Taxis, toilets and smatching

Well, I find that I might have been wrong in my previous post about the focus on transactions within the mainstream B2B web sites. Alibaba.com kindly invited me today to the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce speech given by the urbane President of its B2B division, David Wei.

He kicked off by dispelling the myth that the Alibaba Group had turned into Hong Kong's largest taxi company (see picture to see what I mean). He also denied any plans to run the airport despite the company's logo being more liberally displayed there than that of home carrier Cathay Pacific.

He then launched into a good series of stories trailing the progress of his conversion from e-commerce doubter when he first met Jack Ma in 2000 to missionary for the concept. The bright light apparently hit him not on the road to Damascus but while discussing toilets with a buyer for his previous employer, British home improvement retailer B&Q.

On a more serious note, Wei spoke of how the company's links with Yahoo! have allowed it to roll out what he called "world class search technology". Today, he said, the company is launching an advanced search service it is calling "smatching" where search and matching are combined. We look forward to trying it, if not using that neologism.

Looking into the future, Wei predicted the roll-out later this year of transactional services which sounded very much as though - as we have predicted all along - Alipay will be extended from its current use in the B2C Taobao.com auction site into the B2B domain. The transaction service will be subscription based removing, he suggested previous disincentives for deals to be done on line. It sounds like another interesting year in store from the guys in Hangzhou.