■ Airline Industry
Vietnam flights to expand
Taiwan and Vietnam have agreed to expand flights between them on the back of booming trade and tourism, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday. Under the new pact pending final approval from both governments, the seat capacity of Taiwanese airlines offering regular passenger flights to Ho Chi Minh City will nearly double to 11,000 a week from 6,010, the CAA said in a statement. The cargo flight capacity of Taiwan air carriers would be lifted from 600 tonnes a week to 1,000 tonnes, it said. Taiwanese airlines would also be allowed to extend their flights from Vietnam to Europe, while Vietnam Airlines would be allowed to extend its flights from Taipei to San Francisco or Los Angeles, it said. Trade between the two sides more than doubled to US$4.7 billion last year, up from US$2.1 billion in 2000.
■ Telecoms
Instant messaging a hit
The penetration rate of instant messaging, a real-time communication software, has topped 90 percent in Taiwan, according to the results of a survey released yesterday. The survey was conducted on March 11 and 12 by InsightXplorer, a market research company, among 1,524 Internet users aged 15 to 39. As many as 92.7 percent of the respondents said they had used instant messaging software over the past month, with 50.1 percent of respondents saying they had installed two or more types of instant messaging software. It was found that instant messaging software is most frequently used by younger people, with 99 percent of those in the 15-to-19 age group using the software, compared with 81.3 percent among those in the 35-to-39 age group. MSN Messenger was the most popular, used by 77.1 percent of Internet users. Yahoo Messenger is used by 56.1 percent of Internet users, and Skype by 20.1 percent.
■ Internet
AltaVista pioneer dies at 42
Paul Flaherty, a computer engineer who helped create the pioneering AltaVista online search engine, has died. He was 42. Flaherty died on March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, California, family members said on Friday. Flaherty came up with the idea of indexing Web pages that made the AltaVista search engine one of the most popular Internet search tools in the mid-1990s. "He was such a warm and loving man, and he was exceptionally smart," his brother, Michael, said on Friday. Flaherty was working as a research engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in Palo Alto when he teamed up with two other staff researchers in 1995 to develop AltaVista's technology.
■ Music industry
Classics promoted online
Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, will release download-only live concert recordings of the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and other symphony orchestras. Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, two Universal classical-music labels, will release an average of four live recordings per orchestra each year for digital downloading, Universal Music, a unit of Paris-based Vivendi Universal SA, said in an e-mailed statement today. Consumers can buy downloads of a movement, a symphony or an entire concert, and one concert per year may also be released on a physical compact disc. "Recordings of these live performances will be available for downloading much faster than traditional releases," Jonathan Gruber, a Universal vice president, said in the statement.
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