
Rakuten Acquires Viki for $200 Million - bearwithclaws
http://allthingsd.com/20130901/exclusive-japans-rakuten-acquires-viki-video-site-for-200-million/
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robryan
I really like what Rakuten is doing, they are leveraging the profits that the
Rakuten marketplace in Japan brings in the acquire what I would term as second
tier marketplaces around the world.

Buy.com in the US appears to be slowly being overhauled and Play.com in the UK
is aggressively expanding out into new categories for 2 examples.

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yalogin
Didn't they end up destroying the name recognition buy.com had in the US? Had
they kept the name the same and put more money into the business it would have
made sense. I don't understand their business.

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VexXtreme
They say that the CEO of Rakuten is a really weird and eccentric person. A few
years ago he instated a company wide policy that all staff must use English
for any and all business within the company. Since most Japanese people can't
speak English, he ended up creating a really weird atmosphere where people
pretend to use English but really end up secretly (or not so much) conducting
business in Japanese.

In short, he's a weirdo, though a successful one.

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CrossWired
My wife works for one of their companies here in the US, and yes, they do all
meetings in English, which really doesn't affect their US companies,but does
make company wide meetings quite odd, painful at points.

