Click onto the European Council of Commerce and Trade (ECCT)'s new Web page and what comes up may look normal, but it's not.
Behind the mass of images and text is a new technology designed to transform secretaries into Webmasters and make information easier to post, use and find on the site -- and ecct.com.tw is first in Taiwan to use it.
It's called PHP -- a software provided free of charge over the Internet to anyone willing to learn how to use it. The latest version of PHP creates "database driven sites" that put the power of the Net into the hands of anyone who can cut and paste.
"I used to have to send new information to [the Web designer] so he could upload it onto our Web page and do all the coding," said Warwick Simpson, editor of EuroView, the ECCT's magazine. "I can't begin to tell you how easy [the new site] is to use."
Gone are the days Webmasters ruled over companies and laughed at simple requests to "update the homepage." With two clicks of a mouse, Simpson can upload a new article for EuroView onto their site.
PHP takes care of the rest, making the article immediately available to readers and linking it to the homepage, search engine and the rest of the database.
To the designers of the new ECCT site the new technology means no more phone calls in the middle of the night to add a press release, product update, or trade manual to a company homepage. Moreover, the days of "data mining," -- also known as searching for an elusive fact, phone number or e-mail for hours -- are over for those with a PHP-driven Website.
The architect behind the design and construction of the ECCT homepage, Russ McClay of Pro QC Studios said that after a site is built with a PHP database, information can be found and used easily.
"For example, if you wanted to create a list of every company on the [Website] database and make a [Microsoft] Excel document out of it -- with phone numbers, addresses, products -- you can," he said. In the early days of the Web, that spreadsheet would have to be hand typed after an excruciating session of data mining to locate each information nugget and phone number.
As the PHP homepage (www.php.net) puts it: "This may sound a little foreign to all of you folks ... but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software."
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
CRESTING WAVE: Companies are still buying in, but the shivers in the market could be the first signs that the AI wave has peaked and the collapse is upon the world Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported a new monthly record of NT$367.47 billion (US$11.85 billion) in consolidated sales for last month thanks to global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Last month’s figure represented 16.9 percent annual growth, the slowest pace since February last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 11 percent. Cumulative sales in the first 10 months of the year grew 33.8 percent year-on-year to NT$3.13 trillion, a record for the same period in the company’s history. However, the slowing growth in monthly sales last month highlights uncertainty over the sustainability of the AI boom even as
RSS