Electric scooter maker Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) has become the only Taiwanese company in Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 Internet of Things (IoT) start-ups — the concept of connecting household devices to the Internet.
The Taoyuan-based company raised US$150 million, ranking it seventh in the top 100 IoT start-ups, Forbes said in a report on Sunday, citing data compiled by the analytics platform Mattermark.
Gogoro also has the second-highest growth score of 1,123 in the rankings, behind only Santa Monica-based Ring, which manufactures a doorbell with a video camera.
The Mattermark growth score is a measure of how quickly a company is gaining traction at a given point in time. It incorporates the mindshare score (Web traffic, social traction), as well as business growth metrics (such as employee count over time and funding).
Mattermark uses a combination of artificial intelligence and data quality analysis to provide insights into more than 1 million private companies, 470,000 employees and more than 100,000 funding events.
Gogoro, founded by former HTC Corp (宏達電) executives, slashed the prices of its electric scooters by as much as 23 percent on Oct. 1 and unveiled a cheaper model in an attempt to address consumer complaints over its pricing strategy.
The price cuts came only three months after the debut of Gogoro scooters in Taipei, which company cofounder and chief executive Horace Luke (陸學森) described as a “fast response” to both positive and negative feedback from users of online forums, including some who complained that the scooters are too expensive.
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