PC maker Acer Inc’s (宏碁) telecom solutions unit Acer Octon Inc (宏碁通信) is expected to announce a new Chinese customer at the China International Cloud Computing Expo — to be held from April 10 to April 12 in Chongqing.
Acer Octon general manager James Sha (沙舟) told a news conference that the new customer is a large-scale Chinese enterprise that is not a telecom operator.
The company is also in talks with one of the top three telecom carriers in the US, along with other wireless carriers, banks and hospitals in Japan, Europe and Southeast Asia, aiming to persuade them to adopt the company’s telephone network solutions, Sha said. He declined to name any of the potential customers.
He added that Acer Octon plans to unveil a new terminal switch device — which can be used in telephone networks — at Acer’s annual press conference on April 23 in New York. The new gadget can also be used for smart buildings, such as in home security devices or walkie-talkie systems.
Acer teamed up with Octon in October last year to create affordable telephone network solutions mostly aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, as part of the company’s efforts to expand its business reach beyond the sagging global PC industry.
One of Acer Octon’s new products is a global communications network for businesses based on Internet Protocol communication, which is known as the abPBX plus series. The company says it integrates traditional telephone systems and desk phones with smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to offer greater efficiency and reduced costs.
Another product is a minicomputer called the aBeing One, uses Acer Open Platform software to act as an intelligent hub, enabling users to share files or control devices running on different operating systems, according to Acer Octon.
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
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