■ Consumption
Taiwan tops `Asian Dragons'
Taiwan's private consumption accounted for 62.08 percent of its GDP this year, ranking it at the top of the four "Asian Dragons," the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management and Development (IMD) said in the IMD 2006 World Competitiveness Yearbook. Taiwan placed 18th in the world in terms of its private consumption ratio, the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said, noting that private consumption in Taiwan has seen continuous growth in quality over the past few years. In the evaluation, Hong Kong was ranked 27th, while South Korea placed 45th and Singapore 57th, according to the IMD yearbook.
■ Copyrights
Court rules against Compal
A US jury on Friday found Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦) guilty of infringing a Samsung patent and ordered the Taiwan-based computer company to pay US$9 million in damages. The suit filed by Samsung Electronics Co in federal district court in San Francisco accused Compal of using the South Korea company's patented keyboard technology in its notebook computers from April 1999 to March 2002. "We are very happy," lead Samsung attorney Mark Fowler said as members of his legal team hugged and exchanged "high-fives" after US District Court chief judge Vaughn Walker excused the jury.
■ Gaming
PS3 shopping turns violent
Shopping for the new Sony PlayStation 3 video game console proved dangerous on Friday, with a shooting, a mugging and a stampede marking Connecticut's opening day sales. At 3:15am, two armed robbers shot Michael Penkala, 21, of Webster, Massachusetts, outside a Wal-Mart store in Putnam, Connecticut, as he waited in line to be one of the first to own the machine, police said. Hours after Penkala's shooting, police said that a 24-year-old man was mugged by as many as seven teenagers after buying a PlayStation at a mall in Manchester. Meanwhile, in Meriden, some in a crowd of roughly 700 people who were lined up outside a Best Buy store on Friday morning tried to shove their way in.
■ Music
Universal sues MySpace
Universal Music Group on Friday sued MySpace.com, claiming the online social-networking hub illegally encourages its users to share music and music videos on the site without permission. In the lawsuit, filed in US District Court, Universal Music contends MySpace, a unit of News Corp, attempts to shield itself from liability by requiring users agree to grant the Web site a license to publish the content they upload to the site. Users, however, have no such authority over works they don't own.
■ Publishing
Reader's Digest okays bid
The Reader's Digest Association, the company responsible for publishing some of the world's best-read magazines, agreed to a US$1.6 billion takeover offer on Thursday. Reader's Digest, an 84-year-old company that publishes the pint-size magazine, agreed to be acquired for US$1.6 billion by investors led by Ripplewood Holdings. The offer is a 43 percent premium over the company's August stock price, when shares bottomed at US$11.83. The investor group, which includes Merrill Lynch Capital and the J. Rothschild Group, will also assume US$800 million in debt, bringing the total purchase to US$2.4 billion.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS