The nation is among the top five markets for Google Inc’s app store by revenue, helped by the public’s increasing use of smartphones, Google said yesterday.
Google vice president of engineering and Google Play in Asia-Pacific head Chris Yerga told a news conference in Taipei that three of the top five Google Play markets are in Asia — Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — and that the US is also among the five.
He declined to name the fifth market or give the specific rankings of the top five, saying only that the figures were not for public consumption.
It was not a surprise to see three Asian markets in the top-five list given the high smartphone penetration rates in these countries, which in turn leads to strong demand for mobile games, Yerga said.
Launched in 2012 as the official app store for Google’s Android operating system, Google Play now has more than 1 million free and paying apps and over 50 billion downloads. It also offers music, games, magazines, books, movies and television programs.
Google Play’s game services received 100 million new users between January and June last year, making it the fastest-growing mobile gaming network ever, according to Google.
A poll released in December last year by the Institute for Information Industry (資策會) found that 13.55 million Taiwanese aged over 12 owned a smartphone by the second half of last year, representing 65.4 percent of Taiwanese in that demographic.
That was up from a smartphone penetration rate of 58.7 percent during the first half of last year, the survey said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday said it plans to resume operations at two coal-fired power generators for three months to boost security of electricity supply as liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply risks are running high due to the Middle East conflict. The two coal-fired power generators are at Mailiao Power Plant in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮). The plant, operated by Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), supplied electricity to Taipower’s power grid until the end of last year. Taipower’s decision came about one month after Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) on March 10 said that the nation had no imminent
Some robotaxi passengers were left stranded in the middle of fast-moving traffic in a major Chinese city after their driverless vehicles stopped running, according to police and media reports on Wednesday. A preliminary investigation indicates more than 100 robotaxis came to a halt because of a “system malfunction,” police in the city of Wuhan said in a statement, without elaborating. No injuries were reported. One passenger told Chinese media that their robotaxi stopped after turning a corner. An instruction on a screen read: “Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes.” After no one showed up, the passenger pushed
RSS