Tech & Innovation
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Blog
Kobo in color: Digital reading innovator unveils first-ever color eReaders
The newly announced Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour blend the vibrancy of life and literature in two eye-catching models. Rakuten Kobo has announced its first-ever color E Ink eReaders with the new Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour, offering a new element to the digital reading experience Kobo fans already know and love. Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour feature a Kobo-optimize…
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Blog
Rakuten’s Open LLM Tops Performance Charts in Japanese
Japan’s open-source AI community is taking a major leap forward, thanks to the groundbreaking efforts of Rakuten’s AI engineers and scientists.Last week, Rakuten’s AI team unveiled a suite of large language models (LLMs) with exceptional performance in Japanese*1. Seven billion parameter models are the result of training on top of Mistral-7B, another open-source model with high p…
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Imagine, your smartphone could soon connect to a satellite
Trekking through the wilderness? Road tripping across a Japanese desert? Or even taking a trip to a remote island? Rakuten Mobile users may soon have a cell signal in these once disconnected domains. “Connectivity is a necessity no matter where you are.”Mickey Mikitani, Chairman and CEO, Rakuten Group At a press conference last month, Rakuten Group CEO Mickey Mikitani spoke about an ex…
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Open RAN for everyone: Rakuten continues to empower a more open, innovative telecom industry
Mickey Mikitani, Chairman & CEO, Rakuten Group Recently, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we made what I believe was one of the most disruptive announcements of the conference: Rakuten Symphony is going to start licensing its mobile software to anyone who wants to use it. Rakuten operates more than 70 different businesses around the world. We are a leader in e-commerce, travel, advertisi…
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Rakuten Innovation
Rakuten Steals the Show at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024
More than 100,000 visitors, from across the globe, came together in-person last month for Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024 (MWC), the world’s largest and most influential annual connectivity event. Returning to MWC for the fifth time, Rakuten made its presence felt at the event with a captivating lineup of speaker sessions at the Rakuten booth, experience zones offering visitors in-depth info…
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The sustainability dilemma: Cloud guru Sean Varley on the AI boom
From chatbots to product recommendations, AI tools are a natural presence in our everyday lives. But what is fueling AI’s astonishing trajectory, and is it even sustainable? Sean Varley is Chief Evangelist & Vice President of Business Development at Silicon Valley-based semiconductor firm Ampere Computing. He took the stage at Rakuten Technology Conference 2023 in Tokyo to talk about the…
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Experience ‘Telecom Reinvented’ with Rakuten at MWC Barcelona 2024
Taking place at Fira Gran Via from February 26 to 29, Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona, the world’s largest and most influential connectivity event will convene global leaders and tens of thousands of visitors to discuss the latest trends and innovation impacting the future of the telecom industry. Rakuten is returning for the fifth time with a can’t-miss lineup of speaker sessions, boo…
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We must embrace AI, but we also need to stay human
Mickey Mikitani, Chairman and CEO, Rakuten Group 2024 is the year Rakuten evolves into an AI empowerment company. At last month’s Rakuten Ichiba New Year Conference, I spoke to over 8,000 merchants from across the country about the future of Japan’s largest online shopping mall. About 30 years ago, many of these merchants were selling their wares in physical stores, or through cat…
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Generative AI, tech revolutions and semantic search: Insights from Rakuten Technology Conference
What do deep learning, semantic search and Japan’s next big breakthrough have in common? Artificial intelligence, of course – the topic of the day at Rakuten Technology Conference 2023. Erwan Menard is the Director of Product Management, GTM (Go to Market) Google Cloud AI business. He joined Rakuten’s resident AI expert and Chief Data Officer Ting Cai to talk about the challenges and o…
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