Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket

Nokia lands core role at Rakuten Mobile

ANNE MORRIS, Contributing Editor, Light Reading 2/25/2020

Nokia has landed a prime deal with Rakuten Mobile that will see the Finnish vendor operate the virtualized core platform of Japan's newest mobile operator as part of a managed services contract.

The deal is designed to allow Rakuten Mobile to focus on developing its service portfolio and expand its footprint, "while developing operational maturity and automation capabilities." Nokia said it will support more than 160 virtual network function instances across two data centers in a multivendor cloud environment.

Nokia was already on an illustrious list of vendors selected by Rakuten Mobile that also includes Altiostar, Allot, Ciena, Cisco, F5 Networks, Innoeye, Intel, Mavenir, Netcracker, Netrounds, OKI, Qualcomm, Quanta, Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and Viavi. However, this latest deal is a further feather in its cap, indicating it is a trusted partner that, all concerned hope, can run a virtualized core platform.

All eyes are on Rakuten Mobile as it gears up to launch what is arguably the most cloud-oriented mass-market mobile network in the world, a feat made possible because it is a greenfield network with no legacy elements or infrastructure.

www.lightreading.com/cloud-native-nfv/...57745?_mc=RSS_LR_EDT
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www.quicksprout.com/best-business-loans/

The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten | wallstreet-online.de - Vollständige Diskussion unter:
www.wallstreet-online.de/diskussion/...ide-e-commerce-rakuten

As part of our commitment to transit access, we’re helping commuters connect with transit more seamlessly.

From Feb. 14 through April 30, Lyft is offering $3 weekday rush hour Shared rides to and from select LA Metro rail stations. For a limited time, we’re also giving riders $10 in TAP credit after taking three rides with this promo.

First-last mile connections

Commuting is one of the biggest pain points of navigating the vast and congestion-filled city of LA. And that can make connecting with transit an uphill battle. To help make commuting easier, we’re offering flat-fare Shared rides to and from select Metro stations.

www.lyft.com/blog/posts/...ecting-you-to-your-transit-commute

Kursziel erhöht - Rating-Update: Brian Fitzgerald, Analyst von Wells Fargo Advisors, stuft die Aktie des Fahrdienstvermittlers Lyft Inc. weiterhin mit dem Votum "overweight" ein. Das Kursziel wurde von 60,00 auf 70,00 USD erhöht.

www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/...6-lyft-kursziel-erhoeht

In a marketplace crowded with competition, ride-hailing pioneer Uber still dominates the US transportation-sharing economy. But as the first mover's growth slows, its main competitor Lyft will increasingly claim market share.

We estimate that 74.5% of transportation-sharing users in the US will use Uber in 2020, compared with 54.0% who will use Lyft. Over the next three years, Lyft will continue to grow its share of transportation-sharing users at faster rates than those of Uber, according to our latest forecasting report, “US Sharing Economy 2020.”

By the end of 2023, Lyft’s share of transportation-sharing users will reach 59.0%, less than 13 percentage points behind Uber.

www.emarketer.com/content/...ser-share-from-uber-through-2023

readies for April launch in Japan
by
Bevin Fletcher |
Feb 26, 2020 12:15pm

“We intend to export what we have built outside of Japan as well,” said Rakuten’s chief executive and founder Mickey Mikitani, speaking during a livestream of a Qualcomm event that was held instead of a press event at MWC 2020. That show was cancelled earlier this month over concerns of COVID-19.

“Rakuten Mobile is not just about Japanese mobile network operator service, but we want to become – together with Qualcomm and others – [a] global MNO platform service,” continued Mikitani.

Mikitani did not provide additional details, but earlier in the presentation noted that Rakuten – an e-commerce giant that has created an ecosystem of other services it offers including online banking, mobile payments and messaging apps among others – had 1.4 billion global members in 2019.

“It is absolutely real,” said Amin of the virtualized mobile network. “It’s delivering capacity that is unprecedented, it’s delivering cost savings that’s unimaginable.” He noted those savings are not only related to cellular capital expenditures, but to operating expenditures, with only 130 people on Rakuten Mobile’s network operation team today.

Amin reiterated that one of the most fundamentally different aspects of Rakuten’s network is the virtualized radio access portion, which in contrast to core infrastructure, is where billions of dollars are usually spent.

www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/...ies-for-april-launch-japan

kenshoo.com/...the-roas-for-oneill-with-kenshoo-optimization/

Vom Qualcomm Event "What`s next in 5G", bei ca. 1h15min geht es dann um Rakuten, wobei es m.E. sinnvoll ist, die „Untertitel“ einzuschalten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SaM1IkpeSk

als den Kursrückgang bei Lyft, habe ich erneut einen Nachkauf getätigt.

A year later, Rakuten's mobile optimism remains undimmed

Japan's Rakuten arrived in Barcelona, Spain, like a freight train at last year's MWC trade show, promising to completely upend the industry with a radical new network architecture designed to dramatically cut down expenses.

Today, a year later, there's certainly some dirt under Rakuten's fingernails, hinting at the difficulties it has encountered so far. But in an online presentation by Qualcomm this week intended to replace the company's 2020 MWC press conference that was canceled due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, Rakuten executives remained decidedly optimistic.

The Rakuten Mobile network is "delivering cost savings that is unimaginable," said Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin. "It's no pie in the sky"

Rakuten's Mikitani: "Now we are ready to launch our service," he declared.

Although that's a significant delay from an October 2019 launch date Rakuten executives had touted at last year's MWC, it nonetheless represents clear progress by Rakuten on its promise to launch "the world's first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native network."

Amin said the company's network is supporting 99.7% availability as it scales up from 5,000 users added in October 2019 to 20,000 added in January 2020. And Rakuten recently reiterated its plans to launch 5G by June 2020.

www.lightreading.com/5g/...ism-remains-undimmed/d/d-id/757773

LONDON 27th January 2020 – Currencycloud, the leader in providing embedded B2B cross-border payments for platforms of the future, today announces that it has secured an additional $80 million in funding to fuel the next phase of its growth story.  

As part of its Series E funding round, Currencycloud received new backing from leading global institutions such as Visa, International Finance Corporation (a member of the World Bank Group), BNP Paribas, SBI Group and Siam Commercial Bank. Visa, who partnered with Currencycloud in 2019 to deliver innovation in travel payments, will see Colleen Ostrowski, SVP and Treasurer of Visa Inc, join the board.

Existing backers Sapphire Ventures, Notion Capital, GV, Accomplice, and Anthemis, also participated in the round. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to over $140 million.

www.currencycloud.com/company/news/item/...ecures-80-million/


API-Based Money Mover Currency Cloud Taps Sapphire Ventures And Rakuten For $18M
Ingrid Lunden@ingridlunden / 10:57 am CEST • June 23, 2015

Currency Cloud, a UK-based provider of cross-border money transferring services that are in turn used by a number of money transfer and payments businesses, has landed an $18 million round of funding. The Series C round — which brings the total raised by the company since 2012 to $36 million — is notable not only because it underscores progress for the company, but also because of who is doing the investing.

Sapphire Ventures — the now-independent venture arm of SAP — led the round with participation also from Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten.

techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/...re-ventures-and-rakuten-for-18m/

London and New York – Currencycloud, the world’s leading cross border payments platform today announced $25 million (GBP £20M) in Series D funding with a new investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and additional funding from the existing investors – Notion Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Rakuten FinTech Fund, and Anthemis. Total investment in the five-year-old company now stands at £44 million ($61 million).

Posted On
9th March 2017

www.currencycloud.com/company/news/item/...cloud-secures-25m/

Higher in 2020  - Market rationalization and cost-cutting will spark a 2020 rebound in Lyft stock
By Luke Lango, InvestorPlace Markets Analyst Feb 6, 2020, 2:39 pm EST

Both companies will continue to cut costs and raise fees throughout 2020 as they make a big push towards profitability. This will ultimately result in margin improvements, narrower losses and enhanced visibility with respect to long-term profit growth prospects. All of those good outcomes will help propel a 2020 rebound in Lyft stock.

It is important to note that, even though Lyft is focused on cost-cutting in 2020, the company won’t lose much (if any) ride-sharing momentum.

This is for two reasons. First, the North American ride-sharing market in which Lyft operates is a two-horse race, and the other horse (Uber) is also cutting costs. Lyft’s only true competitor, Uber, is also making significant cuts to its marketing team and also raising fees.

