Test Your Value and Growth Hypotheses

The leap-of-faith assumptions: test your value and growth hypotheses.

Part of developing a product is the leap of faith: a founder believes in the future success of the product she wants to create, even though there’s no proof for this yet.

To quickly close the gap between believing and knowing, every founder should formulate and test two fundamental assumptions:

The value hypothesis assumes that a product will deliver value to its customers, i.e. that early adopters will find and embrace the product.

The growth hypothesis states that the product will not only appeal to the small group of early adopters but will also find a bigger market later.

Both assumptions must be tested as soon as possible. Only if they can be validated is it worth investing the time and effort into developing the product.

Take a look at Facebook: they managed to validate both the value and growth hypothesis at a very early stage when the social network had only a few users.

First of all, the registered users were very active in the network. More than half logged in at least once a day – impressive proof for the value hypothesis.

Second, Facebook had sensational user-activation rates, meaning it gained market penetration very quickly. In colleges where Facebook had been introduced, three quarters of all students signed up within one month – without the company having spent a penny on marketing. Thus, the growth hypothesis was proven as well.

Such impressive data made investors strong believers in the future success of this new social network, leading them to invest millions at a very early stage.

Validated Learning

Find your sustainable business model through validated learning.

In order to find a sustainable business model, start-ups have to discover what their customers want and how to make money from it. They have to find the right product for the right people and understand how to sell it to them.

This doesn’t mean coming up with a great plan from the start. Rather, it requires a process of constant learning: ideally validated learning, meaning learning through a scientific approach.

To begin the process of validated learning, you must come up with hypotheses about whether and how certain products will be successful in a given market. For example, “US customers will be willing to purchase shoes online.”

Such fundamental hypotheses have to be tested, and only if they are validated by talking to customers can the start-up know it’s on the right track towards finding a sustainable business model.

Don’t use questionnaires or fictional customers though; instead, talk to real customers in a realistic environment. The most reliable way to find out whether people will buy your product is to offer it to them and see how they respond.

Take the success story of Zappos: it started with the simple hypothesis that people would be willing to buy shoes online. To test this idea, the company took photographs of shoes in shoe stores and displayed the photographs in a fake web shop. When people actually tried to buy the shoes online, Zappos saw that their hypothesis was valid.

Through this approach, the foundation was laid for one of the most successful business models of the last decade.

The Goal for Start-Up

The purpose and main goal of a start-up is to find a sustainable and profitable business model.

The  company need to be more than just a temporary pet project that will sooner or later dwindle and die, you must find a way to acquire customers and earn money by serving them including find something that people do want and will be willing to pay for.

Thus, the sustainable business model is the one that works today and can work in the future as well.

The main responsibility of any start-up’s management should be to focus the whole company, including everything being done on a day-to-day basis, on reaching this one main goal. The faster a start-up finds its way to a sustainable business model, the likelier it is to succeed.

Start-ups need to be managed differently

Taken from blinks insight of "The Lean Startup" 

Traditional management consists of two components:

- developing plans,
- overseeing the people executing them.

A manager creates a plan, sets milestones, and delegates tasks to her employees, guiding them to ensure they hit their milestones on time.

This management strategy works in established companies that have been around long enough to know what worked in the past and therefore what could work in the future.

Start-ups are different though: They can’t predict their own future because they have no past, don’t know what their customers want, and don’t know which approaches are best for finding customers or creating a sustainable business. To find out what could work, they must stay flexible. To adopt fixed plans with set milestones or rely on long-term market forecasts would be to delude themselves.

Nevertheless, many founders do use corporate-management tools such as milestone plans and long-term market forecasts. They act as if they are preparing a space rocket for liftoff, tinkering with it for years and only launching it when they think it’s perfect. In reality, managing a start-up is more like driving a jeep across unstable and shifting terrain, where the founders must constantly change direction and respond quickly to unexpected obstacles and dead ends.

However, start-ups shouldn’t abandon planning completely to adopt a chaotic “just do it” mindset either. Driving chaotically is not going to get you anywhere; someone has to be at the wheel to make intelligent decisions about which way to go.

A start-up’s management team should try to maintain an overview of their situation and keep their company steered toward its overall goal. Hence, they need to find the right metrics to measure whether their journey is leading them in the right direction.

Digital's McKinsey

Taken from McKinsey journal

What ‘digital’ really means

July 2015 by Karel Dörner and David Edelman

Companies today are rushing headlong to become more digital. But what does digital really mean?

For some executives, it’s about :
- Technology,
- A new way of engaging with customers, or
- An entirely new way of doing business.

Such diverse perspectives often trip up leadership teams because they reflect a lack of alignment and common vision about where the business needs to go.

Digital should be seen less as a thing and more a way of doing things, and it can broken down into three attributes:
- Creating value at the new frontiers of the business world,
- Creating value in the processes that execute a vision of customer experiences, and
- Building foundational capabilities that support the entire structure.

Creating value at new frontiers

Being digital requires being open to reexamining your entire way of doing business and understanding where the new frontiers of value are. Capturing new frontiers may be about developing entirely new businesses in adjacent categories, or it may be about identifying and going after new value pools in existing sectors.

Unlocking value from emerging growth sectors requires a commitment to understanding the implications of developments in the marketplace and evaluating how they may present opportunities or threats. The IoT, for example, is starting to open opportunities for disrupters to use unprecedented levels of data precision to identify flaws in existing value chains. In the automotive industry, cars connected to the outside world have expanded the frontiers for self-navigation and in-car entertainment. In the logistics industry, the use of sensors, big data, and analytics has enabled companies to improve the efficiency of their supply-chain operations.

Being digital means being closely attuned to how customer decision journeys are evolving in the broadest sense. That means understanding how customer behaviors and expectations are developing inside and outside your business, as well as outside your sector, which is crucial to getting ahead of trends that can deliver or destroy value.

Creating value in core businesses

Rethinking how to use new capabilities to improve how customers are served, with understanding each step of a customer’s purchasing journey—regardless of channel—and thinking about how digital capabilities can design and deliver the best possible experience. Developing the flexibility, efficiency, and speed to deliver the right product efficiently in a way the customer wants, or focus on delivering insights about customers that in turn drive marketing and sales decisions.

Digital is about implementing a cyclical dynamic where processes and capabilities are constantly evolving based on inputs from the customer, fostering ongoing product or service loyalty. Making this happen requires an interconnected set of four core capabilities:

Proactive decision making. Relevance is the currency of the digital age. This requires making decisions, based on intelligence, that deliver content and experiences that are personalized and relevant to the customer. Remembering customer preferences is a basic example of this capability, but it also extends to personalizing and optimizing the next step in the customer’s journey. Blend data from multiple channels into one view of what customers are doing and what happens as a result. Analytics and intelligence provide near-real-time insights into customer needs and behaviors that then determine the types of messages and offers to deliver to the customer.

Contextual interactivity.  Analyzing how a consumer is interacting with a brand and modifying those interactions to improve the customer experience. The content and experience may adapt as a customer shifts from a mobile phone to a laptop or from evaluating a brand to making a purchasing decision. The rising number of customer interactions generates a stream of intelligence that allows brands to make better decisions about what their customers want. And the rapid rise of wearable tech and the IoT represents the latest wave of touchpoints that will enable companies to blend digital and physical experiences even more.

Real-time automation. Automation of customer interactions can boost the number of self-service options that help resolve problems quickly, personalize communications to be more relevant, and deliver consistent customer journeys no matter the channel, time, or device. Automating the supply chain and core business processes can drive down costs, providing more flexibility to respond to and anticipate customer demand.

Journey-focused innovation. Serving customers well gives companies permission to be innovative in how they interact with and sell to them.  Expanding into new businesses and services will extend the relationship with the customer. These innovations in turn fuel more interactions, create more information, and increase the value of the customer-brand relationship.

