Tatung Co (
The transnational cooperation underlines the 86-year-old Tatung's ambition to enter the Internet MP3 stereo system market, following the introduction of its built-in hard-disk MP3 products last summer.
"Building a digital family brings opportunities and also challenges. Our cooperation with Roku has been prompted by wanting to be able to upgrade music players, make them applicable to wireless connections and allow users to enjoy the product when in motion," said Lin Kuo Wen-yen (林郭文艷), Tatung's executive vice president, at a press conference yesterday.
Under the alliance, Tatung secures the rights to manufacture and sell Roku's SoundBridge wireless home digital music player, which hit the market last October.
With the dual brand-name strategy, SoundBridge will be marketed under the Roku name in the US and Europe, and under the "Elio" name in Asia.
"Elio" was launched in July last year to cater to younger consumers through a new product line of portable digital devices.
"Tatung possesses strong hardware technologies and manufacturing capabilities that meet world class standards. Combining its capacities and Roku's software development and service integration technology will give us a leading edge in the global market for digital audio video," said Anthony Wood, Roku's founder and chief executive officer.
Wood is the inventor of digital video recording.
In light of rapid changes in the market and fierce competition, Roku expects to build a strategic alliance that will involve original equipment manufacturing (OEM), R&D and marketing, Wood said.
Cooperation with Tatung will start with the manufacturing of SoundBridge and expand into a series of products.
Alan Pan (
The wireless music player will hit the local market in September, and then be released in Japan, Southeast Asia and China.
While celebrating the cooperation deal, Pan also acknowledged that worse-than-expected sales of Tatung's "Elio" portable devices had led the company to reconsider its market positioning and introduce new and cheaper models.
Its Photo Jukebox, an MP3 player that can display photos stored from digital cameras, retailed for NT$14,500 when launched last summer. It later introduced two MP3 gadgets, priced at under NT$9,000, in the face of Apple's price war.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”