Second, secular ride-sharing adoption tailwinds remain robust. In the absence of price-cutting and big marketing spend, what will drive Lyft’s revenues higher in 2020 and beyond are ride-sharing adoption tailwinds, which remain healthy. Traffic is still a problem, especially in urban areas. Parking is still a problem, especially in urban areas. Car rentals are still expensive. Consumers still like to go out and drink at nights.

So long as those things remain true, there will remain growing demand for ride-sharing services in North America. And, so long as that remains true, Lyft’s revenues will keep moving higher.

investorplace.com/2020/02/...drive-lyft-stock-higher-in-2020/

Raises $18M
By PYMNTS
Posted on February 27, 2020

Dahmakan, a Malaysian food delivery startup that uses menus and cloud kitchens, has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round, according to a report by TechCrunch.

Participants in the round include Rakuten Capital, White Star Capital, JAFCO Asia and GEC-KIP Fund, food delivery app Woowa Brothers, Partech Partners and Y Combinator.

Dahmakan’s full-stack platform features an operating system that is end to end and oversees every part of its process, from developing a recipe to delivering the food to a person’s doorstep. It offers 40 dishes a week based on a database of about 2,000. The company picks its menu every week through customer data, food preferences and spending habits of customers.

CEO Jonathan Weins, when speaking with Business Times, said the company’s operating system helps the kitchens to be more profitable and operate more efficiently than competing quick-service restaurants (QSRs).

www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/...-raises-18-million/

Cyndx 3.0 Makes it Even Easier to Quickly Find the Next Unicorn

NEW YORK, May 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyndx, the leading investment search and discovery tool, today announced the launch of Cyndx 3.0 to incorporate precision filtering and collaborative toolkits into the world's most comprehensive investment search platform.

Using artificial intelligence and semantic processing, Cyndx analyzes textual data from more than 7.3 million companies and 1.4 million transactions. Cyndx provides a complete set of global companies matched and mapped to each custom search in order to help investors, investment bankers, family offices, business owners, and entrepreneurs find each other faster and more effectively.

Founded in 2013, Cyndx is an AI-powered financial technology company that is making it easier to discover business opportunities. The collaborative result of seasoned investment bankers, data scientists, and M&A specialists, Cyndx provides secure cloud-based solutions to help companies, including startups and financial institutions, to obtain comprehensive, algorithmically-curated investor information and strategic recommendations to enhance their capital raising and M&A efforts.

www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/...xt-unicorn-300841761.html

Announcing a New Partnership Between Argyle Group and Cyndx
Argyle Members Will Now Have Access to the Most Comprehensive Investment Search & Discovery Tool

NEW YORK, September 16, 2019 (Newswire.com) - Cyndx is an advanced AI-driven investment search platform that gives companies, investors and financial institutions access to a broad spectrum of curated data to enhance capital raising, M&A transactions, and other business opportunities.

Argyle brings business information and thought leadership to leading professionals from Fortune 1000 companies in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Argyle serves a curated membership community of over 2 million business leaders in finance, information technology, marketing, data analytics, strategy, customer engagement, human capital, supply chain, and security.

www.newswire.com/news/...ween-argyle-group-and-cyndx-20996481

de.cointelegraph.com/news/...onds-on-the-blockchain-to-wechat

Rakuten Mobile, Altiostar to launch container-based 5G radio access network platform
Friday 28 February 2020

Altiostar announced that it's launching what it calls the world’s first container-based, cloud-native 5G radio access network (RAN) software. The platform was created in collaboration with Intel and will be deployed with Rakuten Mobile in Japan. As an industry first, this platform takes the open virtualised RAN concept, pioneered by Altiostar, and further decomposes the network functions into containerised applications that are fast to deploy, can be individually upgraded and offer better network scalability. The new vRAN software dramatically improves the economics, deployability and scalability of 5G RANs for mobile network operators (MNOs).

The server platforms that drive the virtualisation technologies in Rakuten Mobile’s network are based on high performance Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. As part of this project, Intel will release various Kubernetes plugins that make possible the deployment of RAN and MEC application containers on Intel architecture.

www.telecompaper.com/news/...access-network-platform--1328436

global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2020/...category=corp%20ir

Denkbar ist vielleicht auch eine Kompromisslösung.

per month to undercut rivals: Nikkei
March 01, 2020 06:27 pm
By Sam Nussey

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Rakuten Inc plans to set its big data mobile plan at 2,980 yen ($27.68) per month, or less than half of major rivals' offerings, the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday.