Building foundational capabilities

The technological and organizational processes that allow an enterprise to be agile and fast. This foundation is made up of two elements:

Mind-sets. Use data to make better and faster decisions, devolving decision making to smaller teams, and develop much more iterative and rapid ways of doing things. Thinking in this way should incorporate a broad swath of how companies operate, including creatively partnering with external companies to extend necessary capabilities. A digital mind-set institutionalizes cross-functional collaboration, flattens hierarchies, and builds environments to encourage the generation of new ideas. Incentives and metrics are developed to support such decision-making agility.

System and data architecture. Digital in the context of IT is focused on creating a two-part environment that decouples legacy systems from those that support fast-moving, often customer-facing interactions. A key feature of digitized IT is the commitment to building networks that connect devices, objects, and people. This approach is embodied in a continuous-delivery model where cross-functional IT teams automate systems and optimize processes to be able to release and iterate on software quickly.

Digital is about unlocking growth now. How companies might interpret or act on that definition will vary, but having a clear understanding of what digital means allows business leaders to develop a shared vision of how it can be used to capture value.

Cloud services are a good business but takes time to get the payoff

Taken from www.itnews.com

Oracle profit slides 24 percent as customers move to the cloud

Jun 17, 2015 | IDG News Service

The company reported its first overall sales decline in more than two years

by James Niccolai

Oracle has reported a sharp drop in profit for the quarter just ended, with customers spending more on its cloud services but less on software that runs in their own data centers.

Chairman Larry Ellison portrayed the shift as a positive one and said Oracle can make more money selling cloud services over the long term. But the change didn't seem to help it much last quarter, when its results were also battered by the strong U.S. dollar.

Oracle's cloud business seems to be growing strongly. Revenue from software sold as a service climbed 29 percent from this time last year, to $416 million, the company said. But that's a relatively small part of Oracle's business, and it wasn't enough to offset mediocre performance elsewhere.

Sales of new software licenses, which account for roughly a third of Oracle's overall revenue, declined 17 percent from this time last year, and the fourth quarter is usually the strongest of its fiscal year, because sales teams are pushing hard to meet their quotas.

Revenue from license updates and support fared better but was still flat from last year because of the currency effects.

On a call to discuss the results, Ellison said cloud services are a good business for Oracle to be in, but that it takes time to get the payoff.

For example, he said, if a customer buys $1 million in new software licenses, Oracle gets $1 million from the sale immediately, then collects $3 million in maintenance and support fees over the next 10 years.

With cloud services, if a customer signs up for a $1 million subscription, Oracle gets no money up front, but it collects $1 million a year for the next 10 years. "It's a much better business for us," Ellison said.

That's the theory, at least, though it depends on the customer continuing their contract for the full 10 years.

And the cloud sale has a short-term hit on profitability. That's because, although Oracle doesn't book the revenue immediately, it does still have to pay commission fees and other costs.

"This shift [to cloud] has the effect of lowering near-term [earnings per share], but over time will increase it significantly," said CEO Safra Catz.

Cloud services are a highly profitable business, according to Ellison. "This is gonna shock you," he said, but the profit margins on cloud software sales are about the same as those for selling software licenses and support. "It's stunningly profitable," he said.

He also went to great pains to explain that Oracle is growing faster in cloud applications than rivals Salesforce.com and Workday -- although that might not be surprising, since for Oracle it's a newer business. "Clearly, our cloud business has entered hyper-growth," Ellison said.

Oracle's total revenue for the quarter, which ended May 31, was $10.7 billion, the company said. That was down 5 percent from a year earlier and below the $10.9 billion that financial analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters.

Net income was $2.8 billion, down 24 percent from a year earlier. Excluding certain one-time items, earnings per share was $0.78, well short of the analyst forecast of $0.86.

Oracle's business has shown signs of slowing -- its sales last quarter were flat from the year before -- but this is the first quarter in more than two years that its overall sales have dropped.

That was largely due to the strengthening dollar, which can make products from U.S. companies more expensive to buy overseas. Oracle said its total revenue would have increased 3 percent without the currency impact.

But even allowing for the currency effect, sales of new software licenses were down 10 percent. Revenue from license updates and support fees climbed 8 percent on that basis, and total hardware revenue climbed 5 percent.

IoT market in 2015

Taken from www.machinetomachinemagazine.com article

IDC: Worldwide IoT Market to Grow 19% in 2015
M2M MAGAZINE+ | May 19, 2015

Spending projections include 25 use cases to provide insight on immediate opportunities for IoT technologies

The worldwide Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to grow 19% in 2015, led by digital signage, according to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). The second annual forecast focuses on growing IoT use in 11 vertical industries, including consumer, retail, healthcare, government, manufacturing, transportation, and other industries, while also sizing IoT opportunities for 25 vertical-specific use cases.

Unlike any other research in the industry, the new forecast specifically highlights worldwide spending across IoT use cases, including smart appliances, automated public transit, remote health monitoring, digital signage, connected vehicles, and air traffic monitoring, among others. The comprehensive spending model was designed to help vendors clearly understand the industry-specific opportunity for IoT technologies today.

Other key findings from the new forecast include:

• The IoT market in manufacturing operations will grow from $42.2 billion in 2013 to $98.8 billion in 2018, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.6%. Growth will be driven by ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and link islands of automation.
• Digital signage use in retail outlets will grow from $6.0 billion in 2013 to $27.5 billion in 2018, a 35.7% five-year CAGR, as retailers continue to digitize the consumer experience.
• The hottest US market is in connected vehicles, with 34.8% year-over-year growth anticipated in 2015.

According to Bob Kraus, Senior Research Analyst, Global Technology and Industry Research Organization, IDC, “Working in concert with both IDC’s technology and regional analysts, we have built IoT market models for key vertical-specific use cases from the ground up. This forecast is an invaluable tool for those business leaders evaluating the vendor opportunities in IoT for a 12-layer technology stack, which includes modules/sensors, software, installation/ongoing services, and connectivity.”

A forecast update is planned for November 2015 and will evaluate additional vertical-specific use cases, including smart agriculture.



IoT Analytics Market to Reach $5.7 Billion in 2015
M2M MAGAZINE+ | January 14, 2015

A market analysis by ABI Research finds that the revenues from integrating, storing, analyzing, and presenting Internet of Things (IoT) data will reach US$5.7 billion in 2015. In the next 5 years, the market will expand dramatically, to an extent that in 2020 it is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all big data and analytics revenues.

Principal analyst Aapo Markkanen says, “About 60% of this year’s revenues come from three key areas: energy management, security management, as well as monitoring and status applications. Within these segments, we can generally find analytic applications that reduce the cost base of asset-intensive operations (condition-based maintenance), automate routine workflows (surveillance), or even enable new business models (usage-based insurance). These early growth drivers also have in common the fact that the economics of IoT connectivity align easily enough with the requirements of analytic modelling.”

Making sense of IoT-kind data from machines and sensors data comes often with its unique challenges, such as the need for time-series databases in storage, and for relatively deep domain expertise in analysis. These kinds of factors create a certain mismatch with many leading technologies that have been designed for more traditional, “digital-first” analytic environments. This, in turn, is attracting a flurry of startup-level activity aimed at filling the gaps.

According to practice director Dan Shey, “What is remarkable about this market is how much of the innovation actually comes from startups. Take, for instance, ParStream’s geo-distributed architecture, CyberLightning’s 3D visualization technology, or Peaxy’s work on software-defined data access. All three address some of the problems that usually come up in discussions with end-users. Meanwhile, of the more incumbent vendors likes of Datawatch, Informatica, Software AG, and Splunk seem well-positioned to seize the IoT opportunity.”

