[photopress:JackMaalibaba.jpg,full,alignright]Alibaba.com and China Post have signed an agreement to develop China’s e-commerce infrastructure.
China Post’s Green Card debit service will become a new partner for Alipay’s online payment service, and both companies will join forces for parcel delivery and money remittance services.
In addition, China Post and Alibaba.com’s Alipay will shortly launch e-Youbao, a parcel service for online purchases allowing customers who own a debit card or bank account to replenish their Alipay account at any of China Post’s 66,000 branches around China.
All of which is pretty interesting although not rivetingly fascinating.
What it does is carry forward the story of Jack Ma as founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba.com which is seriously riveting and fascinating.
Jack Ma was born in 1964 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. He graduated from Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute in 1988 (he failed the entrance exam twice) and became a lecturer in English and International Trade in the same university.
According to a 2005 New York Times interview Jack Ma traveled to the United States in 1995, intending to recover money owed to a Chinese company by an American businessman in Malibu.
The businessman refused to pay the debt, took Ma at gunpoint, and held him captive for two days. Ma only managed to negotiate his release by agreeing to help the American start an Internet company in China, though Ma had no familiarity with the technology before this moment.
Ma had no further connection with his American kidnapper, but once he returned to China, he borrowed $2,000 to found China Pages, one of the first Chinese internet companies.
He first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US.
Jack Ma has commented: ‘The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house.’
He was on a very slow dial up connection. ‘We waited three and a half hours and got half a page…. We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed.’
So Alibaba was founded not on forty thieves but, perhaps, because of the action of one American thief.
Source: China Knowledge and research
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