Rakuten has attracted global attention as it says it has radically cut the cost of network construction by using cloud-based software and commoditized hardware instead of proprietary equipment.

The company, which hopes the mobile service will drive traffic to its ecommerce and finance offerings, has pushed back the launch of the network after suffering build-out delays, with trial users having connection problems.

wiky.com/2020/03/02/...n-per-month-to-undercut-rivals-nikkei/

"It is difficult to make a clear comparison between data plans offered by different mobile carriers due to the complexity of the plans and campaign pricing. However, a rough comparison is possible. NTT Docomo currently offers a 60GB a month plan for ¥6,980. Softbank is offering an unlimited data plan for ¥7,480 per month and SoftBank has a 50GB monthly plan for the same amount.
RakutenMobile’s plan to offer a high-usage data plan for ¥2,980 a month would be a shot across the bow for the big carriers. The company is even considering offering an unlimited data plan for that amount.

With consumers increasingly streaming video on their smartphones, Rakuten Mobile sees a big opportunity in offering an easy-to-understand, low-cost high-use data plan. As a mega e-commerce company that also offers many other services, including fintech and digital content, Rakuten also has an opportunity to include these other services as standard to new subscribers. Some 100 million people currently have a Rakuten-related user ID."

resources.realestate.co.jp/living/...nge-to-3-major-carriers/

The Swiss health technology and insurtech company dacadoo completed its C-round capital increase to secure funding for its global growth strategy. Over the past few years, the company has now raised total funding of 70 million Swiss Francs.

dacadoo develops technology solutions for digital health engagement and health risk quantification, and the company partners with insurers as well as corporate health service providers to bring its technologies to market globally.

Peter Ohnemus, founder and CEO of dacadoo, commented:
“dacadoo has gone through a high-growth phase in 2019 and is expected to continue on a strong growth path. We therefore arranged additional funding via a C-round capital increase and we’re very happy to report that we successfully concluded this round.”

fintechnews.ch/insurtech/...al-70-million-swiss-francs/32274/

January 7th, 2020
dacadoo announces global partnership with Swiss Life Global Solutions

Zurich, Switzerland – Due to an increasing demand for digital health and wellness propositions from its network partners and multinational clients, Swiss Life Network is continuing its progressive expansion into offering state-of-the-art health and wellness services that complement and strengthen its core insurance and risk-pooling solutions, and therefore announces its strategic global partnering with dacadoo.

dacadoo develops technology solutions for digital health engagement and health risk quantification. dacadoo partners with insurers as well as corporate health service providers to bring its Health Score Platform to market globally.

Swiss Life Global Solutions, the cross-border competency centre of the Swiss Life Group, supports multinational companies in designing high quality and compliant Global Employee Benefits Solutions across 90 countries and territories through Swiss Life Network, a global association of more than 80 leading local insurers and business partners. More than 450 international companies with over a million of insured employees are currently being serviced. Therefore, we pursue our mission with a clear strategy and support our clients to lead a self-determined life with confidence.

dacadoo.pr.co/...partnership-with-swiss-life-global-solutions

Rakuten Wallet to Provide Crypto Asset Margin Trading Services Starting in Spring 2020
- Early applications for dedicated trading accounts starts today -

Tokyo, March 2, 2020 - Rakuten Wallet, Inc., a consolidated subsidiary of Rakuten Group and operator of a crypto asset (virtual currency) exchange business, today announced that it will begin providing crypto asset (crypto currency) margin trading services (leverage trading) starting this spring. Users may now apply to open a dedicated crypto currency margin trading account ahead of the launch.

In addition to the Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) spot trading services currently offered by Rakuten Wallet, users will also be able to trade in Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP) with the new service, and also perform up to double margin trading for five varieties of currency pairs: BTC/JPY, ETH/JPY, BCH/JPY, LTC/JPY and XRP/JPY. Asset margin trading will be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year*1 through the service’s dedicated smartphone app*2, allowing users to trade wherever they are.

global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2020/...egory=ec%20fintech

On February 5, 2020, Rakuten Securities’ “Point Investment” service was honored at the “2019 Nikkei Superior Products and Services Awards” with the Nikkei Veritas Award for Superiority. Awarded each year to superior products and services, a total of 36 awards were issued by Nikkei, Inc. this year.

global.rakuten.com/corp/innovation/rnn/2020/2002_006/