With product design a top consumer consideration when purchasing electronics, pundits yesterday said that domestic competitiveness in the world's markets hinges on the ability to innovate.
"Among all commercial designs, the concept of user-friendliness will be the major challenge for local designers to perfect their innovations," said David Lin (林行憲), chief executive officer of computer parts maker the Lite-On Group (光寶集團), yesterday at a ceremony to honor winners of its second annual innovation awards.
The event, co-organized by Lite-On and the China External Trade Development Council (CETRA, 貿協), yesterday recognized 20 innovative designs by college students from a crowd of over 500 entries. The theme for this year was "the seventh sense -- human communications in the digital era."
The gold prize at yesterday's awards was given to Tessa Yen (
"How to add a bit of fun to the design was the hardest part for me," Yen said, spelling out the challenges innovative designers face.
Yen said she will be overjoyed if her design could turn into a real product although she believed that some practical modifications need to be done to make the new product more user-friendly.
The Lite-On CEO expressed satisfaction with the students' work yesterday.
"After minor modifications on practicability and studies of economic scale, four to six of these 20 winning designs may stand a good chance of becoming real products," Lin said, adding that the awards aim to encourage innovative designs and further enhance Taiwan's information-technology competitiveness and style.
Stressing the importance of innovation to add value to electronic products, Lin yesterday said that Lite-On has approximately 2,000 in-house designers to help create added value for its products. He also hoped that the government will help upgrade enterprises' innovative capabilities by encouraing more international groups to hold their exhibitions in Taiwan.
Upholding the government's determination to nurture R&D talent, CETRA's secretary general Huang Chih-peng (
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day