2020systems Blog

Jack Ma, Founder and CEO of Alibaba.com, with former U.S. President Bill Clinton in Hangzhou, China.

Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba.com, has for the first time confirmed to Alibaba employees at the company’s annual meeting that Alibaba’s B2B business will initiate its IPO procedure in Hong Kong.

Ma said that Alibaba has already submitted an application to Hong Kong Joint Stock Exchange Market. For a long time there had been a rumor about Alibaba’s IPO plans, but all this had not been formally confirmed by Alibaba until July when Alibaba appointed consultants for its listing and hired Maggie Wu, a partner at KPMG, as senior vice president and chief financial officer of the B2B company.

Alibaba reportedly will raise about HK$7.8 billion through this IPO (about US$1 billion), and use the money for its global expansion and B2B platform improvements.

2020 Systems is an early member of the Alibaba trade community and has been helping  its global manufacturers market products online and to U.S. customers.  We are glad to see Alibaba makes it thru the upcoming IPO.

Photo above: Firefox and Parakey co-founder Blake Ross

Their first acquisition: Facebook has bought Parakey, the yet-to-launch “web operating system” created by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. The price isn’t being disclosed, but Facebook should be issuing a press release soon.

Back in Feb 2005, Doug Leone is the Sequoia partner who has spearheaded the investment in the two-person company which is yet to decide its name. Ross, has been one of the most talked about youngsters in Silicon Valley. The 19-year-old Stanford University student interned at Netscape at age 14, and was one of the many software whizkids who turned Netscape’s bloated and kludgy software into Mozilla’s Firefox. Ross is not revealing the ultimate plans for the company or the focus of its products at that moment (now we know it’s a web os). The funding information comes from highly placed Silicon Valley sources, but was never confirmed officially.

Parakey will be an extremely important asset to Facebook as they are trying to become a web os itself with a social networking twist. With their F8 program launched in May 2007, 1000’s of apps has already appeared on the Facebook platform.

Could Facebook kill Microsoft by having thousands of apps developed on its platform (vs the PC os “windows” in the 1990’s) Time will tell.

All we know is our 2020 CLASSIFIEDS customers will benefit greatly as more users/consumers flock to the facebook site.

2020 CLASSIFIEDS service now reaches 30 million online classifieds sites users who generates 7 billion+ page views. Back in April 2007, the service reached 8 million online classifieds sites users.

To learn how you can reach these online population, subscribe to 2020 CLASSIFIEDS service.