Skype reports close to 300 million users worldwide. WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform, says it has more than 400 million monthly users. Many of these apps are used by hundreds of millions of people, too. Twitter Direct Messages, Google Plus, Kik, Tango, ooVoo and dozens of other apps are consistently among the most downloaded apps for consumers worldwide.
In the last two years, text, photo and video messaging apps have become one of the hottest areas in technology. Late last year, Viber introduced an instant messaging and calling service for personal computers. The audio, video and chat front-runner acquired by Microsoft in 2011. Viber, based in Cyprus, has recently become a rival to Skype, Rakuten said on Friday that its net profit for the year through December doubled to 43.5 billion yen, or about $427 million, its sixth consecutive year of record earnings.
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Making phone calls and sending free messages on a smartphone, with the United States, Australia and Russia among its biggest markets. Viber is one of the most popular apps for The Rakuten site’s various services have about 200 million users worldwide, and Viber will bring Rakuten about 300 million more, according to the Tokyo-based company. In the American virtual scrapbook site Pinterest in 2012.
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Mikitani in 1997, Rakuten has expanded its footprint outside Japan with a series of prominent investments and acquisitions, including buying a stake in the Canadian e-book maker Kobo in 2011 and investing The company said it would finance the acquisition through bank borrowing.įounded by Mr. The deal is expected to close next month, according to Rakuten. In real time with online retailers, he said. Rakuten’s users, for example, could use Viber instant messaging to communicate Mikitani said at a news conference in Tokyo. “With Viber, we’re going to link up messaging with e-commerce,” Mr. Snapchat, whose app offers a variation on messaging that lets users send photo and video messages that disappear after they are viewed, turned down a multibillion-dollar takeover proposal from Facebook last year. The purchase of Viber Media could also heat up competition in the world of web messaging, where services such as WhatsApp of the United States, Line of South Korea and WeChat of China are fiercely vying for users. Mikitani’s fast-growing empire, whose businesses already include the Rakuten online marketplace, a travel agency, credit cards and the baseball team Tohoku Rakuten GoldenĮagles, which once had Mr. On Friday, Rakuten said it would buy Viber Media, which runs a popular app for calling and messaging, for $900 million. He recently lost the pitcher Masahiro Tanaka to the New York Yankees, but Hiroshi Mikitani, the billionaire owner of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Viber is one of the top five most downloaded smartphone phone call and messaging apps, and counts the United States, Russia and Australia among its biggest markets.Updated, 7:25 p.m.
“Developing this messaging system on our own would have been impossible,” he added, saying Rakuten users could, for example, use Viber’s instant messages to contact an online store while considering a purchase. The all-cash deal was announced after Rakuten reported an 80 percent jump in its 2013 operating profit. will take Rakuten to a different level,” said Mikitani, who is also the company’s chief executive. Privately held Viber, run from Cyprus by Israeli entrepreneur Talmon Marco, will add 300 million users to Rakuten’s existing 200 million users, Mikitani told reporters in Tokyo. But in the face of a shrinking population and weak consumer spending at home, Mikitani is trying to re-invent Rakuten as a one-stop-site for a global audience. Rakuten offers services from financing to shopping to online video on its e-commerce platform, the largest in Japan. Viber's Founder and Chief Executive Marco Talmon gestures during a news conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in this Februfile photo.
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