either.

~~~
ekianjo
I've been closely watching them in Japan, and while they brand themselves as
being an international company (using English internally), I've heard a lot of
things about how it works internally... and... they're very Japanese at their
core. I don't see them being successful outside of Japan anytime soon. Just
like 99% of Japanese companies (the exceptions being B2B companies focusing on
high quality manufacturing/engineering goods where they crush the foreign
competition easily). (Disclaimer: I live in Japan)

~~~
w1ntermute
> I've been closely watching them in Japan, and while they brand themselves as
> being an international company (using English internally), I've heard a lot
> of things about how it works internally... and... they're very Japanese at
> their core.

The "Englishnization" program is a complete farce. Just because your company's
"official" language is English doesn't mean that your workers will actually
use the language to speak to one another on a daily basis when they share a
native language that isn't English. And even if the majority of your workers
are speaking to one another in English, the company culture isn't going to be
suddenly Westernized. Just look at Indian multinationals - many (most?) of
them use English internally, but there are still plenty of cultural barriers
when working with Westerners.

> the exceptions being B2B companies focusing on high quality
> manufacturing/engineering goods where they crush the foreign competition
> easily

This is definitely true. "Monozukuri", regardless of its recent coinage, is an
apt descriptor of the mindset of Japanese businesses. For Japanese business to
thrive, they should focus (more) on integrating themselves into the
manufacturing supply chains in China by providing "high quality
manufacturing/engineering goods."

~~~
ekianjo
> "Monozukuri", regardless of its recent coinage, is an apt descriptor of the
> mindset of Japanese businesses.

Precisely. And this is why so many regular businesses like Panasonic, Hitachi,
are utterly failing overseas. They are focusing too much on the engineering
bit, on which they are very good at (and where they made their bread and
butter in the 80s and 90s), but fail to understand the concept of "product
experience" that goes beyond Engineering. Japanese pre-smartphones phones
could all do amazing stuff at the time, but the user experience was extremely
poor and they never tried to push it forward. The same can be said for Sony
and other major maker's appliances. Once China or Korea is good enough to copy
their products, they lose their marketability because they lack any edge that
would bring more value to their product. Sony in its whole was a huge FAIL:
they had so many different divisions focusing on hifi, electronics and
computing and they never could make any sense on how to make all this products
branded as Sony work better together. It's like they were all made by
different companies without any common goal or logic.

And unfortunately, this "engineering comes first" mindset has not changed at
the head of most of these consumer-products companies, and it will be the
Death of them.

~~~
sgdesign
That would be a great topic for a presentation ;)

~~~
ekianjo
Haha seriously ? :)

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tzury
Founded by Israelis (iMesh founders).

Formed in Cyprus (perhaps for tax planning)

R&D team mostly in Belarus.

QA/PM/Design -- at Tel Aviv.

This, in addition to Waze, Trusteer and others in recent months, makes Tel
Aviv startup scene as excited as NYC an SV (ie - unicorn-startups are also
available over here - $7.6B total exits during 2013).

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RaSoJo
Rakuten used to have a very strong feud running with Softbank in the early
part of the last decade, especially when it came to early eComm growth in
Japan. While Masayoshi and his merry band at SoftBank have grown leaps and
bounds with multiple diversifications, Rakuten has never been able to keep
pace. Kakao Talk is quite popular in the region and has a partnership with
Yahoo Japan(SoftBank)...Rakuten can position Viber to take this on.

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hhorsley
The fact that this is self funded is extraordinary

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k-mcgrady
Self funded but according to one of the other comments the self funding
amounted to $30m. Hardly your typical bootstrapped company.

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rahimnathwani
Where are Viber's users geographically based?

\- Here in China, people use WeChat (as do many Chinese living abroad).

\- Many people I know in the USA use WhatsApp

\- Line is popular in Japan

I installed Viber 2-3 years ago, but no one has ever contacted me with it.

~~~
dnqthao
here in vietnam, we have like 7million users

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wsr
It looks like the company is founded by an Israeli founder but the company is
incorporated in Cypress. Other than that, the crunchbase page is pretty empty:

[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/viber-
media](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/viber-media)

Does anyone know where their engineering team is? How much funding have they
raised to date? I'm very curious about their story.

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ishener
viber was founded by 4 israelies who invested $30M out of their own pockets.
the location of the developers are now exactly known but it says that they
have offices in israel, cyprus, belarus

~~~
wsr
Thanks ishener & snaky!

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msh
Anybody know how secure viber is? Google don't seem to show much.

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uchi
For the longest time Viber had this wonderful feature of being unable to block
numbers and contacts. So if you ever found yourself being harassed by an
anonymous number or viber user, there was nothing you could do but uninstall
the app. It seems that they finally got around to implementing that feature,
curiously around the same time obtrusive payment popups began taking over your
screen.

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nikunjk
First big mobile messaging exit since Instagram

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mynameisasdf
Something here doesn't make sense:

\- They can afford to spend $900m on a shitty app like this that no one uses

but...

\- They pay the average 31 year old engineer in Tokyo (arguably the most
expensive city in the world) a measly $66K
[http://jobtalk.jp/company/1527_earns.html](http://jobtalk.jp/company/1527_earns.html)

\- None of their international subsidiaries have any real traction (buy.com,
play.com, kobo)

Where is this money coming from?

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gwilkes
Ok, so you don't use so no one uses it.

Tech salaries suck almost everywhere in Tokyo.

Doesn't matter if their international subsidiaries don't have great traction
because domestically they do pretty well, that's where the money is coming
from.

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josh2600
That's cool. It sounds like it's time to start another calling company.

