Rakuten to Buy Voice-Call App Maker Viber | Hacker News Reader

Rakuten to Buy Voice-Call App Maker Viber

online.wsj.com

44 pointscoloneltcb44 comments

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.

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.

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?

> or are the phone companies just trying to milk us?

This one. I used to have a mobile phone plan with Skype rates for international calls. Then it was discontinued.

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 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339434

Out of interest, have you tried upptalk?

I have never heard of this one before but you seem to target US/Canada users (at least for the free part) which is not my case (European).

Also multiplying the apps make everything harder, already teaching most of my family to use/update/check Viber was a long process especially remotely so I prefer to stay on what works fine for now!

We also do free calls for German, Spanish and UK users.

To me it is better than Facebook because Viber uses your phone number to identify you, no registration needed. And as a consequence it can tell you all persons in your contacts who have it too. I don't use Facebook but my phone numbers list is huge.

The success of applications like Viber, Whatsapp or Skype goes to show how much international communications there is and also hints at the level of immigration.

I'm curious to see what repercussions the removal of roaming taxes from this summer in the EU will have on these apps, if at all.

I have unlimited everything but along with being able to call/chant international with friends it is good when the reception in an office or building is crap but you have wifi.

i still don't know of any compayn that gives unlimited international calls (let alone free...)

besides, they started to gain popularity before the widespread of unlimited plans, at least in my country

/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.

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

Fellow Rakuten Eng here - high five!

Met a fellow at the hacker news meet up in Tokyo that works for that company. His name evades me unfortunately. You could pop by the next meet up and ask around. I think he was a regular attendee.

You should also check out Mobile Monday: www.mobilemonday.jp

Just emailed you :)

Hey, I have a Skype interview for entry-level engineer position with Rakuten on Tuesday next week. If you could send any tips that would be great. So far I have been learning the shugi and the concepts and have been reading up on Mikis vision and watching him speak at various conferences on Youtube.

Other than technical ability and experience is there anything important I might have missed?

It totally depends on the department and position you're applying for, and the people who'll be interviewing you. There's so many different things - I'll send you an email and we can chat over the weekend if you want?

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.

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.

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)

> 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."

> "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.

That would be a great topic for a presentation ;)

Haha seriously ? :)

> 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.

The funny thing is, the Chinese and Koreans are no better than the Japanese when it comes to UX or design sense. So while Samsung might be dominating the Android market for now, it won't be long before the Chinese come in and wipe them out.

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).

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.

The fact that this is self funded is extraordinary

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

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.

here in vietnam, we have like 7million users

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

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

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

Thanks ishener & snaky!

The engineering team is based in Minsk, Belarus

http://www.facebook.com/ViberMinskOffice

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

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.

First big mobile messaging exit since Instagram

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

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

Where is this money coming from?

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.

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

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