Top 10 Predictions for IoT and M2M in 2015
M2M MAGAZINE+ | January 2, 2015

Every year Machina Research makes a set of predictions for what will happen in the world of IoT/M2M. Here are Machina Researh’s Top 10 Predictions for IoT and M2M in 2015:

1. Enterprises will get cracking in IoT. We will see a lot more commercial deployments of enterprise IoT. There’s a huge amount more interest from a diverse range of enterprises. Until now it’s been exploratory. In 2015 it becomes meaningful. 
2. More productized offerings. There will be many more platforms and solutions enabling out-of-the-box connected devices. This area has been somewhat overlooked up until now, with everybody focusing on industrial/ application type platforms. Just enabling lots of ‘same’ devices to communicate may be less glamorous, but the numbers involved are huge.
3. More M&A. During 2014 we’ve seen a lot of interesting M&A, not least PTC acquiring Axeda, in addition to ThingWorx, as well as recent deals that saw Kore buy RACO Wireless, and Sierra Wireless buy Maingate. 2015 should see more of the same, particularly involving two types of companies. Data analytics providers will be increasingly appealing as companies seek to broaden their service offerings to include analytics capabilities. Meanwhile full service providers such as Numerex, Aeris Communications and Raco/Kore will become increasingly attractive acquisition targets. As the primary full-service M2M solution providers in the space, these mid-tier companies provide a crucial service path to enterprises looking to build and design IoT and M2M projects. 2015 will be the year of consolidation for these agile companies.
4. Breakthroughs in smart city service deployments. 2015 will be the year when we’ll see some real commercial success stories in smart cities, especially from services that save money. Street lighting is a good example because electricity consumption is a major part of the OPEX for the city. Machina Research’s new Smart Cities Research Stream delves into this area in much more detail.
5. Major OS vendors disrupt the connected car market. 2015 will be the year that one of the major OS players makes a disruptive intervention in the connected car market through an innovative after-market device and platform play. There are a number of interesting start-ups in this area with OBD-based propositions that are sound but sub-scale. Several look ripe for acquisition or emulation by the big boys.
6. Mobile phone as the gateway for IoT. Machina Research had already highlighted the possibility back in the beginning of 2014 that the smartphone would be integral to IoT, when for example looking at iBeacons and wearables. What will become even more interesting is when data analytics uses the mobile phone as one of many processing platforms for geo-distributed analytics (which it will be able to, given the processors and memory).
7. A year for avatars. This will be a very good year for avatars – digital representations of things that are open to standards-based Web APIs, thereby obviating the need for app developers to engage with connectivity protocols. Machina Research published a Research Note on one such firm, Evrythng, last year.
8. A crunch on regulation. Machina Research launched a service looking specifically at M2M & IoT Regulation in 2014 and it’s a critical area in 2015. Regulators are set to focus much more attention on M2M and IoT. This is both good and bad. There is a quicksand of regulatory uncertainty threatening to hold back M2M deployments, in particular around permanent roaming. We’ll also see more regulators wanting to adopt a nurturing approach to IoT. Machina Research will host a webinar on M2M and IoT Regulation on 20th January.
9. Segmenting for success and identifying role in IoT. It’s a function of the maturity of the sector that companies throughout the M2M and IoT value chain will increasingly realise that they can’t sell everything to everyone. Everyone selling into this sector will become more discriminating. This means all players will need to better define their role in the Internet of Things.
10. Privacy and security. Issues of privacy and security reach the top of the agenda. The complexity of IoT solutions will require a fresh way of thinking about security. Requirements will vary massively depending on the application, while the number of moving parts in any solution mean that there are a lot of potential weak links. Security will need to be considered on an end-to-end basis. Furthermore M2M and, particularly, IoT involve the widespread sharing of data. Understanding the dynamic and implications of all of that data sharing will be critical.

IDC Report: Worldwide IoT Predictions for 2015
M2M MAGAZINE+ | December 4, 2014

Within the next five years, more than 90% of all IoT data will be hosted on service provider platforms as cloud computing reduces the complexity of supporting IoT “Data Blending

The predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Internet of Things are:

• IoT and the Cloud. Within the next five years, more than 90% of all IoT data will be hosted on service provider platforms as cloud computing reduces the complexity of supporting IoT “Data Blending”.
• IoT and security. Within two years, 90% of all IT networks will have an IoT-based security breach, although many will be considered “inconveniences.” Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) will be forced to adopt new IoT policies.
• IoT at the edge. By 2018, 40% of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge, of the network.
• IoT and network capacity. Within three years, 50% of IT networks will transition from having excess capacity to handle the additional IoT devices to being network constrained with nearly 10% of sites being overwhelmed.
• IoT and non-traditional infrastructure. By 2017, 90% of datacenter and enterprise systems management will rapidly adopt new business models to manage non-traditional infrastructure and BYOD device categories.
• IoT and vertical diversification. Today, over 50% of IoT activity is centered in manufacturing, transportation, smart city, and consumer applications, but within five years all industries will have rolled out IoT initiatives.
• IoT and the Smart City. Competing to build innovative and sustainable smart cities, local government will represent more than 25% of all government external spending to deploy, manage, and realize the business value of the IoT by 2018.
• IoT and embedded systems. By 2018, 60% of IT solutions originally developed as proprietary, closed-industry solutions will become open-sourced allowing a rush of vertical-driven IoT markets to form.
• IoT and wearables. Within five years, 40% of wearables will have evolved into a viable consumer mass market alternative to smartphones.
• IoT and millennials. By 2018, 16% of the population will be Millennials and will be accelerating IoT adoption due to their reality of living in a connected world.

“The Internet of Things will give IT managers a lot to think about,” said Vernon Turner, Senior Vice President of Research. “Enterprises will have to address every IT discipline to effectively balance the deluge of data from devices that are to the corporate network. In addition, IoT will drive tough organizational structure changes in companies to allow innovation to be transparent to everyone, while creating new competitive business models and products.”

Indonesia e-commerce is the riskiest ? Good news or Bad News ?

Taken from internetretailer.com article

A global e-commerce fraud report ranks Indonesia as the riskiest for U.S. e-retailers

May 20, 2015, 3:04 PM
BY TRACY MAPLE Managing Editor, Digital Content

35% of transactions from Indonesia are fraudulent, and fraud rates exceed 10% in the five riskiest nations.

No country will clamor to claim such distinction, but five nations stand out as the most likely in percentage terms to produce fraudulent online transactions: Indonesia, Venezuela, South Africa, Brazil and Romania. That’s according to a new report that analyzed more than a million online transactions in 2014 to determine the rankings for countries other than the United States. The aim of the report was to advise U.S. e-retailers on which foreign countries pose the highest risk for attempted fraud.

In Indonesia, about 35% of e-commerce transactions are fraudulent; for Venezuela it’s 33%; South Africa’s rate is 25%; Brazil’s rate is 11%; and Romania’s is 10%, according to fraud prevention technology provider Forter, which compiled the report. On the flip side, the report ranks Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Norway and Switzerland as the least-fraudulent countries.

In the U.S., the average e-commerce fraud rate is less than 1%, according to CyberSource Corp.

Forter analyzed online transactions over the course of 2014, including the sale of consumer goods, sales on online marketplaces, travel and other purchases, but excluding adult entertainment, says Noam Inbar, Forter’s vice president of business development.

“U.S. retailers have a perception that everything outside the U.S. is very fraudulent, and they will automatically blacklist most countries outside the U.S. and want to focus on domestic sales,” she says. The report aims to give retailers in the United States a “true picture of what’s going on outside the U.S.”  While it’s useful to understand which countries produce the fewest fraudulent transactions, she encourages e-retailers not dismiss consumers from nations with higher fraud rates. “Even though there are problems in those markets, there are ways to deal with them,” Inbar says.

“Things are changing so fast,” she adds. “New fraudsters are entering the scene these days, and we want retailers to take this information and combine it with their tools to make better decisions to balance their business goals and fraud management.”

The study also examined mobile transactions and discovered that fraud rates are twice as high for transactions made with Android devices than the iPhones and iPads that use Apple Inc.’s iOS. Criminals using mobile devices tend to attack via Android because the systems are more open and therefore easier to manipulate, according to Forter.

