Medical deal to be inked
A cross-strait summit for business leaders in Taiwan at the end of this year will finalize an official deal for bilateral recognition of clinical trial results, a National Health Research Institutes official said yesterday.
National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Tri-Service General Hospital have already signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with some Chinese hospitals — Peking Union Medical College Hospital, affiliated hospitals of Peking University, Shanghai Ruijin Hospital and Zhongshan Hospital Fudan University — for mutual recognition of clinical trial results, said Oliver Hu (胡幼圃), commissioner of the Institute of Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Research, adding that the MOU will serve as the basis for the upcoming official agreement.
The deal will advance a bilateral cooperation pact on medicine between both sides, Hu said.
Workers want 10% raise: poll
Employees in Taiwan would like to be paid on average NT$40,536 per month, about 10 percent higher than the average real wage, according to a survey released yesterday by an online human resources agency.
Employers would have to give a 10 percent pay raise to meet the ideal, said yes123, which conducted the poll from Oct. 14 to Monday.
The ideal pay from the poll is about 10.5 percent higher than the average real wage of NT$36,679 per month, after inflationary adjustments, as calculated by the government for the first eight months of the year.
The real-wage figure, which excludes bonuses and overtime, is 0.24 percent higher year-on-year in the eight-month period, according to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics.
Tigerair opens Bangkok route
Budget carrier Tigerair Taiwan (台灣虎航), a joint venture between Taiwan’s China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) and Singapore’s Tiger Airways, yesterday launched a new route to Bangkok to capitalize on increasing travel between Taiwan and Thailand.
Tigerair Taiwan, whose maiden flight took off for Singapore on Sept. 26, said all 180 seats were full on the A320 jet yesterday flying from Taipei to Bangkok. The carrier operates the new route with daily round-trip flights.
The carrier is launching another new route to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand today, which is to operate round-trip flights every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
One-way tickets start at an introductory rate of NT$1,988 to Bangkok and NT$1,688 to Chiang Mai, according to Tigerair Taiwan.
BlackBerry pushes security
BlackBerry Ltd is expanding its efforts to sell mobile-security software on its rivals’ smartphones and tablets to help counter the waning popularity of its own devices.
As part of its strategy outlined on Thursday in San Francisco, BlackBerry unveiled several upgrades to its mobile security features and a partnership with smartphone market leader Samsung Electronics Co.
Many of the security features are to protect smartphones running on operating systems made by Apple Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, BlackBerry said.
BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen (程守宗) is counting on an increased emphasis on mobile security to help the Canadian firm double its annual software revenue to about US$500 million.
The security arsenal is designed to help businesses and government agencies protect their employees’ smartphones from malicious software and other hacking attacks that can steal confidential information.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts