Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma last week stirred things up during a speech at Stanford University when he said he was "very interested" in buying Yahoo!

The comment touched off a lot of speculation about how -- and whether -- a purchase would actually go down. But Ma had plenty of other things to talk about, among them his Chinese e-commerce competitors; the astounding growth of Taobao, Alibaba's Chinese online retailing platform; his friendship with Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang; how important the U.S. market is to his company's growth plans; and more.

(Sina.com, China.org.cn, October 17, 2011)