Other findings include continent fraud trends:

Europe’s fraud rate is slightly lower than the global average.
Asia’s fraud rate is similar to the global average.
Africa’s fraud rate is as much as 10 times higher than the global average.
South America has a fraud rate three times higher than the world average.

Forter says it does not include the actual average rate because the average is calculated and compared on a per-industry basis, and the average fraud rate varies significantly between different industries.

OTT vs VOD

From www.parksassociates.com

The average consumer watches 3.4 hours of OTT video per week
and 1.7 hours of pay-TV VOD per week

Telkomsel Big Data

Taken from www.rcrwireless.com
Telkomsel chooses Cloudera as big data platform


Telkomsel, Indonesia’s largest mobile operator, selected Cloudera, which it claims is the first unified big data platform powered by Hadoop, to help them become a higher-value broadband service provider.

Up until now, Telkomsel has been largely a voice and text message-based business, but is hoping this partnership will allow for faster data processing and decision-making that will help it better understand its customers.

The partnership is said to help Telkomsel better exploit the growing data volumes gathered from its 140 million subscribers in its legacy data warehouse. The company believes that the data, if properly harnessed, can provide valuable customer network insights.

The Indonesian operator is turning to Hadoop through Cloudera Enterprise to offload, extract and transform data warehouse operations to make them faster and more cost-effective for data processing and insights.

Cloudera was chosen for the perceived stability of its Hadoop distribution, widespread market share and range of relevant use cases.

“One of the first use cases we looked at was storing xDR data for longer data retention. With 100% data growth annually, Hadoop is the best option to offload the data from the EDW,” Metra Utama, VP of IT planning at Telkomsel said. “We’re looking forward to the next phase of adoption of our Cloudera environment, which will drive new analytical insights.”

Telkomsel is currently using an on-premise environment to run Cloudera, and exploring Hadoop components including Apache Hive, Spark and Impala.

Through Hadoop’s integration with Cloudera, Telkomsel said they have been able to cut down customer transaction process times from days to minutes.

Misconceptions and How to Get Safely on Cloud Platforms

Taken from forbes.com 's article
Five Common Misconceptions About Cloud Platforms
By Lisa M. Schwartz, Oracle

Understanding a few basic misconceptions about cloud platforms can make a difference to the bottom line of your business. Why? Simply put, cloud platforms (“platform as a service,” or PaaS) are cloud-based infrastructure and development environments that customers like you pay for o8n usage-based arrangements, and which are maintained by third-party cloud providers.

Using cloud platform technology frees your IT staff from doing repetitive maintenance work and allows them to be more responsive to pressing business needs, such as quickly developing and testing a new app for salespeople in the field or creating a new real-time inventory dashboard.

However, all cloud platforms aren’t created equal, choosing a cloud platform is an important decision you will have to live with for a while.

Misconceptions About Cloud Platforms

1: All cloud platforms offer the same set of services.
2: PaaS is a great catchall solution to providing missing capabilities not found in SaaS applications.
3: Non-standards-based cloud platforms or open source development languages can bring down costs.
4: All cloud subscriptions are more or less the same.

How to Get Safely to the Cloud

1. Use a single, well-known, standards-based cloud platform across your entire business. That will save you a lot of time and money in the long run, allow you to innovate faster, and avoid unnecessary headaches.

2. Use a provider that doesn’t lock you in to its platform by using lesser-known proprietary languages or databases.

3. Look for a cloud platform that connects easily with its own SaaS applications, and also allows you to move your SaaS applications, if you choose, to another platform.

4. Finally, choose a provider that has many prebuilt services at every layer so your business can innovate quickly while maintaining governance and standards across your entire business.

Starting with a secure cloud platform as a foundation, built on widely known standards, you can save your company time and money and position your business well into the future.

Lisa M. Schwartz is senior product marketing director for cloud applications at Oracle.

2015 Indonesia’s economy by economist.com

Taken from economist.com ' s article
Indonesia’s economy
Spicing up growth

Bad policy as much as bad infrastructure is holding Indonesia back
May 9th 2015

IN LATE April Indonesia’s president, Jokowi, wooed foreign moneymen at a big international conference. Investing in Indonesia will bring “incredible profits”, he promised. “And if you have any problems, call me.” Two days later, at a summit of Asian and African dignitaries, Jokowi struck a different note. He called for “a new global economic order that is open to new emerging economic powers” to avoid the “domination of certain groups and countries”.

That is not necessarily a contradiction: you can pursue foreign cash while also arguing that international financial institutions grant developing countries too little power. But the change in tone was striking: from open, affable and welcoming of foreign money to prickly and suspicious of it. In his first seven months as president, Jokowi has tended to present the first face to the world, particularly to potential investors. But Indonesia’s policies still show too much of the second. That has grave implications for the country’s future.

Jokowi says he wants Indonesia to return to 7% annual growth—a rate unseen since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, but not unusual before it. In fact, the economy is slowing. In the first quarter of this year it grew by 4.7% year on year, down from 5% in the previous quarter. On a quarterly basis, it has been shrinking for six months now.

The problem is commodities. Ever since the ancient Romans acquired a taste for cloves, commodities have played a big part in Indonesia’s economy. The country is the world’s leading exporter of palm oil and tin, the second-biggest rubber exporter and the fourth-largest coal producer. The Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia’s biggest and easternmost province, is the world’s biggest gold mine and its third-largest copper mine. When China’s hunger for commodities was growing and prices were high, Indonesia boomed. But since 2011 its growth rate has declined, reflecting China’s weakening appetite for raw materials and the dramatic fall in prices this has precipitated.

Jokowi’s plan is to rebalance Indonesia’s economy away from commodities and towards manufacturing. The country managed a similar shift once before: in the late 1970s and 1980s, as the price for Indonesia’s then-abundant oil fell, the government tried to attract foreign investment in industries like food processing and carmaking instead.

By 1990 manufacturing’s share of GDP exceeded that of agriculture for the first time, thanks to a winning combination of low wages, decent infrastructure, a stable investment climate and abundant natural resources. That boom ended with the Asian financial crisis and the chaotic fall of Suharto, Indonesia’s long-serving strongman, in the late 1990s.

Indonesia today should be even more attractive as a manufacturing hub. It is the fourth-most-populous country in the world, with a huge, fast-urbanising domestic market and a rising consumer class. Workers are cheap: the average manufacturing job pays a base salary of $253 per month, compared with $369 in Thailand and $403 in China. Demography is in its favour: its median age, 29.2, is well below those of Thailand (36.2) and China (36.7).

But Indonesia’s bureaucracy is impenetrable and its infrastructure, much neglected since Suharto’s day, woeful. Companies spend 50% more on logistics than those in Thailand and twice as much as those in Malaysia. No wonder that foreign investment has stagnated in recent years. Manufacturing’s share of GDP, meanwhile, fell from 29% in 2001 to 24% in 2013.

Jokowi has taken some steps to reverse this slide. He launched a one-stop shop for investment approvals in January that has helped speed progress through Indonesia’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy (though when dealing with Indonesian bureaucracy, “speed” is a relative concept: according to Wellian Wiranto of OCBC, a Singaporean bank, the one-stop shop has reduced the number of days required to obtain a permit to build a power plant from 923 to 256).

Using savings from the welcome cutting of fuel subsidies late last year, Jokowi has boosted the budget for infrastructure by 53%—the biggest year-on-year increase in Indonesia’s history. Better roads and ports should drive down logistics costs. Some of the money is for much-needed power plants: Indonesia has five times Britain’s population, but just half of its generating capacity. He has also sought out foreign investment for infrastructure projects.

But many businesspeople worry that the results will not match the rhetoric. Much of Jokowi’s infrastructure money will go to inefficient, state-owned enterprises. Indonesia has inflexible labour laws and minimum wages have shot up (albeit from a low base). Moreover, a morass of protectionist rules persists. The number of industries barred to foreign investors, for instance, has grown steadily. Last year the “negative-investment list” expanded to include onshore oil extraction and e-commerce. In 2014 the government banned the export of some raw minerals in a disastrous effort to ramp up domestic smelting; exports of bauxite collapsed from 55m to 500,000 tonnes within a year, without any concomitant rise in alumina or aluminium exports.

Local-content laws abound, covering energy, retailing and carmaking, among other sectors. A long-mulled, much-criticised draft law may soon require companies that sell tablets and smartphones to produce up to 40% of their components in Indonesia. The aim is to boost domestic tech manufacturing; instead, it will probably create a flourishing black market for iPhones and scare off potential investors. Tight immigration rules have cut the number of foreign workers in Indonesia by 16% in three years, to just 64,000 in 2014. Foreign doctors are banned; foreign oil-and-gas workers must be below the age of 55.

Much of this is not Jokowi’s doing. Economic liberalism has never really taken hold in Indonesia. Its parliament is always ready to embrace protectionist policies, driven by the widespread belief that foreigners have long plundered Indonesia’s resources and left locals none the wealthier. The Asian financial crisis left Indonesia deeply suspicious of foreign capital.

Nor is Jokowi blameless. A decree published without consultation in January unexpectedly banned the sale of beer in minimarts and other small shops across the country, depriving brewers of perhaps half their revenues and startling investors who now fear more surprise regulations. He promised to increase government revenues by bringing more Indonesians into the tax system, but many foreign firms whisper that tax officials are squeezing them harder instead.

Carmaking, led by Japanese firms, is humming along: production is now rising in Indonesia and falling in Thailand. For the past two years more cars have been sold in Indonesia than in any other country in South-East Asia. But Jokowi has lately promoted the potential for a national-car scheme in partnership with Proton, the money-pit that is Malaysia’s national carmaker. Jokowi’s supporters say he has the right ideas, and stress that he faces strong opposition. But whether bad policies are enacted with Jokowi’s support or because he is powerless to stop them matters little: either way, they hinder investment that Indonesia sorely needs.

Geography already puts Indonesia at a disadvantage: it sprawls across more than 13,000 islands, which means that getting goods from one place to another will always be more complicated (and expensive) than just putting them on a lorry. But that makes good policy all the more crucial. When commodities were in demand, Indonesia’s business environment mattered less: companies that wanted tin and copper had to go wherever they could be found. Manufacturers can be choosier.

Singapore as a Hub of Global Data Center

Taken from enterpriseinnovation.net 's article:
Coming to Singapore: A global IT company's CEO moves to Asia
By Rahul Joshi | 2015-04-13


Talks to CEO George Slessman about his move as well as the company division

IO, a company that offers 'Data Center as a Service', is the sixth largest data centre provider in the world. IO first opened its Singapore office in September 2013 to serve the APAC region - this was its first office outside of the US. Since then, the company has been steadily ramping up its activities in Asia, and this year the CEO has made the unconventional decision - to relocate to Singapore.

Also recently, the company split into two units - IO, which, will continue to handle colocation and cloud services,and a new company, BASELAYER, which will comprise IO’s modular data center hardware and data center infrastructure management software.

We are deeply committed to the ASEAN region and Singapore. We believe it will be the largest growth market for IO in the next five years. In fact, my wife and I recently moved to Singapore because I see incredible opportunity to grow and expand the IO footprint throughout Asia. We plan to have the majority of our business operations and R&D located in Singapore over the next five years.

The significant growth opportunity in the ASEAN region combined with Singapore’s robust ecosystem, pro-business environment, stable geopolitical landscape and high-technology infrastructure set the stage for our success in Asia.

Singapore has a relatively mature data center market compared to other countries in Asia, yet it has extraordinary growth and development ahead. It has low risk of natural disaster and is located within 50 milliseconds of Hong Kong and 75 milliseconds of Tokyo – other two major financial centers in Asia. That makes Singapore a strategic connector for Asia.

The financial services industry is a target vertical market for IO. Singapore is the fast growing FI hub in the world today, which was a key reason for IO’s move to Singapore. In addition, the broader growth dynamics in the region made Southeast Asia a natural next step for IO’s global expansion. Singapore’s technology ecosystem is also superior compared to other markets in the region due to the demand from multinational companies that have been operating in Singapore.

In addition, technology providers thrive in stable geopolitical environments. Singapore consistently outperforms its peers in that area as the government is highly supportive of building a vibrant infocomms ecosystem, and strengthening Singapore’s position as a data management hub through pro-development policies and rigorous R&D. These were all key considerations that resulted in us selecting Singapore as the first IO data center in Asia.

Innovation has been core to Singapore’s competitive success, and we’re starting to see more tech start-ups, patents and entrepreneurs coming out of Singapore. The local government agencies are creating and enabling an environment for innovation to take place.

The past few years have seen unprecedented economic growth in Asia, with low-cost capital and low-cost energy further driving interest and development. My prediction is that, one year beyond its IPO, Alibaba will be one of if not the largest companies in the world, representing the definitive move of the Internet's center to Asia. What Intel did for Silicon Valley, Alibaba is doing for Asia.

In Asia, failure is seen as exactly that—something to be avoided and a stain on a businessperson’s reputation. In America there is a very different attitude toward failure. For every high-tech business success in Silicon Valley, there are countless failures.

The key is to walk the line between vision and being able to execute. You have to have a healthy fear of failing that drives you—not paralyzes you—to be more persistent, to work harder than the next person.

The Cloud of Utility

John McCarthy

was the first to propose a time-sharing model of computing. 

In 1961 he suggested that if his approach were adopted, 

"computing may some day be organized as a public utility, 

just as the telephone system is a public utility", 

and that this could become the basis of a significant new industry. 

This is the way that cloud computing is sold today.

Cloud Amazon Web Service

Di kutip dr KOMPAS.com

Jika Perlu, Amazon Akan Bangun Server di Indonesia
Kamis, 16 April 2015 | 08:56 WIB

Perusahaan jasa komputasi cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) membidik kebutuhan digital para pelaku bisnis di Indonesia, mulai dari penyewaan daya komputer , pengiriman konten, hingga storage.

AWS selalu terbuka mempertimbangkan untuk menggelar data center di negara tempat pelanggan berada, apabila memang diperlukan atau disyaratkan oleh pemerintah negara yang bersangkutan.

AWS menjalankan operasi di berbagai belahan dunia dengan mengandalkan 11 data center yang masing-masing melayani cakupan wilayah dalam batas tertentu. Ke-11 data center itu tersebar di beberapa benua, termasuk Amerika, Eropa, Asia, dan Australia.

“Data center yang paling dekat dari Indonesia letaknya di Singapura,” lanjut Harshman, sambil menambahkan bahwa sebuah negara tak perlu memiliki infrastruktur data center sendiri untuk bisa mengakses layanan AWS dengan lancar.

“India dan Taiwan juga tak memiliki infrastruktur (data center AWS), tapi nyatanya kami bisa sangat berkembang di sana,” kata dia.

Di Indonesia sendiri kewajiban memiliki data center dalam negeri bagi para penyelenggara layanan online sudah diatur dalam Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 82 Tahun 2012 tentang Penyelenggaraan Sistem dan Transaksi Elektronik.

Namun, akhir tahun lalu Menteri Komunikasi dan Informatika Rudiantara menegaskan bahwa tak semua server perusahaan asing mesti ditempatkan di Indonesia. Hanya yang berkenaan dengan keamanan dan kepentingan nasional saja yang didorong agar melakukan hal tersebut.

“Misalnya nggak, ya nggak harus. Untuk apa ada teknologi cloud computing? Teknologi itu menembus batas negara,” ujar Rudiantara ketika itu.

Rakuten .. again

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Rakuten acquires online shopping service Slice

August 12, 2014, by Allison Enright 

The Japanese e-commerce company previously invested in the Silicon Valley startup.

Rakuten Inc. has acquired Slice, a shopping application that helps consumers keep track of their online shopping.

Terms of the buy were not disclosed. Rakuten, a Japanese company that operates online marketplace sites around the globe and has made numerous e-commerce investments in recent years, first invested in Slice last year, leading a $23 million funding round.

Slice’s shopping app, launched in 2011, organizes the order confirmations and shipping notifications that e-retailers e-mail to consumers after they purchase. Consumers let the Slice application access their webmail accounts.

“We couldn’t have found a better partner as we grow our business and product portfolio,” writes Slice founder and CEO Scott Brady in a blog post announcing the purchase. “Joining forces with Rakuten now enables us to exponentially increase our ability to develop the technology and products to bring that transformative vision to life more quickly and at a scale beyond what we could achieve independently.” Brady goes on to say Slice will operate as a stand-alone business and retain current management.

Rakuten had no immediate comment on why it purchased Slice or what it intends to do with it.

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Japanese e-commerce powerhouse Rakuten launches a $100 million startup fund

June 30, 2014 by Don Davis

The company plans to invest in early-stage companies based in Asia, the United States and Israel.

Like many successful Japanese companies, Rakuten Inc. has taken profits from its operations in Japan to expand globally. That continued today with the Tokyo-based company announcing plans to create a $100 million fund to invest in young technology companies that have a focus on improving user experience.

Rakuten Ventures, the investment are of Rakuten Inc., said today the new fund will focus on investing in technology start-ups in Israel, the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. It will be based in Singapore and run by Saemin Ahn, managing partner of Rakuten Ventures. Rakuten Ventures set up a similar fund last year to invest in companies in Southeast Asia.

Rakuten, whose Rakuten Ichiba marketplace is the leading e-commerce site in Japan, has invested billions in recent years in e-commerce and online marketing companies in North and South America, Asia and Europe. The company’s global e-retail sites and shopping portals accounted for $18 billion in sales in 2013, while the company reported revenue grew 29.5% to $4.9 billion and net income more than doubled to $412.6 million.

In a statement announcing the new fund, Saemin Ahn, pointed to two companies with roots in Israel as examples of the kind of start-ups that have rapidly won consumer loyalty: Waze, a mobile travel app developer that Google Inc. acquired last year, and messaging service provider Viber Media Inc., which Rakuten acquired in February for $900 million.

“More Asia-based VCs are venturing out into different regions to look at investment as long-term growth vehicles,” he said. “Since 2013, Rakuten Ventures has been one of such VCs to aggressively invest larger amounts into younger companies, to enable them to focus on product and service development.”

Rakuten chairman and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has made clear his global ambitions: He said last year aims to operate marketplaces in 27 countries and process $125 billion in transactions by 2020. By contrast, eBay Inc. reported the total value of transactions on its shopping portals in 2013 was $77 billion, and Internet Retailer estimates Amazon.com Inc.’s sales on its worldwide sites last year amounted to $100 billion.

To achieve that growth, Rakuten has been on a buying spree in recent years.

The company in 2010 acquired U.S. e-retailer Buy.com for $250 million, renaming it Rakuten Shopping and turning it into a marketplace that hosts other merchant’s products but does not sell on its own behalf. Other investments include purchasing a stake in image-based social network Pinterest in 2012, buying e-reader company Kobo in 2011 for $315 million, and taking a stake in U.S. e-retailer The Grommet Inc., No. 415 in the 2014 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. In 2005, Rakuten acquired affiliate marketing network Linkshare for $425 million.

Rakuten’s European investments include: acquiring French online shopping mall Price Minister in 2010 for $248 million; taking an 80% stake in 2011 in Germany web marketplace operator Tradoria GmbH; buying U.K. e-retailer Play.com in 2011 for $39 million and participating in a $100 million investment round in 2011 in Russian online retailer Ozon.ru. Play.com is No. 28 in the 2014 Internet Retailer Europe 500 and Ozon.ru is No. 89.

Europe smart meters projection

From Berg Insight 's report 

December 2014

40 percent of Europe's gas customers will have smart meters by 2020 

According to a new report from the research firm Berg Insight, 40 percent of all gas customers in Europe will have smart gas meters by 2020. At the end of 2014, there were 2.5 million smart gas meters in the EU28+2 area, corresponding to a penetration rate of around 2 percent. By 2020, the installed base is projected to reach 49.0 million units. The increase will mainly be driven by nationwide rollouts in France, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. In early 2015, the Netherlands will become the first European country to reach 1 million units installed as the Dutch utilities start the mass-deployment of smart meters. At the end of the year, Berg Insight also expects that massive installations will get underway in Italy and France. Earlier this year, the French national gas distribution network operator GrDF placed orders for a total of 11 million smart gas meters that will be deployed until 2020. GrDF and several leading gas network operators in Italy intend to use 169 MHz radio technology as the communication platform for their solutions, while smart electricity meters will be used as local communication hubs in the UK and the Netherlands. 

While the smart gas meter rollouts are largely proceeding according to plan in the countries mentioned, the UK is facing a more difficult situation. Following the announcement that the country’s centralised data and communications system will not become operational before the end of 2016, Berg Insight expects that the mass-rollout of smart meters will not begin before 2017. As a consequence of the delay, the official target that the rollout should be completed by 2020 seems unattainable. “We are fully convinced that the UK smart metering project will eventually come to its conclusion, but the multitude of challenges arising from such a complex undertaking require considerable time to resolve” says Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight and author of the report. “If there is one thing that can be learned from a decade of smart metering projects in Europe, it is that they get delayed.” 

70 percent of Europe's electricity customers will have smart meters by 2022

At the end of 2014, there were 67.9 million smart electricity meters in the EU28+2 area, corresponding to a penetration rate of 24 percent. By 2022, the installed base is projected to reach 199.7 million units. The vast majority of Europe’s smart electricity meters are today deployed in Italy, Spain and the Nordic countries. Over the coming 6–8 years, nationwide rollouts are planned in a number of additional countries in Western Europe, including France, the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland. Moreover, Berg Insight expects a significant uptake in several countries in Eastern Europe such as Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Estonia. The outlook for Germany is however less optimistic as several regulatory and technical issues still need to be resolved. 

Berg Insight expects that the European smart electricity market will perform well in the coming years as a number of new and ongoing rollouts ramp up to full speed. During 2015, shipments of smart electricity meters are expected to grow by 30 percent to 8.4 million units, fuelled by new and expanded projects in France, the Netherlands and Norway. By 2017, Berg Insight also expects that the much delayed rollout in the UK will finally get up to speed. “Based on the current time plans and projections, the European smart meter market will peak at 25–30 million units per year in the early 2020s”, says Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight. “Besides greenfield deployments, we also expect to see next generation upgrades of the oldest existing systems in countries such as Italy“. 

Rakuten Corporate Action

OverDrive       $410 million : will April 2015 ? : e-book distributor
Lyft Inc            $530 million
Ebates Inc        $981 million : October 2014
Viber Media    $905 (or $900?) million : March 2014 : mobile chat and app platform provider
Wuaki.tv
Viki Inc
Kobo Inc.         $350 (or $315?) million : ? 2012 : e-reader and e-book provider
Play.com          $39 million : 2011 : U.K. e-commerce operator

Ikeda                75% stake : June 2011: e-commerce technology and services
Tradoria          80% stake : 2011: e-commerce platform
PriceMinister  $248 million : 2010 : France-based e-commerce operator

Buy.com           $250 million: 2010 : e-retailer

Total                 $3.2 billion

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From internetretailer.com 's article
Rakuten pays $410 million for U.S. e-book marketplace OverDrive

March 19, 2015 by BLOOMBERG NEWS

OverDrive will strengthen Rakuten’s e-book business by adding a distribution platform, more than 2.5 million titles, relationships with 5,000 publishers and 30,000 libraries.

