A senior official of Japan's Sony Corp said yesterday the company has still not decided when it will begin marketing its much awaited PlayStation 3 video game machine.
Tetsuhiko Yasuda, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment Asia, told reporters at the Taipei Game Show the company wants to be completely prepared when it begins selling PlayStation 3, but declined to say when that might be.
Taipei Game Show 2006 kicked off yesterday at the Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall I. The event will run through next Monday, with over 100,000 attendees and industry professionals expected to visit the show, according to the Taipei Computer Association (
PHOTO: AP
PlayStation 3 is Sony's answer to Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360, which debuts in Taiwan on March 16 and is already available in some markets.
Microsoft Taiwan Corp announced earlier this month that it would slash the price of the video game console by up to NT$1,000 (US$31) in a move to reflect currency changes.
"We want to be completely prepared when we bring PlayStation 3 to the marketplace," Yasuda said. "Our No. 1 competition is not other companies but counterfeiters. We want to work with governments to stop this."
Sony -- known worldwide for its Walkman portable music players and PlayStation video-game machines -- has embarked on a serious cost-cutting mission since Welsh-born Howard Stringer took over the company in June.
Stringer has promised to trim 10,000 jobs, or nearly 7 percent of Sony's global workforce.
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