So I was half paying attention to Twitter's stock ticker last week like everyone else with a tech blog (yes, I bought a tiny token amount of TWTR on the first day, no I am not going to tell you exactly how much, its embarrassing either way), and then yesterday a much bigger number rolled by that almost nobody in the US seems to be talking about.
Alibaba just did something like 35 billion yuan in a single day. That's Tmall and Taobao combined, for their "Singles' Day" shopping event on 11/11, and it works out to somewhere around $5.75 billion USD moving through Chinese e-commerce in about 24 hours. Last year the same event did roughly 19.1 billion yuan, so this isn't a fluke, its just growing, fast, in a way our Black Friday and Cyber Monday totals (still weeks away, calm down) dont really compare to.
I keep coming back to the fact that "Singles' Day" started as a joke. Some college students in Nanjing supposedly invented it in the 90s as an anti-Valentine's thing for single people, the date is 11/11 because four 1's looked appropriately lonely on a calendar. Alibaba picked it up around 2009 as a shopping promotion and now its apparently the biggest online shopping day on Earth, bigger than anything we do, and most of my friends who work in tech here had never heard of it until this week. That gap is the interesting part to me, not the raw dollar figure.
A smaller complaint while I'm on the subject of online shopping
I tried to buy a pair of headphones off a mid-size retailer's site on my phone last night and it was miserable. Zoomed-in desktop layout, a checkout form that made me re-enter my zip code three separate times, no autofill that actually worked. I ended up giving up and just ordering from Amazon instead, which took maybe 45 seconds because they already have my card on file. If a chunk of $5.75 billion moved through phones in China in a single day, and I cant even check out on my phone here without wanting to throw it across the room, something is broken on our end. Not a controversial take, I know, but its been bugging me since like 11pm last night.
Unrelated tangent, but not really
The other thing eating up my week has nothing to do with either of those stories: I've been paranoid about backups again because of this CryptoLocker ransomware thing thats been going around since the fall. If you havent run into it yet, count yourself lucky, its nasty. It quietly encrypts your files and then demands payment, in Bitcoin no less, to get a key that unlocks them, and there's no guarantee paying even works. A guy I know through a mailing list got hit at his small office and lost about two weeks of invoices because their "backup" was a second folder on the same physical drive. Which, come on. So I spent Sunday afternoon finally setting up an actual offsite backup instead of just nodding along every time someone tells me I should have one. It's not glamorous work but I'd rather be boring about backups than end up emailing strangers in Eastern Europe for a decryption key.
Anyway. Between a Chinese shopping holiday moving more money in a day than most countries' entire retail sectors do in a week, and malware that turns your own files against you unless you pay a ransom in an internet currency that didnt exist five years ago, it's a weird moment to be paying attention to computers. I dont have a tidy way to connect those two things except that both of them made me feel a little behind, in different directions. One is "the future of commerce is happening somewhere I'm not really watching" and the other is "the thing on my desk is more fragile than I want to admit."
Going to go double check that backup actually restores something before I trust it. Probably should've done that step first, honestly.