Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has signed a deal with the Beijing municipal government to jointly develop so-called "smart city" initiatives to move public services online.

The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are among the first group of 12 Chinese municipalities to sign up with Alibaba for the initiatives, reports China State news agency Xinhua.

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Other companies partnering with cities for the project include microblogging platform Sina Weibo and Ant Financial, Alibaba's small and medium-sized enterprises finance unit.

Li Zhengrong, deputy general manager of Weibo's government affairs cooperation department, said there are 130,000 government microblogging accounts registered with the company's web portal. The smart city projects would give people access to public services via Weibo's applications on mobile phones.

By linking with Alibaba's mobile payment service Alipay, Xinhua reports that the smart city initiatives could make hospital appointments, passport renewal, and paying for traffic tickets and utility bills as easy as pressing a few buttons on the phone.

Alibaba expects to finalize deals with 50 Chinese cities for smart city initiatives within the next year.

Alibaba-owned subsidiary Alibaba Cloud Computing and strategic partner ChinaSoft International have signed a deal to build a smart e-government cloud computing platform for the Lishui city government. The Lishui e-government platform is one of 13 smart-city pilot projects in Zhejiang, one of the wealthiest provinces, according to Xinhua.

The so-called smart-city projects can be a key infrastructure investment strategy for local governments. They can focus on upgrading information-technology platforms to improve the efficiency of government operations.

Last week, China's State Council issued several opinions to guide local governments' support of cloud computing initiatives.

Major smart-city infrastructure and service providers, such as IBM and Digital China, are using cloud computing to implement the projects with local governments, reports Xinhua.

Cloud computing enables enterprises and consumers to buy, lease, sell or distribute over the Internet software, business systems, data and other digital resources as an on-demand serviced.

Alibaba Cloud said yesterday it would be responsible for the building, operation and maintenance of Lishui's smart government services cloud platform.

ChinaSoft will provide consulting, planning, research and design. It will also oversee the migration of the city's government services applications to the new cloud infrastructure.

Technology research firm IDC has forecast the mainland's smart-city market to be worth $10.8 billion in 2015.

TagsAlibaba Signs Deal with China to Develop Smart Cities, Alibaba Group, Guangzhou, Ant Financial, Alibaba Cloud Computing, ChinaSoft