Taiwan will make good use of a window of opportunity by developing 5G mobile networks under a three-year NT$15 billion (US$497 million) budget plan, Minister Without Portfolio Simon Chang (張善政) said yesterday.
The money, which will come from the 4G mobile service license bidding last year, will be used to enhance the nation’s industry competitiveness and that should be done before it is too late, Chang said at a meeting of the Cabinet’s Board of Science and Technology.
Taiwan did not complete licensing 4G mobile services until last year, and commercial operations for 5G services will probably take another 10 years to begin, which would put Taiwan behind the curve, he said.
“We have to start action now, integrating power from academia and the private sector,” Chang said.
The government has been urged by the private sector to establish a task force on 5G development, which would manage and integrate inter-ministerial resources and cooperate with the private sector.
Standards for 5G services are expected to be finalized in between eight and 10 years, and once the standards are ready — by 2020 — the global production value of the 5G sector could reach US$61 billion by 2021, growing to US$300 billion by 2025.
Separately, a new government agency, the National Development Council (NDC), was launched yesterday, by combining several Cabinet-level agencies aimed at streamlining the way major policies are developed.
The newly formed council is charged with the responsibilities formerly belonging to the Council for Economic Planning and Development, the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission and the Public Construction Commission.
The challenges mean that the NDC will not focus solely on economics, but rather on a wide range of issues that will require flexible consideration of the nation’s overall development.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained