Tech & Innovation
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Blog
Discovering new applications for 5G and beyond with Japan’s leading universities
What does a new student on campus today think of when they hear 5G? Perhaps better online gaming or movie streaming, or maybe better connectivity for calling home or ordering food delivery? Could it be that they dream of remote learning without buffering? To discover and delve deeper into new applications for 5G, Rakuten Mobile has announced partnerships with three leading institutions in Japan: T…
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Farm fresh to table: How Secai Marche’s AI helps link farmers and restaurants
Thanks to sustainability-minded shoppers, rising demand for locally grown products and initiatives like Rakuten Agriculture that support local farmers, small-scale family farming is increasingly gaining global recognition. The COVID-19 pandemic has also acted as a catalyst, speeding up what could be an agricultural transformation. There is however one significant challenge that smaller farmers hav…
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Mythbusting Open RAN – separating fact from fiction on open radio access networks
The mobile industry is in a constant state of transformation. While industry buzzwords have long been focused on the Gs (prepare yourself for a whole lot of talk about 6G moving ahead…), perhaps the greatest mobile industry evolution is occurring today within the infrastructure. The telco industry is evolving In a traditional mobile network ecosystem, the RAN (radio access network) is proprietary:…
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Rakuten is taking its “Kobe model” COVID-19 vaccination operations nationwide
Rakuten’s employee vaccination program is officially underway. On June 21, Rakuten ― together with Rakuten Medical ― kicked off large-scale vaccination operations at Rakuten’s Crimson House headquarters in Futako-Tamagawa, Tokyo. The program, which currently has capacity for around 1,000 daily vaccinations, is targeted to increase to 5,000 per day going forward. Operations will also roll out to Ra…
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Hiroyuki Ushijima is driving Rakuten’s robot delivery ambitions
On the streets of Japan, autonomous delivery robots are rapidly becoming a reality. After a trial late last year, Rakuten’s Drone UGV department ran a successful month-long robot delivery service in the spring of 2021. In a first for Japan, the ambitious project saw a four-wheeled self-driving vehicle deliver groceries directly to the doors of customers in Yokosuka, south of Yokohama. This UGV aut…
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Rakuten Mobile Network Performance Shines Through in Study Comparing Major City Networks Around the Globe: umlaut report
Mobile networks are undergoing a significant transformation, with a movement away from the closed, proprietary systems of legacy networks to more open, efficient and flexible systems known in the industry as Open RAN. On overall performance, Rakuten Mobile’s Open RAN network in Tokyo scored 920 points out of 1,000 for a “very good” rating. In Open RAN, the interfaces and protocols between the diff…
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Setting the record straight about Rakuten Mobile’s Open RAN Network: Tareq Amin at IIC/BEREC Forum
Success sometimes breeds skepticism. As Rakuten’s world-first revolutionary, Open RAN mobile network continues to roll out in Japan, the company’s progress has sparked interest and raised questions around the world. Does the software-driven network work in cities? Will it slow down adoption of 5G-fast service? Since it depends on multiple vendors and off-the-shelf components, does it ensure…
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Faster, more sustainable internet through Edge Computing: Rakuten Mobile partners with Queen’s University Belfast
Rakuten Mobile has partnered with Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland to launch a brand-new Edge Computing Hub this May. The hub represents a major step forward in a collaborative relationship that goes back to January 2020. Rakuten Mobile will be sponsoring two PhD students and a post-doctoral researcher to push forward research on edge computing at the new hub and explore what scienti…
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Rakuten Kobo introduces Kobo Elipsa — with a stylus for note-taking, annotating and everything in between…
Readers, when they are truly immersed in a book, can’t help but annotate what they are reading, filling in the spaces around the words with their own experiences and understandings. People also can’t help but be shaped by those same books, and jotting down notes is a great way to make sense of that writing. A recent Rakuten Kobo survey revealed that more than 80% of people said they frequently wan…
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