Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, revealed his heart sound that he’s unhappy for being rich. According to Ma’s talk in the one-to-one interview he had with CNBC, Alibaba’s historic IPO valued at a record setting 25 billion brought a huge pressure on his shoulder. “People say, ‘Well Jack, rich people is good.’ Yeah it is good, but not the richest man in China. It’s a great pain because when you’re (the) richest person in the world, everybody (is) surrounding you for money,” he said. “Today when I walk on the street, people look at you in a different—I want people to see this is entrepreneur, this is a guy who is having fun of himself, and I want to be myself.” Well, indeed, there are people in the world who approach “rich people” on purpose because they think that there must be profit to gain eventually, such as money and connection. Being rich would bring to people like Jack Ma a set of pain that probably could never be understood by people who never get to experience the similar situation. Refer Jack Ma’s words to other billionaires, it suddenly made a lot of sense to their action of giving back huge proportion of their personal assets in many ways to the society, such as by donating money to build schools for children. Jack and his colleagues together founded Alibaba for innovation, entrepreneurship and fun, those are the original incentives of them to keep outreach his company’s business development. I think that what could make Jack Ma “happier” would be people throwing more attention to his personality, ideas, and the company’s future instead of the fact of himself being the richest guy in China.

As a local Commerce student having been living in Vancouver for nearly ten years, it’s exiting for me to hear that Alibaba, China’s biggest and the most profit-making e-commerce company started since 1999 , finally will expand its market to this city.  Alibaba would absolutely be able to establish a successful huge market in Vancouver due to the city’s resourceful geographical location as well as its multiculturalism. Although in future, the company might need to confront a fierce competition with E-bay to the extent of fighting for the same and limited market and customer groups, the long-term benefit in a big picture that Alibaba would be able to bring to the city’s business development is what I care about the most! According to the discussion that our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, had with the CEO of the company, Yun Ma, Alibaba’s focus in Vancouver’s market would mainly be seafood and agricultural products; The very first promotion of Alibaba in Vancouver is to sell 200,000 fresh Canadian lobsters online around the period of “the Single’s Day”(November the 11^th)!

By opening an office in Vancouver, not only Alibaba the company is able to develop more customers in North America, but also to provide with more job opportunities to Vancouver’s local community, such as more postmen will be needed as the amount of deliveries increases. Probably one day in future, Alibaba’s company in Vancouver will open recruitment opportunities to Sauder Bachelor of Commerce students, by then, I would be more than willing to give it a try!

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/technology/Alibaba+Jack+China+richest+eyes+Vancouver+office/10362427/story.html

It’s very challenging to create a brand new market in nowadays, especially when everything seems to be already pretty advanced and able to fulfill what customers need and pursue. Kathryn Redford and Paul Froese are two young entrepreneurs graduated from Yale MBA, founded their company of making worms edible, and trying to open up this niche market and having more customers accept and experience their “innovation”. Before getting to read the article, I was surprised at first by its eye-catching title, but later on found it could be practical in reality to the aspect of there’s a huge latent market for “organic foods”.  Kathryn and Paul’s intention of making insects a human-grade food just as chips or oatmeal could actually bring some benefits to the society. According to the article, market survey was being done to investigate customers’ tastes and they received more “yes” and “no”! Right now they had already sold out 30-40 protein bars made of silk worms in the U.S.!

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/smallbusiness/Vancouver+firms+believe+eating+bugs+future/10318718/story.html#ixzz3IpCMQXW7

On Oct 24, 2014, the signing ceremony of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank took place at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Xi Jinping, the current president of China presented at the ceremony and signed the documents along with guests representing other 21 Asian nations. However, the U.S. raised up an opposing opinion towards having a new international bank established, they think that it’s unnecessary since there’s the World Bank existing there already. It’s obvious enough that by having another bank established and mainly controlled by these economically powerful Asian countries, the current World Bank’s power and status would absolutely get diminished to certain extent. It’s totally understandable that the U.S. would have a huge concern since the World Bank is “controlled” by them. Indeed, in recent years, China’s economy had been growing fast in a super good trends, its stock market (A shares and H shares) had been in a stable status as well. Moreover, this new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would probably bring more economic benefits to China. Whereas comparing to the U.S. economy, financial crisis made countless people lost their jobs and many businesses were shut down on Wall Street, the unoptimistic stock market condition made many traders gradually losing their faith in the U.S. stocks. But sometimes I felt that even China and other Asian countries were becoming more advanced, they still have limited rights in making economic decisions. I personally support the build-up of the AIIB, looking forward to how this would be able to aid Asia to improving its global stature and protecting its rights for being equal.

http://www.vancouversun.com/Business/asia-pacific/China+backed+Asian+bank+supported+countries/10321894/story.html#ixzz3Ip0QRcmG

Zuckerberg, founder and the current CEO of Facebook, the most popular social networking platform in North America, granted 25 million dollars to help to fight against the Ebola disease. He hopes that the money he donated would be able to strengthen the medical equipment and to support CDC and related experts to set up care centers.  Personally, I’m impressed by his action, and at the same time, I noticed that this also successfully promoted his company’s image in a positive way since Zuckerberg’s personal image had always been tightly related to Facebook. True say, it’s actually a very smart and applicable marketing strategy that’s worthy to be adopted by many start-up companies.

http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/09/23/bcic-new-ventures-bc-tech-competition-winners-announced/

News published: Sseptember 23 2014

“A startup that specializes in technology that delivers high-resolution images from inside oil and gas wells is the winner of the Vancouver tech sector’s version of Canada’s top chef — a five-month competition that started with 128 entrants last April.”

I personally love this start-up company and I think that it actually creates value to our society! Its technology of using the 3D printing technology to replace lab animals by creating tissues not only diminished many social controversies about should or should not use animals for medical purposes, but also decreased the chance of having conflicts. With the development of such technology, I’m looking forward to a better world and a better society!

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/technology/bank+customers+tight+after+falling+victim+massive/10260137/story.html

News published on Oct 3.

JP Morgan Chase& Co, the largest U.S. Lender, encountered a data breach on Oct 2, 2014, which resulted 76 million households and 7 million small businesses have their private account information harmed. What impressed me was the reflection of JP Morgan’s customers after the breach, they said that they are definitely going to stick with JP Morgan and not switching banks. Many people think that the occurrence of such data breach understandable and the similar situation could happen on other banks in future. From the reflection of JP Morgan’s customers we can tell that the bank has a super solid reputation, most people look at the reputation the most when choosing to build their bank accounts.

source URL: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/personal-tech/Apple+unveil+iPads+event+sources/10259980/story.html

Apple gained most of its profits via the sales of Iphones, the release of such new version of Ipad and the smaller iPad mini hopefully would able to bring up a good selling trend for Ipads. The size of the new version which will about to be released by Oct 16 is 9.7 inch. According to the news article, half of the Apple company’s revenue relies on the sales of the Iphones, and they would really like to break the trend by enhancing and dong more updates on their tablet computers. And in order to make this happen, Apple would offer the colour gold as one of the options for the new version of Ipad. I personally think that to add the color option to its ipad products is a very legit marketing strategy in the aspect of customization. It is true that “the colour gold” is gradually becoming many customers’ first selection when making the purchase, and this trend has begun since when the Iphone 5s became available on to the market. Anyway, I am looking forward the new release of the gold Ipads and I would predict that the “gold version” would bring up a beautiful selling trend for Apple’s revenue on tablet computers!

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