Young entrepreneurs invited to speak yesterday shared their experiences of how to take advantage of failure and make progress, at the third XFail Conference at Taipei’s Syntrend Creative Park (三創園區).
Entrepreneurs in California’s Silicon Valley adhere to “fail fast and learn fast,” and people should boldly share their failures, Asia Silicon Valley Development Agency deputy executive director Wang Ting-an (汪庭安) said in a video shown at the conference.
“You fail because you are dying to prove yourself,” O’Pay Electronic Payment Co chairman Calvin Lin (林一泓) said, adding that he had learned to take failure more lightly, while grasping opportunities on time.
Lin, who is promoting digital payment methods in Taiwan, said the nation’s conservative regulations are unfavorable for the development of financial technology.
However, Lin said he was more confident now that newly appointed Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) has said he would give digital payment developers more incentives.
Another speaker, Wu Yin-jui (吳崟睿), founder of the social media platform Eatgether, said entrepreneurs should grab hold of any opportunity for success, however tiny, amid the many failures.
The conference was organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taipei City Government, Taiwan Innovation Entrepreneurship Center and Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Association of Taiwan, and attended by more than 500 people.
One audience member, surnamed Huang (黃), said he attended the conference because he was attracted by a slogan that read: “Success cannot be reproduced, but failure can be prevented.”
Huang, 33, said he had worked at Chunghwa Telecom Co for about six-and-a-half years, but found innovation was almost impossible at the state-run telecom and had joined his friend’s hacking-technology start-up a few months ago.
Taiwan has a wealth of technological talent, yet salaries are much lower than in Singapore or Israel, Huang said, adding he hoped to stay off the trodden path and out of established institutions.
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
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
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