Nearly 60 digital content companies from about 20 countries gathered in Taipei yesterday for two days of exchanges on the future of games, e-books, mobile applications and much more at the 2013 Taipei International Digital Content Summit and Fair, known as Digital Taipei.
Now in its fifth year, this year’s event aims to focus on the business potential of bringing digital content to the small screen — namely cellphones and mobile devices.
More than just a trade fair, Digital Taipei consists of conferences and forums, which this year will feature, among others, speeches from Yukio Kawasaki, general manager of TV Tokyo’s Animation Division; Tommy Palm of Sweden, the self-titled “game guru” behind Candy Crush-developer King; and Yajima Satoshi, head of marketing and communications at Japan’s Line Corp.
Taiwan’s digital content industry has shown resilient growth over the years despite a sluggish global economy, according to Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Shen Jung-chin (沈榮津).
Last year, local digital content production value experienced 5.6 percent year-on-year growth to NT$633.8 billion (US$21.4 billion), he said at the event’s opening ceremony.
Shen attributed the achievement to international cooperation, pointing out a US$40 million capital venture fund aimed at spurring digital content industries that was set up last month by Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry and New Zealand’s Pan Pacific Capital.
Taiwan-New Zealand cooperation goes even deeper, dating back to a July bilateral economic cooperation agreement which Digital Content Industry Promotion Office head Gary Gong (龔仁文) calls “an important start.”
Yesterday Sunnet (旭聯科技), a Taiwanese company providing e-learning solutions, and New Zealand’s Huhu Studios took the digital content relationship one step further by signing an agreement to focus on creative massive online open course training and e-learning animation.
Taiwanese game developers can look forward to more access to the Chinese market, as well, because the newly signed service trade agreement reduces the amount of time China’s censors will spend reviewing Taiwanese games before allowing them on to the market, Shen said.
That will provide a huge boost for the competitiveness of products with a short life cycle, he said.
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