Rakuten TV expands to 42 European countries, gets direct button on Samsung, LG, Philips and Hisense remotes

Rakuten TV, the Japanese e-commerce giant’s effort to take on Netflix and Amazon in the world of video streaming, has been something of a minor player when it comes to market share for online entertainment. Today, it’s unveiling two key pieces of news that it hopes will help reverse that. The company is adding 30 […]

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Transportation Weekly: Polestar CEO speaks, Tesla terminology, and a tribute

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fourth edition of our newsletter, a weekly jaunt into the wonderful world of transportation and how we (and our packages) move. This week we chat with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, dig into Lyft’s S-1, take note […]

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Why longer term sheets are better

Recently in a conversation, the length of term sheets came as a topic (I assure you, it was a riveting conversation). The complaint was that a term sheet which had recently been received was too long, and therefore the VC who sent it wasn’t being founder friendly. The travails of successfully raising money! Actually though, […]

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Rakuten’s Viber chat app plans to charge to operate chatbots in controversial move

Viber, the messaging app down by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, is poised to implement a controversial new strategy that will see it charge companies that run chatbots on its platform. The conventional wisdom is to work with content companies to help bring users to messaging platforms and keep them engaged but Viber, which has struggled […]

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JD.com’s drones take flight to Japan in partnership with Rakuten

Chinese e-commerce company JD.com is taking its drone delivery system to Japan. Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, just announced a partnership with JD that will see its drones and unmanned vehicles become a part of Rakuten’s own unmanned delivery service efforts. JD has been operating drones in its native China for a number of years, […]

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Walmart partners with Rakuten to open its first e-commerce store in Japan

Walmart is continuing its strategy of revamping its businesses in Asia after the U.S. retail giant opened its first e-commerce store in Japan, where it is working with local retail giant Rakuten. The companies first announced a collaboration in January when they agreed to team up on the launch of an online grocery service in Japan […]

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Rakuten has SoftBank in its sights

This week, I’ve tried to do something new at TechCrunch with this experimental column — getting obsessed about a topic broadly in tech and writing a continuous stream of thoughts and analysis about it. With my research consultant and contributor Arman Tabatabai, we’ve covered two topics: Form Ds, the filing that startups usually submit to […]

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Envoy raises $43 million to digitize your office

The office might not seem like an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy — a Silicon Valley company used to sign in over 100,000 visitors at offices across the world each day; and a TechCrunch SF office neighbor! — has raised $43 million to do just that. The company started life five years […]

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Walmart and Kobo launch Walmart eBooks, an online e-book and audiobook store

In January, Walmart partnered with Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten on online grocery in Japan, as well as the sale of audiobooks, e-books, and e-readers in the U.S. Today, Walmart is capitalizing on that relationship with the launch of a full e-book and audiobook catalog on Walmart.com, alongside its assortment of physical books. The new site, […]

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Robotics-as-a-service is on the way and inVia Robotics is leading the charge

The team at inVia Robotics didn’t start out looking to build a business that would create a new kind of model for selling robotics to the masses, but that may be exactly what they’ve done. After their graduation from the University of Southern California’s robotics program, Lior Alazary, Dan Parks, and Randolph Voorhies, were casting […]

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