Taobao to Build Technology Labs with Universities
DoNews, 6/17/10
Representatives of the software institutes of 17 universities, including Peking University, Zhejiang University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and Fudan University, recently paid a visit to Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba to discuss the feasibility of partnerships in technology, student employment, and other projects. According to a report from the meeting, Alibaba's B2C and C2C e-commerce subsidiary Taobao will jointly set up technology labs with the universities, and has already begun cooperating with Zhejiang University.
The director of the software institute at one of the universities that took part in the meeting revealed that Taobao hopes to reach a cooperation agreement with his university on image search. "Taobao will pay for the construction of the lab and lab equipment," the director said, "and will also provide related data for research." He added that Taobao listed more than ten long-term technical partnership projects during the meeting, all with very specific plans, and said that the company's partnership with Zhejiang University had already progressed to the deployment phase. In addition to image search, he said, Taobao had also named data mining and analysis, real-time search, and network load balancing among its areas of focus. The director predicted that Taobao would set up roughly ten lab projects simultaneously.
Alibaba Group VP Cao Guang said that further details about the company's university partnerships would emerge in July or August.
Keywords: R&D Cao Guang e-commerce Taobao Internet university B2C C2C image search Alibaba