After its international initiation ceremony last month in Madrid, the European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC) began its regional tour in Taipei yesterday. Taiwan is the first and only sponsoring partner in the Asia-Pacific region this year.
“Taiwan possesses many talented high-tech engineers, encompasses a wealth of enterprise resources and harbors the perfect technological environment,” ESNC chairman Thorsten Rudolph said at the ceremony yesterday.
ESNC was started in the Free State of Bavaria in 2004, and in the last few years has matured into a global network for high-tech regions and international technical experts. As of last year, the ESNC community encompassed 16 partner regions with 525 participants.
The Taiwan tour is sponsored by government-funded market researcher Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院).
ITRI president Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙) said that ITRI was very excited about the competition because in recent years Taiwan has advanced rapidly in the field of global positioning system (GPS) technology, its ancillary components and products, as well as GPS global mapping.
Lee said satellite GPS could be Taiwan’s next major industry.
“Last year, Taiwan generated in excess of NT$200 billion [US$5.91 billion] in navigation-related products. Globally, Taiwan produced more than US$30 billion in navigation opportunities,” he said.
The competition is open to individuals as well as corporate and institutional teams regardless of nationality. Regional awards go up to 10,000 euros (US$12,900), while the global premium award or the Galileo Master award is 20,000 euros.
Aside from the monetary incentives, prizewinners get the opportunity to realize their projects, which is the spirit behind ESNC.
Entries in three categories will be accepted from May 1 to July 31, with winners announced on Oct. 21, Rudolph said.
“Safety of life” entries would include navigation innovations in traffic and aerial control, driver navigation and emergency services.
“Mass market” entries include information system services, tracking applications and personal entertainment.
The “professional” category includes innovations in geological information systems, fleet management and utility transport systems.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS