Alibaba Group kicked off its annual 11.11 Global Shopping Festival at midnight on Sunday, with a four-hour pre-event show at Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai featuring local performances, Cirque du Soleil acts, and even Mariah Carey, amping buyers up and solidifying the company’s push to blur the line between the online and offline experience. Within 20 seconds of the sale starting, total gross merchandise volume (GMV) had exceeded 1 billion yuan — $155 million, with buyers taking only one-and-a-half minutes to spend $1 billion. By two minutes in, GMV hit 10 billion yuan, and at just under four and a half minutes, sales on Alibaba’s ecosystem had surpassed the 2012 total of 19.1 billion yuan. It took only another 30 minutes for the GMV to reach the total for 2014 — 57.1 billion yuan. At the end of the first hour, total GMV was 67.2 billion yuan, and 48 seconds later, the total hit $10 billion. 100 billion yuan — $14.4 billion — in GMV had been generated at 1.50am CST. ...