Alibaba Group's founder Jack Ma expressed his thanks to employees, their families and others for the company's success in a speech at the company's 10-year anniversary party on September 10th. Mr. Ma thanked the citizens of Hangzhou, China, a tourist destination where he founded Alibaba, and even thanked the city's taxi drivers and West Lake boatmen for helping to publicize the company.

Alibaba's flagship site, Alibaba.com, is a global matchmaking service that helps entrepreneurs find suppliers, and its domestic Taobao consumer site famously trounced eBay in China.

While Alibaba has diversified beyond its B2B international ecommerce marketplace, all of its services have the same focus: serving small businesses through ecommerce platforms, an online payment service, online advertising services, and web-hosted business software. In his speech to employees, Mr. Ma said Alibaba would keep its focus on ecommerce and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

Alibaba's founder also laid out his vision for the next decade, stating that Alibaba Group would create the ecommerce platforms for 10 million small enterprises, create 100 million jobs in those small online businesses around the world, and would provide an online retail platform that would supply the everyday needs of 1 billion people around the world.

In conjunction with its 10-year anniversary celebration, Alibaba Group kicked off its annual Alifest conference in Hangzhou, China. Among the speakers at the APEC SME Summit were former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The event was capped with the Alibaba.com-Taobao Net Products Trade Fair, bringing together 1,000 Alibaba suppliers with 100,000 Taobao sellers looking for inventory.

In addition to giving a keynote, Mr. Schultz attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new Starbucks located at Alibaba's headquarters, which is home to 6,000 employees. Alibaba is building a new headquarters in Hangzhou for Taobao.

While U.S. customers who buy on Alibaba.com resell those products on eBay, Amazon, Yahoo Shopping and on their own websites, there was speculation from several sources over the weekend on how the company might compete with eBay and Amazon.com.

PC World reported that while Taobao.com does not have a concrete plan for the overseas market, it would likely target regions with cultural similarities to China first.

Alibaba spokesperson Andrea Meyer downplayed speculation, telling AuctionBytes that Alibaba has no plans to expand Taobao outside of China, stating they were only thinking about the possibility.

However, Gerson Lehrman Group said it believed Alibaba's new B2B ecommerce platform would compete not only with Amazon but with eBay, "which has been strengthening its own wholesale platform, and building the closeouts and "out of season" parts of its site," a strategy described in last week's AuctionBytes newsletter.

Through its presence at such conferences as eBay Live and Internet Retailer, Alibaba.com has demonstrated its desire to help online sellers in the U.S. source product not only from China, but from all over the world via its product-sourcing website, Alibaba.com. Likewise, U.S. manufacturers can upload their catalog onto Alibaba.com so that entrepreneurs around the world can purchase U.S.-made items to resell in their domestic markets.

This year, Alibaba created a microsite for North American users and launched a training program and a marketing campaign to attract entrepreneurs with the tagline, Find It - Make It - Sell It. Its new AliExpress website, which is in early beta testing, is significant in that it offers its online payment service Alipay with an escrow component.

It's possible Alipay's global expansion might cause eBay more concern than AliExpress given eBay's high hopes for its PayPal online payment service. Alibaba entered into a long-term strategic alliance with Bank of China in July to collaborate on several ecommerce initiatives, including international business cooperation.