(Bloomberg) -- Rakuten Inc., operator of Japan’s biggest Internet shopping mall, will pay $410 million in cash for e-book distributor OverDrive Inc. to expand its digital content business.

OverDrive will strengthen Rakuten’s e-book business by adding a distribution platform, more than 2.5 million titles, relationships with 5,000 publishers and 30,000 libraries.

Rakuten has spent about $3.2 billion over the past three years to buy companies as it expands into online services and selling e-books, video and other content. The company said earlier this month it would invest $530 million into Lyft Inc. and paid $981 million in cash for Ebates Inc. in October, after acquiring Viber Media Ltd. last March for $905 million.

Rakuten’s billionaire chairman Hiroshi Mikitani has introduced tablets in Japan to help sell e-books, tracking rival Amazon.com Inc.’s strategy of delivering digital content through its Kindle platform. Mikitani is Japan’s third-richest man with a net worth of about $9.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

OverDrive supplies the industry’s largest catalog of e- books, audiobooks, music and streaming video to 33,000 libraries, schools and retailers worldwide. It will operate as a subsidiary of Rakuten’s U.S. unit.

As of Dec. 31, Rakuten had about $9.9 billion in net cash, according to Bloomberg.

Rakuten.com Shopping is No. 46 in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide, while Rakuten Inc. is No. 20 (2?) in the Internet Retailer 2015 Asia 500. Amazon.com is No. 1 in the Top 500.

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Japan’s Rakuten buys U.S. rebate site Ebates for $1 billion
September 9, 2014 by BLOOMBERG NEWS

It represents another step toward expansion into the U.S. for the company that previously bought Buy.com and other e-retail assets.

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Rakuten Inc. agreed to buy U.S. rebates web site Ebates Inc. in Japan’s largest e-commerce deal as the operator of the country’s biggest online mall seeks expansion outside its home market through acquisitions.

Rakuten will pay $1 billion in cash for all of Ebates, it said in a filing to the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday. San Francisco-based Ebates offers cash rebates to customers who buy products ranging from laptops to lipsticks from the web site’s retail partners.

Rakuten is betting the purchase will help push its global e-commerce strategy. Rakuten has also been plowing cash into technologies such as mobile applications and online video as it seeks to add to its online marketplace business.

“This deal doesn’t just mean we’ve started a cash-back web site in the U.S., I think we can operate this model all over the world,” Mikitani told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo yesterday. The purchase will lift the proportion of Rakuten’s e- commerce transactions from outside Japan to 16% from about 6% currently, he said.

Rakuten targets to raise the proportion to 50% of total around 2020, said Mikitani, Japan’s fourth-richest man with a net worth of about $7 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Points Program

Rakuten fell 1.3% to 1,254 yen in Tokyo yesterday, the lowest level since May 23. The stock has lost 20% this year, compared with the 0.2% decline in the benchmark Topix index. The shares dropped the most in three months on Sept. 8 on concerns about the deal’s cost effectiveness, after Rakuten confirmed it was in negotiations.

The company wants to create with Ebates a membership-based marketplace with “the world’s largest product line-up” ranging from niche to luxury items, and featuring a points program, Rakuten said in the exchange statement. The potential impact on its earnings from the acquisition is “difficult to estimate” at present, it said.

Ebates, which has 2.5 million active members and more than 2,600 retailers in its network, posted an operating income of $13.7 million on net revenue of $167.4 million in fiscal 2013, Rakuten said. Members spent $2.2 billion shopping through Ebates last year.

“Joining forces with Rakuten will help accelerate our U.S. and international growth,” Kevin Johnson, chief executive officer of Ebates, said in a Rakuten statement distributed by Businesswire.

Viber Purchase

The deal comes after Rakuten announced 18 acquisitions since the start of last year, and the cybermall operator said in June it’s open to more large-scale buys following its bond debut. Rakuten bought messaging service Viber Media Inc. for $905 million in March, Japan’s biggest e-commerce deal at the time according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The company, which Mikitani founded in 1997, was an acquirer in three of the top ten e-commerce deals in Japan before the Ebates purchase was announced, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. As of June 30, Rakuten had about 1.7 trillion yen ($16 billion) in cash and short-term investments, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Rakuten buys mobile messaging company Viber for $900 million
February 14, 2014 by AMY DUSTO Associate Editor

Viber allows members to chat and talk for free on mobile, as well as purchase and send each other digital stickers. Rakuten’s CEO says it has “tremendous potential” to become a gaming platform, too.

Rakuten Inc. has purchased mobile chat and app platform provider Viber Media Inc. for $900 million, the retailer announced today. Viber provides free chat and voice-over- Internet (VoIP) services to consumers. It also allows users to purchase and send digital versions of cartoon-like stickers, similar to emoticons in chat messages, to one another. Additionally, Viber has “tremendous potential” as a mobile gaming platform.

Viber understands how people actually want to engage, this makes Viber the ideal total consumer engagement platform for Rakuten to bring deep understanding to vast new audiences. 

Viber grew its user base by 120% in 2013, to 300 million. Viber will gain access to markets in which it does not currently have strong penetration, while Rakuten will benefit by gaining access to over 277 million new prospective Rakuten users in markets where Viber has an established presence, such as Western Europe.

Rakuten operates the largest online shopping portal in Japan and is the No. 2 e-retailer in all of Asia by sales according to the Internet Retailer’s Asia 500. The company acquired U.S. online discount retailer Buy.com in 2010. It later renamed the retailer Rakuten Shopping and converted it into an online marketplace that hosts other merchants’ shops but does not sell on its own behalf, in the model of Rakuten Japan.

Rakuten has been building out its digital services over the last two years, starting with its acquisition of e-reader and e-book provider Kobo Inc. for $350 million in 2012. Since then, it has also bought two streaming video services, Spanish Wuaki.tv and Palo Alto-based Viki Inc. Today, Rakuten offers 40 Internet services associated with its Rakuten Super Points rewards program, which has roughly 225 million members worldwide. With Viber, the retailer will bring many of those services together onto one platform with single login for members. The acquisition also illustrates a fundamental shift in Rakuten’s strategic direction, which is mobile-first.

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Rakuten books space in the e-reader market by acquiring Kobo

November 8, 2011 by MARK BROHAN Research Director

The value of the all-cash deal is $315 million.

Japan-based Rakuten Inc. keeps on buying up companies it believes will transform it into a global online retailer powerhouse.

This time the merchandising category is the lucrative electronic books and digital content market and the acquisition is Kobo Inc., the e-book reader maker and content  provider that’s also a unit of Toronto-based retailer Indigo Books & Music No. 177 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Rakuten, which acquired U.S. e-retailer Buy.com in 2010 will acquire Kobo for $315 million in cash.

Kobo provides one of the world’s most communal e-book reading experiences with its innovative integration of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; while Rakuten offers Kobo unparalleled opportunities to extend its reach through some of the world’s largest regional e-commerce companies.

Kobo, which in July launched its first overseas venture in Germany, agreed to be acquired because a bigger organization could help Kobo diversify and grow quicker against bigger rivals such as Barnes & Noble, which makes and markets the Nook e-reader, and Amazon.com, which develops and sells the Kindle e-reader.

Kobo is the most social eBook service on the market and one of the world’s largest eBook stores with over 2.5 million titles. This transaction will greatly strengthen position in current markets and allow to diversify quickly into other countries and e-commerce categories.

Kobo was increasingly an also-ran in the U.S. e-book reader market with only 6% market share in April 2011, according to a survey by e-commerce software firm Elastic Path reported by research firm eMarketer. But Kobo commanded 36% of the market in its home country of Canada in August 2011, according to a survey by market research firm Ipsos.

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Japan’s Rakuten to buy U.K.-based online retailer Play.com
September 21, 2011 by Thad Rueter

The acquisition marks the latest global e-commerce investment for the owner of Buy.com

Japan-based Rakuten Inc. today said it will buy U.K. e-commerce operator Play.com for 25 million pounds (US$39 million).

