U.S. small businesses “Go Digital, Go Global”

Alibaba offers four new methods to make it easier to do business globally.

Transformation of Alibaba.com hits new milestones as sellers from U.S. grow at fastest rate worldwide, U.S. buyers increase more than 70% year over year and overall transactions by U.S. businesses on Alibaba.com increase more than 100%

“Doing business online is the bridge for American small businesses through this crisis and into the next decade,” and“We are accelerating our transformation to get both sellers and buyers quickly set up for success and provide the critical tools and services that are required for growth – access to supply and demand, shipping and logistics, and working capital. Ultimately, our goal is to give SMBs even greater access to the $23.9 trillion global B2B ecommerce opportunity – which is six times the size of the B2C ecommerce market.” Said John Caplan President Of North America Alibaba.

1. Alibaba Payment Terms – A Powerful Digitised Trade Finance Solution

Maintaining cash flow and ensuring cash on hand have become even more vital for SMBs during the covid 19 pandemic. Alibaba.com Payment Terms is the first-ever trade financing solution made directly into a B2B cross borders e commerce platform, allowing qualified buyers to order goods and pay for them up to 60 days after they are shipped. Before today, the vast majority of cross-border trade between small businesses required full payment upfront. Small businesses could not benefit from the global supply chain financing programs that their larger competitors frequently enjoyed. Alibaba.com Payment Terms1, offered in collaboration with MSTS, addresses this problem and gives qualified SMBs an additional way to stay competitive by helping to alleviate cash flow pressures.

“We typically pay our suppliers upfront, which ties our cash up in inventory costs and keeps us from planning very far ahead and investing in our business,”. “With Alibaba.com Payment Terms, we’ll be able to keep our costs competitive with larger beauty brands, plan for our future product lines and stock up far in advance of the back to school and holiday seasons.” Said aid Necia Boston, founder of Greenville, N.C.-based B.A.A.B.S. Beauty, a makeup and beauty products retailer and early applicant of Payment Terms

2. Freight – A Shockingly Simple Built-In Ocean And Air Shipping Solution

With an average order size of $2,000, Alibaba.com shipments involve containers and pallets, not parcels and envelopes. The newly launched Alibaba.com Freight, powered by digital freight marketplace Freightos, helps SMBs simplify arranging their bulk shipments with the ability to instantly compare, book, manage and track ocean and air freight in real time online, effectively modernizing the analog, opaque and historically slow process for arranging cross-border logistics.

“Alibaba.com Freight’s extremely friendly user-interface takes what is usually a daunting and extremely complicated task, and turns it into a simple, concise step-by-step process without allowing you to make any mistakes before you move on to the next step,” said Casey Heim, founder and CEO of Hoxie, KS-based WAKE 10, a manufacturer and seller of equipment in the wakesurfing and boating industry and early user of Alibaba.com Freight. “Alibaba.com Freight has helped us continue to source from overseas and expand our product line even during this global crisis, and we are set to launch four new products for the summer.”

3. Online Trade Show – Live Curated Connections Between Businesses Buyers And Sellers

According to Alibaba research, trade shows have historically been the most important way for sellers to meet and acquire new customers, and business buyers have benefited by using them to explore new products and suppliers. COVID-19 has drastically limited this critical channel for trade. In response, Alibaba.com is launching Online Trade Shows USA, a series of category-specific, livestreaming experiences designed to convene quality buyers and sellers to meet and transact in real-time over a pre-determined period of days. These events showcasing U.S.-based manufacturers and wholesalers are part of Alibaba.com’s global online trade show initiative2 of over 20 shows in the next 120 days to bring the world’s SMBs together over virtual show floors.

These innovative, digital-first events feature agendas full of insightful keynotes from industry leaders as well as top U.S. suppliers promoting their products to a select audience of verified business buyers. U.S.-based manufacturers and wholesalers are able to showcase their stories, capabilities and products as a way to promote their business, meet new prospects and drive sales during this transition to digital-first trade. Buyers who attend the events can interact and ask questions of the suppliers, schedule one-on-one sessions and place orders through the platform.

“With the disruption of COVID-19, the next era in global trade starts today, from home and online,” said Caplan. “The grit, resilience and needs of American small businesses who face extraordinary challenges right now have inspired and motivate us to re-imagine the trade show experience for our customers. Alibaba.com Online Trade Shows USA will showcase the innovative products and capabilities of U.S. small businesses and connect them to our rapidly expanding community of more than 10 million global buyers.”

The first live event exclusively designed to showcase American businesses will run from July 7-10, 2020 with the Supplements & Nutrition category. Alibaba.com is hosting the event in partnership with the USA CBD Expo, the nation’s largest CBD industry event, and the United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA). The event will feature daily sessions designed to facilitate meaningful connections between business buyers and U.S.-based manufacturers, wholesalers, raw ingredient suppliers and brands in the supplements, nutrition and CBD category who offer finished and customizable products. Sellers interested in being featured can apply online and buyers interested in joining the online event can register online. Additional U.S. shows will take place over the coming months for a variety of categories, including Food & Beverage, Agriculture, Beauty & Personal Care with more on the way.

