Taobao.com is revamping Taobao Life and plans to launch OFFER, a platform for services such as housekeeping and car renting, to establish its presence in the online-to-offline (O2O) area after launching life services of Taobao Diandian and Taobao Movie. (source in Chinese).
OFFER will cover fields of catering, electronic coupon, house renting, movie tickets and restaurant takeouts.
Taobao Diandian, launched in June, added dish ordering service. Taobao Movie enables customers to select seats online in more than 700 cinemas countrywide.
Seems like Taobao would be using Autonavi (Nasdaq:AMAP) maps and location based services to power this. Perhaps this is why they bought 28.3% of Autonavi recently? Plus Autonavi is doing a stock buyback which ups Alibaba’s ownership in Autonavi. I eventually see Alibaba adding millions of sellers from their Taobao and Tmall platform into Autonavi maps. they are creating a maps based virtual world ecommerce and lifestyle ecosystem…hoepfully with social networking built in. AMAP maps are going to be huge. kind of like the operating system for people on the go. Book cabs in maps, reserve tables at restaurants in maps, get coupons from businesses around you in maps, buy stuff from local businesses in maps, book hotels in maps, read reviews of businesses around you in maps, etc etc. this is what Alibaba, Jack Ma, and Autonavi are up to in my opinion