The world’s greatest bazaar

Alibaba, a trailblazing Chinese internet giant, will soon go public

IN 1999 Trudy Dai used to spend all night sending e-mails from her friend Jack Ma’s apartment, trying to answer queries from American customers without letting on that she was Chinese. Ms Dai was one of the first dozen employees of Alibaba, an online listings service Mr Ma, a teacher, had just started. It was already having some success connecting small Chinese manufacturers to potential customers, including the overseas ones Ms Dai was reassuring over e-mail. But the friends and students who made up the workforce were earning just 550 yuan (then $66) a month.

Mr Ma, though, already had big dreams. That year he said: “Americans are strong at hardware and systems, but on information and software, all of our brains are just as good…Yahoo’s stock will fall and eBay’s stock will rise. And maybe after eBay’s stock rises, Alibaba’s stock will rise.”

Since then, Alibaba has come to dominate internet retailing in China, which will soon be the biggest e-commerce market in the world. It has moved beyond its original remit of connecting businesses to each other to ventures that let companies sell directly to the public (Tmall) and enable members of the public to sell to each other (Taobao). Between them, Taobao and Tmall processed 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in transactions last year, more goods than passed through Amazon and eBay combined (see table 1).

The company that started in Mr Ma’s apartment now employs 24,000 workers at its headquarters in Hangzhou and elsewhere; Ms Dai is president of human resources. A few years ago Alibaba began to turn a profit; in the year to September 2012 it made $485m on revenues of $4.1 billion (see chart 2). Following a recent reorganisation it has 25 separate business units, and on May 10th it will have a new chief executive, Jonathan Lu; Mr Ma will stay on as executive chairman.

Read more at: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21573980-alibaba-trailblazing-chinese-internet-giant-will-soon-go-public-worlds-greatest-bazaar

Monolayer mastery: Graphene and molybdenite combined to create flexible flash memory

Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have created flexible, energy-efficient, high-performance flash memory from graphene and molybdenite.

Molybdenite has received some attention in recent years as a possible replacement for silicon, as it has a structure, bandgap, and charge mobility that enable the creation of small, low-power transistors. Graphene, as you probably know by now, is the most conductive material in the world, making it ideal for use in high-performance electronics — but it isn’t a semiconductor, so it’s proving rather hard to include it in conventional CMOS designs. 

Curiously, molybdenite (MoS²) actually looks and feels a lot like graphite/graphene, too — and indeed, given its semiconducting properties, some have suggested that we should be focusing on molybdenite instead of graphene as a silicon replacement. Importantly, both graphene and molybdenite can be cleaved (using the famed sticky tape technique) into layers that are just a single atom thick.

EPFL created the first molybdenite microchip last year, and now it has gone one step further and created floating gate (flash memory) transistors out of molybdenite and graphene. In this setup, molybdenite is the transistor’s channel, assuming silicon’s usual role. Due to molybdenite’s direct bandgap, it can be switched more efficiently than silicon, allowing for lower-power program/erase cycles. The graphene both acts as an electrode/interface to the molybdenite, and as the floating gate, which stores the memory cell’s value (i.e. it retains charge). In this case, graphene’s excellent conductivity allows for faster switching and less power consumption. The most standout feature of the memory cell, though, is a program/erase current ratio that exceeds 10⁴ — basically, this makes it very easy to read and write data, and opens up the possibility of multi-level storage, where multiple bits of data are stored in different floating gates in the same cell.

Due to their nature of being monolayers, graphene and molybdenite are perfectly suited for the manufacture of thin, flexible electronics. They should also allow for more efficient computer chips, which could be a boon for wearable and mobile computing. Whether there will be any actual performance gains from using graphene and molybdenite remains to be seen: Pure graphene transistors are theoretically capable of switching at terahertz frequencies, but molybdenite’s properties are less well known. As far as we’re aware, EPFL seems to be the only major research institution that’s looking into molybdenite — but we’re sure, if EPFL continues its streak of molybdenite breakthroughs, other research groups will surely sit up and notice.

Read more at: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/151344-monolayer-mastery-graphene-and-molybdenite-combined-to-create-flexible-flash-memory