4. Alibaba Business Transformation

Alibaba.com – initially an online catalog of the world’s best manufacturers – was the original Alibaba business launched in 1999. It disrupted global trade by catapulting the global sourcing and supply chain industries into the Internet-era. Nearly two decades later, Alibaba.com began an earnest transformation on its journey to reinvent global trade, this time by disrupting itself and continuing the transition from a catalogue of suppliers to an end-to-end global trading platform with simple search and discovery, efficient communication and trusted payment, financing and logistics options. The platform opened to American sellers in July 2019, and the U.S. has since been the fastest growing market for new sellers and buyers. As a result of the transformation, gross merchandise value (GMV) on the platform has grown over 85% year over year and customers will transact tens of billions of dollars in GMV this year. At the same time, Alibaba.com’s annual revenue growth accelerated from the low single digits in 2017 to a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR)3.

With today’s announcement, Alibaba.com continues to transform amid the global pandemic while keeping at its core the mission to make it easy for businesses to do business anywhere.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

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Alibaba Cloud powered $1B of GMV in 68 Seconds, with zero downtime in November global shopping festival

Alibaba Cloud has detailed the core technologies used during the record-breaking, 24-hour global shopping festival. The data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group applied multiple mature innovations to power the cloud infrastructure and other key AI-enabled features, enabling millions of businesses to reach hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide.

Powerful cloud infrastructure supports extreme scalability and robustness

Launched during the Apsara Conference in September, the third generation of X-Dragon architecture fully supported the shopping event. The Elastic Bare Metal Servers improved cost efficiency by 20%. X-Dragon servers seamlessly integrate computing platforms, including the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal server and virtual machines, in a single architecture.

Tapping this strong foundation, Alibaba Cloud handled extreme scalability, processing USD1 billion of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) in the first 68 seconds of the event; volume hit USD10 billion of GMV in under 30 minutes. Overall, Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure handled a record-shattering USD38.4 billion of GMV in 24 hours with zero downtime.

Combining advanced data processing and analytic capabilities with green technologies, the Apsara Operating System processed around 970PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, setting a record during 11.11.

POLARDB, a database developed by Alibaba Cloud, supported sales activity with a peak of 87 million requests processed per second. The new generation cloud-native POLARDB database combines performance with compatibility and the availability of traditional enterprise databases in a cost-effective manner.

Through self-developed green technologies, including liquid immersion and deep-water cooling, power consumption for every 10,000 e-Commerce transactions can be reduced to 2kWh. Overall data centre energy consumption dropped 70% from last year, saving over 200,000 kWh on 11.11.

AI-enabled features to empower sellers from international brands to SMBs

Thousands of Tmall merchants were upgraded to Tmall Flagship Store 2.0 storefronts before 11.11. Version 2.0 offers a unique user interface with a 3D Taobao avatar for customers to try on clothes and jewellery, further engaging customers via rich, interactive content and an omni-channel experience. The conversion rate per purchase was increased by over 20% from last year, serving 1,167 key brands’ flagship stores this year.

Alime Shop Assistant, a customer-service chatbot supported by Alibaba DAMO Academy’s machine learning technologies, handled 97% of online customer inquiries on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall during 11.11. The virtual assistant also empowered hundreds of thousands of merchants on Alibaba’s platforms with intelligent customer services. For example, Alime answered questions during live broadcasts, extracting answers from pictures and responding conversationally. The Alime chatbot service offers 11 languages to support communications between global buyers and sellers.

Alibaba DAMO Academy provides enhanced machine translation technology for the cross-border e-commerce platform, AliExpress. The technology can help small and medium-sized merchants globally to automatically translate their store and product pages into 21 languages, including Russian, Spanish, Turkish, French and Arabic, for buyers across Europe, Asia, America and the Middle East.

During the shopping festival, the machine translation service was used 1.66 billion times, with over 200 billion words translated in different languages.

Better consumer experience with live streaming and voice shopping

During this year’s global shopping festival, transactions during Taobao Live generated nearly USD 2.8 billion (RMB20 billion) in sales. More than half of the live streaming Tmall merchants selling products such as cosmetics, clothing, food, cars and electronics experienced robust growth, with home décor products seeing a 400% sales growth.

This year, Taobao developed a new, real-time communications framework for audio and video on Alibaba Cloud. Network latency was reduced to 1.5 seconds from five to seven seconds, improving the real-time interaction experience between broadcasters and users. Video AI identified products mentioned by broadcasters during live streaming, and audiences could view product links simultaneously displayed onscreen.

During 11.11, over one million orders were placed and processed through voice commands via Tmall Genie, Alibaba A.I. Labs’ smart speaker. Items purchased during the day included 810,000 eggs, 1.4 million tons of rice and 76 tons of liquid detergent, a sign that voice shopping has become an increasingly popular trend among Chinese consumers of all ages.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post Alibaba Cloud Details The Core Technologies Used During The Record-Breaking Global Shopping Festival appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, generated the third largest cloud database management system (DBMS) revenue among global players, according to a recent report entitled Gartner, The Future of the DBMS Market Is Cloud, Donald Feinberg et al., 21 June 2019.

