Alibaba Group, which is described as China's eBay (News - Alert), is taking a 28 percent share of AutoNavi Holdings. With a $294 million investment, Alibaba will become the biggest shareholder in the company.

AutoNavi is well known in China, with its maps of cities and roads. AutoNavi also maps the insides of shopping malls. Also, AutoNavi's mobile app has some 116 million users. These factors could make its data and subscribers increasingly important to economic development in China.

It was also reported that the two companies will combine data “to develop e-commerce products that make use of the actual location of smartphone users,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Alibaba may seek to have an IPO this year or in 2014. With that move, its expected valuation could be as high as $100 billion, according to Reuters. Alibaba was valued by analysts at more than $55 billion, news reports said.

Last month, Alibaba took an 18 percent stake in Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter (News - Alert). Weibo is owned by Sina Corporation.

“The deal values Weibo at about $3.3 billion,” TMCnet’s Nicole Spector reported recently. “Alibaba and Sina have agreed to work together to pair social networking with e-commerce – a potentially groundbreaking partnership for China considering that Sina Weibo had more than 46 million daily users in 2012 – an increase of 82 percent from 2011.”

"We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile Internet a core part of Alibaba's strategy," Alibaba founder Jack Ma said in a recent statement about the deal.

In addition, Jonathan Lu was named Alibaba’s CEO. He was Alibaba’s chief data officer. Ma had the CEO’s job, and is now chairman. There is speculation he may soon step down from the chairman’s post.