Alipay upgrades facial-recognition system. Mobile payment giant Alipay on Thursday announced a major upgrade to its 'Smile to Pay' service, aiming to make its facial-recognition process more accessible to merchants and customers. The new version, dubbed Dragonfly, is essentially a plug-and play device that Alipay claims to be just one-tenth the size of a traditional self-service POS machine and can be placed in a backpack.
IBM loses its challenge of Pentagon cloud deal it says favors Amazon. International Business Machines Corp. lost a challenge over the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud contract on Tuesday when the U.S. Government Accountability Office rejected the case, saying the matter is currently pending in court.
Tokopedia raises $1.1 billion from Alibaba and SoftBank. SoftBank Vision Fund and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. led a $1.1 billion investment in PT Tokopedia, a financing round that will help Indonesia’s biggest online marketplace venture beyond e-commerce into new areas such as air tickets and insurance. Tokopedia is No. 18 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Online Marketplaces.
B2B sellers think long and hard on how to drive conversion rates higher. More B2B sellers are looking to increase their ratio of buyers to visitors, but on the whole sellers can improve on how successful they are at increasing e-commerce conversion rates.
Twitter says it receives half a million of spam reports per month. The company revealed this information as part of its bi-annual Transparency Report, which it published earlier yesterday, and which contains data from the first six months of the year.
Major China company, Alibaba, joins Open Invention Network patent protection group. The American and Chinese trade war is near to boiling. The American attempt to extradite Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou has failed; China might be behind the Marriott data breach; and China might've caused a massive internet disruption. But one perpetual sore point between the US and China -- intellectual property (IP) abuse -- is taking a step for the better. Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Financial are joining the Open Invention Network (OIN), the pro-open source and Linux patent-protection group.
