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

Kenya breaks ground on its 'Silicon Savannah' city project

Kenya has begun construction on the new city of Konza -- the so-called "Silicon Savannah" -- as it seeks to cement its position as one of the main centres of Africa's technology sector.

Located 64km south of Nairobi, the £9.1bn city will turn what is currently empty savannah into 20.1km2 mixed-use city that the Kenyan government claims will eventually generate as many as 200,000 jobs by the time its final construction phase is finished in 2030. Tax breaks are being offered to companies willing to invest in moving to the new city.

The site is currently occupied only by a highway, around which the city will grow in a triangular shape. There will be 35,000 homes, schools for all ages and a new university, all designed so that residents can easily get to the two business parks by public transport, walking or cycling. The plan is apparently heavily-influenced by similar "new cities", like Cyberjaya in Malaysia, Cyber Cityin Mauritius and Egypt's Smart Village. Wired.co.uk reported on Chengdu's similar " Great City" plan last year.

While Konza's development is being split into four phases to spread the cost (with the first phase set for completion by 2017), the overall plan is extremely ambitious -- it's not just seen as a way of attracting investment from international tech companies and inspiring domestic entrepreneurs, but also as a way of reducing the corruption that has been endemic in the nation for several decades.

Konza forms a key part of what the Kenyan governman has dubbed "Vision 2030", the long term economic plan that followed the introduction of a new constitution in 2010. Previously, government officials could take advantage of their power to secure public resources for their own ethnic blocks around the country, a situation which eventually fed into the political crisis of 2007. Konza -- economically and politically a completely new entity -- can, it is perhaps optimistically hoped, be something of a role model for the rest of the country, while the improvements in infrastructure will be felt by people around the country as high-speed rail links and highway iprovements are also included in the plan.

However, Kenya has already done quite well with developing its own technology sector, and in recent years has emerged as something of a regional leader. IBM chose Nairobi as the site of its first African research lab in 2012, and major companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel have their regional headquarters in the country.

Kenyan startups -- like the M-Farm, which keeps farmers up to date with the latest agriculture prices -- are often huge successes domestically, and tech incubators like iHub are springing up throughout Nairobi to help entrepreneurs get started. It also helps that the average internet speeds in eastern Africa arehigher than in South Africa, Kenya's main rival in the tech sector. And, of course, the revolution that mobile phones have brought to the entire continent are well-reported by now.

While the plan is for Konza to be the Kenyan answer to Silicon Valley, it will literally be on the savannah, so a large green belt-like buffer zone is being planned to ensure grazing animals like elephants and wildebeests continue to have enough land to roam and feed on.

read more at: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/25/kenya-silicon-savvanah

iPAD Mini preview

Apple IPad Mini Hands on. Watch more top selected videos about: IPad, Mini

KINDLE

BOOKS FOR EVERYBODY