Electric-scooter leasing company Skuro Moto (史庫諾) chief executive Frank Chen (陳孟偉) never expected he would run his own business at the age of 24.
Now, the one-year-old Skuro works with electric-vehicle maker Ahamani EV Technology Co Ltd (其易電動車) to provide a leasing service at Yuan Ze University in Taoyuan.
The business plan of this young startup goes back about seven months, when Chen won an Internet of Things (IoT) contest coorganized by MediaTek Inc (聯發科).
Chen’s team won second prize by developing a monitoring system for vehicle leasing based on MediaTek’s LinKIt platform.
Unlike other scooter-leasing firms, Skuro uses the monitoring system to enable riders to monitor power usage of scooters and to locate their vehicles through a smartphone application.
“The idea is simple,” Chen said yesterday.
“We hope to help students travel between school and their dormitories easily, while the vehicle has to be green,” the Yuan Ze University graduate said.
At a Skuro Moto Computex Taipei booth demonstrating the firm’s service based on LinKIt, Chen said the service was rolled out rapidly, as the platform offers an integrated structure so that new features can be easily developed.
It also helps reduce costs by about 30 percent, he said.
A electric scooter hired from Skuro Moto can travel 70km, while it takes about three hours to fully charge the battery.
Customers can turn on the electric scooter by swiping their student identity cards, Chen said.
To return the vehicle, they can find the nearest leasing center via a smartphone app, he said.
“We began offering the service at our university about a month ago. This is a start. We plan to expand our services to more schools,” Chen said. “To fund the expansion, we have a fundraising program.”
Chen is one of many examples indicating the arriving of the IoT era and possibly an era of startups.
ARM Holdings PLC chief marketing officer Ian Drew said during a summit forum at Computex that half of IoT device developers would be three-year startups in the next five years.
Drew said that there would be 400 billion sensors installed in connect devices over the next five years, compared with 14 billion now.
Another local startup, Alchema (得心股份), showcased a wine brewing device that helps people to make wine at home more easily by monitoring the production process.
The device uses at least five sensors to monitor alcohol content and the brewing environment. It was also developed with LinKIt.
Alchema plans to raise fresh funds on Kickstarter, the world’s biggest fundraising platform, before launching the product next year.
The company was established early this year.
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
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
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
RSS