aleksl - 9:27 pm on May 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Rakuten is #1 japanese shopping mall, they've got tons of money. They bought Buy.com , Linkshare and a few others. It is no doubt they know what they are doing on the web.

I am guessing with them being outside US they can easily avoid trademarking issues that should burn Pinterest.

I am thinking a bunch of...let's use the word "clever".. VCs sold this one to Rakuten. On the other hand, Rakuten could start pinning all images from their shopping sites for free now, basically saturating the web and improving its Buy.com position in US against Amazon.