Line Corp, creator of the Line messaging app, which has 19 million local users, yesterday announced its entrance into Taiwan’s telecoms market with its new service called Line Mobile.
The new service is the result of a partnership leveraging the infrastructure built by local giant Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信) and aims to serve people seeking low-priced monthly plans with unlimited data usage, Line Taiwan general manager Roger Chen (陳立人) told a news conference in Taipei.
Line Mobile offers year-long unlimited data contracts at monthly plans costing NT$299, NT$399 and NT$499, while connection speeds at the two lower price points would be throttled at 10 megabits per second (Mbps) and 21Mbps respectively.
The two lowest price points are designed to cater to lower-usage customers who primarily need data connection for texting and voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) calls, Chen said.
The NT$399-a-month plan meets the connection speed requirement for streaming video and offers 20 minutes of cellular calls, he added.
The NT$499 plan does not throttle connection speed and includes 25 minutes of cellular calls, Line Mobile said, adding that people can begin subscribing to the service today.
Although Line Mobile does not offer subsidized smartphone purchases, it is planning to attract new subscribers with bonus reward points that could be used to purchase emoji stickers.
Line Mobile said that its subscribers would be added to Far EasTone’s tally, and while Far EasTone differentiates its customers by the amount of data used, it differentiates by data connection speeds.
Line Mobile is the latest entrant to Taiwan’s crowded telecoms market, where rival carriers have been engaged in years of cutthroat price competition since the introduction of fourth generation networks.
Line Mobile is not expected to have a significant effect on other carriers, industry observers have said.
Line Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, similar to services launched by local convenience store chains and big box shops, they said.
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