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New face technology lets you pay without wallet

China's Internet tycoon, Jack Ma, founder of giant online merchant Alibaba, gave a glimpse of the future when he demonstrated a new e-payment system using facial recognition at the CeBIT IT fair in Germany.

Jack Ma showed off the technology that uses facial recognition from a smartphone camera selfie as a digital signature.

'I want to take this opportunity to demonstrate a small innovative product that we designed,' Ma said.

He used the technology to buy a gift for the mayor of Hannover, a souvenir stamp dating back to one of the city's trade fairs in 1948, found on Alibaba, of course.

'Using online payments to buy things is always a big headache,' he said, 'You forget your password, you worry about security, today we'll show you a new technology, how in the future people will buy things online.'

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On a smartphone he pressed a 'buy' button, which triggered a face-recognition routine.

Ma, a former teacher, is known for thinking big, and at this week's CeBIT he was the keynote speaker, addressing an audience that included German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Like many other companies from the event's official partner country China, Alibaba, flush with cash from a massive stock listing, is looking beyond the borders of its huge domestic market of 1.2 billion people, to the world.

Ma enthused that, while the industrial revolution freed workers from hard labour, the digital 'revolution liberates the strength of the human brain'.

'It's not the technology that can change the world, it's the dreams behind the technology that change the world,' the 50-year-old told the audience, adding that his dream was to help small enterprises sell on a global market.

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Ma has not hidden his global ambitions and has cited as his models global companies such as Wal-Mart, IBM and Microsoft.

In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said his target was two billion Alibaba users worldwide, compared to 334 million 'active buyers' in December, and a global version of Taobao, the sales site that cemented his dominance in China.

Some observers think Alibaba could one day rival the US online giants eBay and Amazon, or just buy them.

'Many people think that's a road that they may pursue, since it would be so expensive to build their own brand (in the US),' said Zia Daniell Wigder, vice-president of Forrester Research.

Let us know what you think about this futuristic technological advancement.

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