The Ministry of Science and Technology yesterday announced details about its Silicon Valley Innovation and Startups Training Program, the first in a series to be initiated this year to help startups explore business opportunities with Silicon Valley in the US and learn from its innovative capacity.
As a pilot project, 10 top-performing teams in the ministry’s Innovation and Startups incentive programs were sent to the Plug and Play Tech Center in California to receive what the ministry called “accelerated training.”
Over two weeks, the teams received training on marketing and presentation, how to acquire venture capital, and discovering new applications for their products from instructors and international innovators.
National Applied Research Laboratories Director Chuang Yu-tse (莊裕澤) said Taiwan and the Silicon Valley have had very few interactions over the past 10 years, and that the program would seek to re-establish ties with innovators and investors there.
He said that he hopes the teams would guide Taiwan’s future innovators with the knowledge they acquired in the US.
Industrial Technology Research Institute Re-connect Silicon Valley project director Robert Luo (羅一中) said that the Taiwan Innovative Entrepreneurship Center is set to be inaugurated in Santa Clara, California, in June so Taiwanese innovators can learn from professionals and establish business ties in Silicon Valley.
In addition, he said Taiwan’s innovative rapid prototyping and resource matching center was launched in Taipei last month to help transform the nation into a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship.
The center provides prototyping services to innovators around the world, offering 17 emerging technologies and 76 trial production lines primarily in wearable devices, the Internet of Things, cutting-edge manufacturing, advanced medical devices and advanced materials, he said.
Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Lin Yi-bin (林一平) said that the ministry, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the National Development Council are in talks to set up a fund to leverage Taiwan’s innovative capacity.
He said that the fund would seek to attract private-sector investments, as well as investments from semi-governmental agencies, such as the Institute for Information Industry.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater