Nearly 60 digital content companies from about 20 countries gathered in Taipei yesterday for two days of exchanges on the future of games, e-books, mobile applications and much more at the 2013 Taipei International Digital Content Summit and Fair, known as Digital Taipei.
Now in its fifth year, this year’s event aims to focus on the business potential of bringing digital content to the small screen — namely cellphones and mobile devices.
More than just a trade fair, Digital Taipei consists of conferences and forums, which this year will feature, among others, speeches from Yukio Kawasaki, general manager of TV Tokyo’s Animation Division; Tommy Palm of Sweden, the self-titled “game guru” behind Candy Crush-developer King; and Yajima Satoshi, head of marketing and communications at Japan’s Line Corp.
Taiwan’s digital content industry has shown resilient growth over the years despite a sluggish global economy, according to Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Shen Jung-chin (沈榮津).
Last year, local digital content production value experienced 5.6 percent year-on-year growth to NT$633.8 billion (US$21.4 billion), he said at the event’s opening ceremony.
Shen attributed the achievement to international cooperation, pointing out a US$40 million capital venture fund aimed at spurring digital content industries that was set up last month by Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry and New Zealand’s Pan Pacific Capital.
Taiwan-New Zealand cooperation goes even deeper, dating back to a July bilateral economic cooperation agreement which Digital Content Industry Promotion Office head Gary Gong (龔仁文) calls “an important start.”
Yesterday Sunnet (旭聯科技), a Taiwanese company providing e-learning solutions, and New Zealand’s Huhu Studios took the digital content relationship one step further by signing an agreement to focus on creative massive online open course training and e-learning animation.
Taiwanese game developers can look forward to more access to the Chinese market, as well, because the newly signed service trade agreement reduces the amount of time China’s censors will spend reviewing Taiwanese games before allowing them on to the market, Shen said.
That will provide a huge boost for the competitiveness of products with a short life cycle, he said.
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