Since the outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019, the global economy and people's lives have been greatly affected. Going to banks, hospitals, shopping at supermarkets, religious activities, and other daily activities, for example, all came under restrictions. In addition, onsite exhibitions that used to have large crowds have now almost all turned to the online format, including major international exhibitions such as CES and COMPUTEX. Although there are many online exhibition solutions on the market, they all focus on product exhibits and lack a platform for follow-up business opportunities and communication, relying only on traditional email, text customer service, telephone customer service, and video conferencing. These traditional communication modes lack scheduling design and are unable to provide appointment communication services and interactive functions, which in turn weakens the effectiveness of the online exhibition.
In times of illness that necessitate physical exams at the hospital, most people have the experience of having to wait long periods of time for computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results. Although spinal fluid extraction and biopsy of organic tissue are mature technologies, patients are daunted by the invasive nature of these procedures. The fiberoptic particle plasmon resonance (FOPPR) technology developed by Instant NanoBiosensors not only has sensitivity far exceeding other mainstream instruments on the market, but is able to, using just a small amount of peripheral blood (serum, less than 20uL) and three simple steps-- sample injection, analysis and report generation, produce testing results in just a few minutes.
Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) plans to invest NT$80.7 billion (US$2.9 billion) into digital transformation of airports and seaports, using AI, IoT, big data and other innovative technologies over the next five years.
Although digital signature of remote documents is no longer a problem, how to distinguish the authenticity of signature documents and how to verify that the signature is made by the countersigner in person is a pain point. Hungarian start-up Birosign, which was selected by the Epoch Foundation Garage+ Accelerator in early June as one of the 46 must-see start-ups at Computex 2021's virtual exhibition, provides a solution to this problem by using sensor technology and machine learning.
South Korea's SparkLabs Korea, Daewoo E&C Vina, and Bespin Global have signed a strategic partnership to construct a smart city platform in Vietnam, according to SparkLabs Group.
Remote work and online activities have become the new normal since the pandemic started. Startng in July, Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry (III)'s TCloud offers 250 digital tools for local micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses to accelerate digital transfomation and to improve competitiveness.
Taiwan-based medical technology startup iXensor has launched a smart antigen testing solution that is able to detect COVID-19 infections and can show the rest results via its smartphone app.
Good product managers matter, especially for consumer product or service companies. Melody Koh left Blue Apron two months after its IPO as its chief product officer. During her tenure, she helped scale the business through hyper-growth (25x in 3.5 years), building and leading a 35-person team across product management, product design, and analytics/data science. She joined NextView Ventures' New York Office in 2017.
A team of 25 startups from Taiwan participated in the French government-supported VivaTech 2021 in Paris in mid June, with five of them winning four awards of the annual event, according to Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).
India-based AI startup Dynopii is showing a real-time speech accent changer at the ongoing virtual Computex Taipei 2021, aiming to help solution centers address the pain points of communicating with customers carrying different accents, according to company CEO Anubhav Singh.
Though neuromorphic computing is still in the early stage, it promises a new way to make AI devices smarter, smaller, and more efficient by incorporating design elements from the study of how human brainswork.
In today's world of computer vision AI, there is a significant challenge of running AI models on the limited compute power of edge device chipsets, as they are typically too large, process heavy and consume significant power. Furthermore, there is the rising costs of IT infrastructure (e.g. cloud) to support AI models, which is not green-tech friendly, as well as the costly process of spending months to manually optimizing AI models, while trying to maintain accuracy.
As the modern smart connected devices are getting smaller, thinner, and supporting more stringent protocols such as 5G, GPS, UWB, BLE, and Wi-Fi 6, they need high-performance timing solutions that are accurate, scalable and able to fully integrate with electronics chips; however, it's something that traditional quartz timing is practically unable to do.
X-ray imaging has existed for more than 120 years, but a Canada-based start-up, KA Imaging Inc, is trying to be a game changer for the long-established market. With the world's first portable dual-energy detector, the company aims to revolutionize the X-ray market and realize its vision of "Innovative X-ray everywhere".
Massive demand for rapid, secure, and stable transmission of data and information in the age of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 is attracting solution providers to seek opportunities in the manufacturing space. Solace, a middleware solution provider founded in 2001 in Ottawa, Canada, also has its eyes set on the manufacturing sector in Taiwan, and is expanding its business in the market.
