instoftech

Government regulation is one reason. But there are many other reasons (some are arguably more important), one of which being localization.

Check out other Asian markets (South Korea, Japan, Russia) and you may notice something interesting: many western companies failed to excel there too, even though there are no strict regulations.

eBay was not affected by GFW when they competed with Alibaba's Taobao marketplace a few years ago in China. eBay failed due to their own strategic mistakes.

Yes, low transaction fee is part of Alibaba's strategy to grow the eCommerce market in China (and also a major reason why eBay failed their China venture to Taobao in early years).

Amazon/eBay transaction fees (~10%) seem ridiculously high. They almost eat up all margins of many industries. Many small business sellers are complaining about it.

Yes, their microloans business is what makes investors particularly excited. They have the technology (big data) and resource to disrupt internet finance.

One note: <another comment posted here is inaccurate>. Their microloan business is not called AliPay (AliPay is the Chinese version of Paypal from Alibaba).

Alibaba's model (in eCommerce) is very different from Amazon's. Alibaba is only the middle-man platform, and doesn't keep its own inventory or warehouse.

Many recommendation services rank contents based on its actual content relevance (not just on likes/retweets). For instance, Prismatic (http://getprismatic.com) used clustering to group contents of similar topics, which does pairwise comparison between documents (as you mentioned).

Like this? http://siftscience.com

Yes. I believe the poster completed at least one transaction and this is the famous "pizza story" in the Bitcoin world.

Well, at least they did write some code of their own...

Most copycat coins I know of (including some highly-priced ones) did nothing but merely changed some config parameters of the Bitcoin codebase. Github repositories of theirs seem dead for years.