■ Airline Industry
Vietnam flights to expand
Taiwan and Vietnam have agreed to expand flights between them on the back of booming trade and tourism, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday. Under the new pact pending final approval from both governments, the seat capacity of Taiwanese airlines offering regular passenger flights to Ho Chi Minh City will nearly double to 11,000 a week from 6,010, the CAA said in a statement. The cargo flight capacity of Taiwan air carriers would be lifted from 600 tonnes a week to 1,000 tonnes, it said. Taiwanese airlines would also be allowed to extend their flights from Vietnam to Europe, while Vietnam Airlines would be allowed to extend its flights from Taipei to San Francisco or Los Angeles, it said. Trade between the two sides more than doubled to US$4.7 billion last year, up from US$2.1 billion in 2000.
■ Telecoms
Instant messaging a hit
The penetration rate of instant messaging, a real-time communication software, has topped 90 percent in Taiwan, according to the results of a survey released yesterday. The survey was conducted on March 11 and 12 by InsightXplorer, a market research company, among 1,524 Internet users aged 15 to 39. As many as 92.7 percent of the respondents said they had used instant messaging software over the past month, with 50.1 percent of respondents saying they had installed two or more types of instant messaging software. It was found that instant messaging software is most frequently used by younger people, with 99 percent of those in the 15-to-19 age group using the software, compared with 81.3 percent among those in the 35-to-39 age group. MSN Messenger was the most popular, used by 77.1 percent of Internet users. Yahoo Messenger is used by 56.1 percent of Internet users, and Skype by 20.1 percent.
■ Internet
AltaVista pioneer dies at 42
Paul Flaherty, a computer engineer who helped create the pioneering AltaVista online search engine, has died. He was 42. Flaherty died on March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, California, family members said on Friday. Flaherty came up with the idea of indexing Web pages that made the AltaVista search engine one of the most popular Internet search tools in the mid-1990s. "He was such a warm and loving man, and he was exceptionally smart," his brother, Michael, said on Friday. Flaherty was working as a research engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in Palo Alto when he teamed up with two other staff researchers in 1995 to develop AltaVista's technology.
■ Music industry
Classics promoted online
Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, will release download-only live concert recordings of the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and other symphony orchestras. Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, two Universal classical-music labels, will release an average of four live recordings per orchestra each year for digital downloading, Universal Music, a unit of Paris-based Vivendi Universal SA, said in an e-mailed statement today. Consumers can buy downloads of a movement, a symphony or an entire concert, and one concert per year may also be released on a physical compact disc. "Recordings of these live performances will be available for downloading much faster than traditional releases," Jonathan Gruber, a Universal vice president, said in the statement.
Anna Bhobho, a 31-year-old housewife from rural Zimbabwe, was once a silent observer in her home, excluded from financial and family decisionmaking in the deeply patriarchal society. Today, she is a driver of change in her village, thanks to an electric tricycle she owns. In many parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, women have long been excluded from mainstream economic activities such as operating public transportation. However, three-wheelers powered by green energy are reversing that trend, offering financial opportunities and a newfound sense of importance. “My husband now looks up to me to take care of a large chunk of expenses,
SECTOR LEADER: TSMC can increase capacity by as much as 20 percent or more in the advanced node part of the foundry market by 2030, an analyst said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to lead its peers in the advanced 2-nanometer process technology, despite competition from Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, TrendForce Corp analyst Joanne Chiao (喬安) said. TSMC’s sophisticated products and its large production scale are expected to allow the company to continue dominating the global 2-nanometer process market this year, Chiao said. The world’s largest contract chipmaker is scheduled to begin mass production of chips made on the 2-nanometer process in its Hsinchu fab in the second half of this year. It would also hold a ceremony on Monday next week to
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