More than 130,000 Japanese citizens answered an advertisement by the Taiwan Visitors Association (
The TVA advertisement, placed in major newspapers around Japan on July 23, offers 500 Taiwan tour packages, allowing 1,000 Japanese citizens to travel to Taiwan for a two-night, three-day tour between Sept. 1 and Sept. 10 for free.
The packages, featuring free round-trip air tickets, accomodation and food, is part of the TVA's efforts to rejuvenate tourism, which has been battered by the SARS outbreak between March and June.
The drawing will be held in Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo over three days beginning Aug. 6 to select the 500 winners from among a mountain of post cards sent in by over 130,000 Japanese people, said officials from the TVA Tokyo Office.
Su Cheng-tian (蘇成田), director-general of Taiwan's Tourism Bureau under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, is scheduled to arrive in Japan before Aug. 6 to officiate at the drawing.
The names of the winners will be made public by Aug. 15, TVA officials said.
The 1,000 potential visitors will be scheduled to depart Japan for Taiwan from any of six Japanese airports, including Sapporo, Narita, Nagoya, Kansei, Fukuoka and Okinawa airports.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts