jpalley

How does Stripe deal with the currency conversion? Is this tracked by Alipay on an individual level (i.e. so consumers can't spend more then the legal conversion amount of 50k USD)?

In theory that's how it works - but it over-looks a price optimization that everyone uses. Essentially, when I walk into a restaurant/business to buy something, I'm in one of two situations:

a) I have some relationship with my employer whereby I need fapiaos to essentially reduce my income tax (i.e. count my personal expenditures as business expenses). Thus, I will ask for a fapiao.

b) I don't need a fapiao to write off income tax. Now, we play a simple numbers game: Say there is a 10% chance of me winning some small percent of money by receiving the fapiao. But there is a 100% chance that if I ask for the fapiao the business will need to pay tax. So, we strike a win-win deal. The business gives me a discount, that is, say, 50% of what the tax is. I pay less. They make more. Everyone but the government wins.

Other notes:

a) The lottery on fapiao has been around for a while. Its not new.

b) The above deal is less and less common in big cities as more people use UnionPay (debit cards) and businesses essentially assume that people will ask for fapiao.

c) There are a few factual errors in the article. Some restaurants, yes, provide a "stack" of pre-printed fapiaos. Most have a printer that is essentially connected to the tax collection offices computer and can print at the bill's value.

While at its inception Weibo was a "twitter clone with Chinese characteristics"; it most certainly is not. IMHO, and in the opinion of everyone I talk to who has access to both, Weibo has created a "Microblog experience" that is fundamentally different (and for many more engaging) than twitter.

For example, Weibo has included inline images and videos from the get go - making your weibo stream a cross between twitter and pinterest. They have "badges", "real time chat" and other features found in other SNS applications but adapted to the microblog format. Their iPad app is beautiful - flipboard for the "microblog" format. And so on.

If you look at how people use the services, I think you'll find that Weibo users spend more time engaging with the platform than Twitter users. Its an all engrossing source of digital information, content and entertainment.

For anyone looking to put a "stream" into their app (which we are working on) its very interesting to explore the experiences and choices of both. They are not the same.

Having said that, Twitter has a far more open and accessible API and yes, it goes without saying, its not censored.

If you are interested in seeing this sort of data for yourself - it is exactly this experience we are building at BrainPage.

Leave your email on http://signup.brainpage.com - we'd love your feedback as it gets ready.