Creative Idea Powerhouse

Due to recent project, I need to do a research on the Japanese giant e-Commerce Rakuten Inc. Its 2007 reporting net sales reached US$1.76 billion and Net Profit of US$304million (17.2% of Net Sales). It has total of 43.9million members under Rakuten Group (which 35.9million are from Malls business); and 22,396 merchants (stores). Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Mr. Hiroshi Mikitani, the company has involves itself into multiple businesses such as Credit Card & Payment, Portal and Media, Telco, Securities and Travel industries.

I have gathered a short summary about this company to share with the entreprenuers in Malaysia:

5 secrets of Mr. Hiroshi’s Rakuten Success
1. Get things done (Kaizan concept)- continue learning and improvement from day to day – also the secret of Toyota Motors
2. Complete Professionalism- be the professional, the best in what you do in your industry – Jack Welch GE’s spirit
3. Hypothesize, Execute, Verify & Incorporate – visualize, and focus, then execute and corrective action
4. Customer satisfaction maximization - easy to say by many companies, even large corporations but when come to implementation, I still see many local companies take customers as secondary priority, where I have many bad experience on this.
5. Speed!, speed!! & speed!!! – this personally give me a big motivation to get onto action rather than plan plan plan….

Of course, the company itself also equip with most of the attributes to be a successful tech & web company, good working environment, free foods, continue learning & improvement culture,  and I have to admit that the most important thing over this is that they are putting customer as the first and most important priority all the time. They even have their Rakuten University to help customer to improve their e-commerce store, and a team of e-marketing experts to provide instant support and help when needed. Ask back our local website builder company, how many really putting the efforts on this? Time to change..

I will soon put up my whole paper about this company to share with you, meanwhile email me if you need to find out additional information about this company, or you have some insightful information to share with me drop me msg at eddie at ciph dot biz.

Rakuten.co.jp users come from these countries:
Japan95.1%
China2.6%
United States0.5%
South Korea0.3%
Taiwan0.2%

The e-Business industry has evolved dramatically since year 1997, when Jeff Bezos started the first online bookstore Amazon.com (B2C model); Jack Ma started the largest online business trading platform Alibaba.com (B2B model); and eBay.com’s world largest online auction site (C2C model). When time passed, the e-Business players started to evolve themselves into other business model; such as Alibaba.com tried to venture into C2C model using Taobao.com; Amazon.com trying their luck again by launched the C2C model of aStore.com to boost their online revenue. All these investments has raise a question to many online veteran, are the existing business model for Amazon, or Alibaba have hit the boundaries, or the entire internet commerce market are emerging to a new era, where be the best in single business model may longer secure and sufficient to sustain competitiveness in the next decades of internet growth. Are C2C the last piece of unconquered land for all internet businesses? After the C2C model, what will be the next big wave for internet commerce will look like when the industry leaders such as Google and Microsoft aggressively promoting ‘Cloud Computing’ and ‘Web 3.0 – Semantic Web’ platform?
One of the other interesting facts of e-commerce was raised by the Chief Editor of Business Next magazine, the leading Web and Technology magazine in Taiwan. The Web 2.0 is slowly fading out and getting less attention from industry due to many Web 2.0 companies failed to show new profitable business models, and will soon be replaced by Web 3.0, which has started to capture the lime-light from the media and public attention. The shift of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 not merely a technology shift, but it will also indicate the end of PC dominated online era, and move to mobile online era. It also indicated the shift of market domination from United State driven in pass decades, to Asia lead e-business environment in the next 10 years. China has the largest subscriber base for mobile phone, and in next 3 years, China will be the number one English speaking country in the world. South Korea, on the other hand, is currently the ‘Most connected’ country in the world with highest internet penetration rate with fastest internet connection speed infrastructure.
In Platform2u.com, we have spent substantial time to follow the internet industry trend, research on the internet technologies, critical success factors for all e-Business models and building case study on successful e-Business companies such as Alibaba.com, Amazon.com, and even Zlio.com the new rising star in e-Business industry. We also studied the e-Commerce and Internet development reports from mainstream research firms such as Accenture, Morgan Stanley, and IBM; as well as web-base research firms such as e-Marketer, Asia Digital Marketing Association, Forrester Research, and FabelNovel Consulting. We have concluded our researches and studies for the future internet commerce industry into the following table.
• China will be the largest e-commerce market by overtake United State due to recession and recent global economic crisis – Business Next
• Majority of the e-commerce operators are comprise of less than 5-man companies which lead to potential falling of e-commerce industry in Asia – Accenture
• In 2008, consumer internet traffic has surpassed corporate internet traffic usage – Morgan Stanley
• Majority reports and media neglected China power. Three largest social communities in US, MSN (200mil members) + Facebook (85mil members) + MySpace (80mil members) still can’t compete with single largest social community in China – QQ.com with more than 500mil subscribers!
• Social commerce will be the next wave of e-commerce initiative that utilizes the power of social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Blogs and Online TV.
• Business at the speed of thought – Bill Gates. To be the next leading internet company, speed is the key challenge. Speed of Internet, speed to go-to market, as well as speed to multiply the members’ growth in week.

Me and my best buddy have submitted in total of 4 business idea proposal since mid of this year and I can said that we are pretty aggresive in hunting down for this fund to jump start our idea. We have been entering the Technopreneur Pre-Seed evaluation pitching sessions for more than four times with four differen proposals, and only one time we successfully survived through the approval committee pitching session. As result, none of the project get approved so far, but the experience is pretty interesting and fruitful.

This coming monday me and RB is going for the fifth time pitching session on Intelligent Email system. We have downgraded the solution design, upgrade the development costing, and finally, normalize it to industry or Malaysia’s standard

We have once been challenge by one of our VCs friend on the statement that ‘if your idea is so great, why can’t you dump everything in and make it works? Why wait for the 150k?’, that strike me, and deeply inside my heart, I know the answer, the ‘secret’ answer.

There will be two pitching sessions during this ‘Season’ 12th episode. After so many submission, resubmission, pitching, hope that we can finally get into the ‘action’ time and get something on the track to prepare for better Y2009.

I will open up all our four ideas ‘as if this round we continue to be boosted out from the picthing’. Stay tune… and of course, if the ideas are not open here, stay tune too on our success stories, and also be ready to sign up for our BETA … Wish us luck on this coming monday, 10th Nov 2008…

For those who are like me preparing for pitching and sharpening the saw, feel free to find out some cool stuffs at Garage Resource Center
To find out the Preseed fund, check out here

People has been talking about Web 2.0 bubble is over. Web 2.0 companies failed to generate new business model other than Ads revenue. Is this really over? The truth is yet to finalise, but I will be interested to know and further find out what this Millenials / Gen-Yers economy is going to shape up for the next 3 – 5 years? The largest spending power, with fear nothing attitude, living in the speed of internet and wanting results fast (result from Google’s fast search response), what is the new economy going to be created by this group of future kids?