Exhibitors attending the ongoing Taipei international travel fair are all trying their best to become the brightest star at the show and attract more attention from visitors, organizers of the event said yesterday.
A total of 454 exhibitors from 51 countries around the world are presenting updated information concerning their unique tourism characteristics and various entertainment programs to boost tourist activities at the 10th Taipei International Travel Fair (ITF) which opened at the Taipei World Trade Center Saturday.
In the face of the global economic sluggishness, domestic hotel and travel agents are offering accommodation coupons and quality tour packages at highly competitive prices, respectively, to attract buyers at the four-day show co-sponsored by the Taiwan Visitors Association and the Tourism Bureau under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
According to the event organizers, customers can buy hotel accommodations coupons for two days and one night at an average price of around NT$2,500 (US$73.50), with several hotel operators' sales amount of such coupons reaching NT$1 million on the first day of the travel fair.
Statistics compiled by the Tourism Bureau show that visits by domestic travelers to the 263 tourist and recreation sites in Taiwan and Kinmen exceeded 100 million last year.
With increasing numbers of outbound travelers, the island country has also become an important market for tourism industries around the world.
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],”
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
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