According to this report conducted by global analyst firm Gartner, Alibaba Cloud’s DBMS revenue increased by 116% year-on-year in 2018. Cloud DBMS revenue of the other two market leaders Amazon and Microsoft grew by 75% and 134% respectively.

“Cloud-native databases like Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB will be the future of database innovations,” said Lancelot Guo, Vice President of Alibaba Group and General Manager of Strategy and Marketing at Alibaba Cloud. “As enterprises increasingly migrate their on-premises databases to the cloud, cloud-native DBMS providers like Alibaba Cloud will be well positioned to benefit from the exponential growth of the DBMS market. We are a strong and competitive services provider for public services, as well as for the retail, finance and manufacturing sectors.”

Alibaba Cloud is a pioneer in open-source DBMS and an advocate of distributed DBMS. The company boasts a full suite of database products, ranging from relational, NoSQL and analytic database services to database migration tools.

Among these products, PolarDB is a new generation of cloud-native database that combines performance with compatibility and availability of traditional enterprise databases at a much lower cost. It can scale up to 100TB in storage, 88 vCPUs and 710GB of memory which helps customers effectively manage big data development. It allows customers to pay for usage by the minute, enabling them to handle peak business traffic while minimizing cost.

Alibaba Cloud has successfully migrated some 400,000 database instances to the cloud. Its powerful database services have endured the toughest pressure test of Alibaba Group’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, which involved managing peak traffic volumes of approximately 100 times the daily average.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post Alibaba Cloud Ranks Third Globally By Gartner’s Database Management Services Revenue appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

The Mobile World Congress of Barcelona has come to an end. After a week of next-gen mobile showcasing, there was also room for technological discussion. As such, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud-computing arm of the Chinese giant Alibaba Group, found its place to announce the Tech for Change initiative. A initiative that calls for inspiring ideas and joint efforts from enterprises, start-ups and young entrepreneurs, to tackle global social and humanitarian challenges in areas such as education, economic development and the environment through technologies.

Alibaba Cloud, which provides cloud infrastructure to transform businesses digitally, will contribute to the initiative by offering partners with access to its technology expertise, global computing resources and talent development programs including Alibaba Cloud Academy and its AI competition platform Tianchi.

One of the first partnerships of the Tech for Change initiative is aimed at supporting female education across the world. The first collaboration revealed at the MWC is with iamtheCODE, the first African-led global movement to mobilise governments, businesses and the philanthropic foundation on STEAMED (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, Entrepreneurship, and Design) education. The partnership will support young women programmers in marginalised communities through free online training and free access to cloud computing resources, with the aim to enable one million woman and girl coders by the year 2030.

“Through the Tech for Change initiative, we want to bring together creativity and innovation to tackle critical problems and challenges faced by humanity such as equality in education, healthcare for the underprivileged, sustainable agriculture and wildlife protection,” said Dr Wanli Min, Chief Machine Intelligence Scientist, Alibaba Cloud. “By making technology more accessible and affordable, we can inspire creativity and nurture the next generation of game-changers who will make our world a better place.”

“As an advocate for applying technologies for the social good, we believe that affordable cloud infrastructure and accessible intelligent technologies have the potential to enable smaller organisations to make huge differences in creating a better world for all humankind.” Min added, “We are calling for everyone to join forces and be part of the Tech for Change global community.”

The initiative reflects Alibaba Cloud’s long-held value of empowering the community through technology. Alibaba Cloud has been working with small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on their social cause projects over the years, including offering cloud and intelligent technologies to ROYBI, a robotics company on early childhood education and Curefun, a Chinese AI company that creates virtual patients to train doctors and nurses in rural areas of the country. Alibaba Cloud also built a technical philanthropy platform, “Green Code” in 2017 to connect professional IT volunteers with non-profit organisations in China for philanthropy programs. More than 3,000 engineers registered for charity programs from 168 organisations in 2018.

Under the partnership with iamtheCODE, Alibaba Cloud will provide tailored courses on a range of topics including cloud computing, data analysis, machine learning and security. iamtheCODE will also add Alibaba Cloud on their blended curriculum, as certificates will be awarded to young women students who pass the course to help them along with their career path towards engineering and other practical subjects. To date over 13,000 girls have access to the iamtheCODE Curriculum. In addition, each enrolled student will be offered free access to cloud computing resources during their study.

“Having its foothold in 64 countries, iamtheCODE is delighted to partner with Alibaba Cloud to engage more young women and girls from the most disadvantaged background in the world and use its technology to change their lives.  Our blended curriculum will become even more accessible as we add Alibaba Cloud on it. For iamtheCODE, priorities are to use technology to change the lives of young women entrepreneur through tech, to create employability and to equip them with the digital skills of the future,” said Mariéme Jamme, Founder of iamtheCODE. “We are truly honoured and excited for the young women as they will have access to the new technological advancements of Alibaba Cloud. This moment is truly historic. Working with Alibaba Cloud will make a great difference in the lives of millions of young women globally.”

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post Alibaba Cloud Reveals Tech for Change Initiative for Social Good in The MWC appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.