The acquisition of the retailer, which sells music, DVDs, books, consumer electronics, office equipment, mobile phones, toys and other products, marks the latest global e-commerce investment by Rakuten, which in 2010 bought U.S. e-retailer Buy.com Inc.

Play.com, No. 26 in the Internet Retailer Europe 300 Guide, had online sales of $660 million last year, up 18% from the year before.  Buy.com is No. 32 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

“The U.K. market is one of Europe’s largest and most mature e-commerce markets. Play.com is not only a pioneer in the market, but also one of the U.K.’s most successful e-commerce businesses,” says Hiroshi Mikitani, chairman and CEO of the Japan-based e-marketplace operator. “We aim to leverage our e-commerce strength and experience to further expand and develop Play.com’s business model and channel its loyal user base, merchants, and deep product offerings into Rakuten’s global e-commerce network.”

Rakuten says it will buy up all of Play.com’s stock.

Earlier this month, Rakuten was part of a group of investors that raised $100 million for Russia-based online retailer Ozon.ru, which, like Play.com, sells a wide variety of products.  The investment followed Rakuten’s purchases in June of a 75% stake in Brazil-based Ikeda, which sells e-commerce technology and services to more than 100 of the largest online retailers in that country. Rakuten this year also acquired 80% of Germany-based Tradoria GmbH, which sells an e-commerce platform. In 2010, Rakuten bought France-based e-commerce operator PriceMinister.

Asia Pacific (excl Japan) Online Game Market Projection

Taken from enterpriseinnovation.net 's article

Online gaming in APAC to breach $30B in 4 years

The online gaming revenue in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) is expected reach $30.39 billion in 2018 at a CAGR of 18.53%, according to IDC.

This growth comes despite a slowdown in Southeast Asian markets in 2013 as service providers prepared to include mobile games into their business strategies and game portfolios. 

Online gaming revenue in APEJ was $12.96 billion in 2013 with growth of 14.27% over $11.34 billion in 2012. IDC said that the number of online gaming users will rise to 335.88 million in 2018, from 240.74 million in 2013.

What is most encouraging is a corresponding rise in the number of paying online gamers, from 102.81 million in 2013 to nearly 150 million in 2018.

“Online gaming in the APEJ region is not only a fast growing segment but it is also poised to take advantage of the wave of consumer smartphone adoption to access the mobile internet across the region,” says Shiv Putcha, associate research director for consumer mobility at IDC Asia Pacific. 

Putcha said that the first major driver comes down to strong regional growth. China has been and will continue to be the dominant force in online gaming but other markets, like Korea and Taiwan, are also seeing strong growth. The top three markets — China, Korea, and Taiwan — make up 95.56% of online gaming revenue in APEJ.

On the other hand, emerging markets, like India and Indonesia, have nascent online gaming markets but have made great strides in the last year, he observes

"The higher penetration of internet, broadband, PC, and mobile device and completely free-to-play (F2P) game offerings increased the popularity of mobile games,” said Putcha.

“eSports and competitive games such as MOBA games continue to attract online PC gamers,” added Putcha. “The popularity of competitive games, such as e

Sports and mobile battle arena games, continue to attract online PC gamers in Asia Pacific."

Putcha notes that the online gaming market has completely transitioned from a subscription fee–based business model into a freemium model.

Success recipe

Take  from Business Insider

50 Universal Truths That Will Make You More Successful
by JULIE BORT OCT. 28, 2013

No matter what is going on in your career, good advice is universal. No matter what problems you are trying to solve, chances are someone else before you had a similar problem.

There are certain universal "business truths" — tips and tricks that work for nearly everyone in every business. They are:

1. Have a passion for your work. If your work is meaningful to you, your work life will be a joy.

2. If you can't be passiona7te about the work itself, be passionate about the reason you do it. Maybe you don't love your job or company or career, but the money and benefits are good for your family. Be passionate in your choice to do right by your family.

3. If something needs changing, be the one to lead the change. If you dislike your job but are stuck, work on getting the skills that will get you unstuck. If there's a problem at your office, work on being the one solve it.

4. Start small and build from there.

5. Do the obvious stuff first, then progress to the harder stuff. (Otherwise known as going for the low-hanging fruit.)

6. If it's not broke, don't fix it. Do improve it.

7. The hardest lesson to learn is when to keep going and when to quit. No one can teach you that. At some point, you have to choose.

8. The definition of crazy is to do the same thing the same way and expect a different result. If the result isn't good, change something.

9. No one succeeds alone.

10. Ask for help. Be specific when asking. Be graceful and grateful when help comes.

11. Surround yourself with positive people and you'll have a positive outcome.

12. Embrace diversity. The best way to compensate for your own weaknesses is to pick teammates who have different strengths.

13. People experience the world differently. Two people can attend the same meeting and walk away with different impressions. Don't fight that. Use it.

14. You don't have to like someone to treat that person with respect and courtesy.

15. Don't "should" all over someone, and don't let someone else "should" all over you.

16. No matter what you do or how much you achieve, there are always people who have more.

17. There will always people who have less, too.

18. No matter how much you excel at things, you are not a more worthwhile human being than anyone else. No one else is more worthwhile than you, either.

19. If you spend most of your time using your talents and doing things you are good at, you're more likely to be happy.

20. If you spend most of your time struggling to improve your weaknesses, you're likely to be frustrated.

21. Practice is the only true way to master a new skill. Be patient with yourself while you learn something new.

22. The only way to stay fresh is to keep learning new things.

23. To learn new things means being a beginner, and that means making mistakes.

24. The more comfortable you grow with making beginner mistakes, the easier it is to learn new things.

25. You will never have all the resources (time, money, people, etc.) that you want for your project or company. No one ever has all the resources they want.

26. A lack of resources isn't an excuse. It's a blessing in disguise. You'll have to get creative.

27. Creativity and innovation are skills that can be learned and practiced by doing your usual things in a new way.

28. Take calculated risks.

29. In the early stages of a company, career, or project, you'll have to say "yes" to a lot of things. In the later stages, you'll have to say "no."

30. Negative feedback is necessary. Don't automatically reject it. Examine it for the nuggets of truth, and then disregard the rest.

31. When delivering criticism, talk about the work, not the person.

32. Think big. Dream big. (The alternative is to think small, dream small.)

33. Treat your dream as an ultimate roadmap. You don't have to achieve your dream right away, but the only way to get there is to take many steps toward it.

34. If you think big, you will hear "no" more than you hear "yes." They don't get to decide. You do.

35. How long it takes you to create something is less important than how valuable and worthwhile it will be once it's created.

36. If there is one secret to success, it's this: communicate your plans with other people and keep communicating those plans.

37. Grow your network. Make an effort to meet new people and to keep in contact with those you know.

38. No matter what technology or service you are creating or inventing at your company, it's not about the product; it's always about the people and the lives you will improve.

39. No matter how successful you get, you can still fail and fail big.

40. Failure isn't a bad thing. It's part of the process.

41. Things always go wrong. The only way to keep that from hurting you is to plan for that.

42. Learn how to respectfully, but firmly, say "no."

43. Say "yes" as much as you can.

44. In order to say "yes" often, attach boundaries or a scope of work around your "yes."

45. No matter how rich, famous, or successful another person is, inside that person is just a human being with hopes, dreams, and fears, the same as you.

46. Getting what you want doesn't mean you'll be happy. Happiness is the art of being satisfied with what you already have.

47. Working with difficult personalities will be a part of every job. Be respectful, do your job well, and nine times out of 10 that person will move on.

48. For that one-out-of-10 time, remember you aren't a victim. Do what you need to get a new job.

49. As soon as you have something to demonstrate, get an executive champion to back or support your project.

50. Focus on what you want, not what you don't want.