Far EasTone Telecommunications Co Ltd (遠傳電信), the nation’s No. 3 telecoms operator, is planning to expand its wireless hotspot network to nearly 3,000 Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店) outlets by the end of this year.
This would bring the number of hotspots operated by Far EasTone to a total of 25,000 by the end of the year, Far EasTone said yesterday.
“Smartphone users can be offered more Wi-Fi bandwidth amid the high density of Taiwan’s convenience stores,” Far Eastone president Yvonne Li (李彬) said in a press release.
FamilyMart, the nation’s second-largest convenience-store chain, has so far set up wireless hotspots at 1,400 of its outlets, the company’s data showed.
Meanwhile, the nation’s top telecoms operator, Chung-hwa Telecom Co (中華電信), has joined forces with a Chinese phone services provider in the development of mobile applications.
Chunghwa Telecom said yesterday its app store, Hami Apps, has posted more than 100 of its apps in China Unicom Ltd’s (中國聯通) app store, WoStore, to attract potential users, while WoStore has placed about 200 of its apps on the Hami Apps platform to broaden its services.
Chunghwa Telecom also said the number of users of Hami Apps is rising by 15 percent per month and now totals 250,000.
With its number of mobile phone subscribers on the rise and smartphones run on the Android operating system gaining popularity, the company expects Hami Apps to have 500,000 users by the end of this year.
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