COMPUTEX 2017 Concluded Successfully to Build Global Technology Ecosystems

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COMPUTEX stands as the international procurement platform attracting buyers to invest and further leads the world ICT industry to build global technology ecosystems. In addition, InnoVEX, in a short 3-day period, attracted 14,977 visits to InnoVEX, an increase of 36% from last year.

COMPUTEX 2017 co-organized by Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) and Taipei Computer Association (TCA) attended by 41,378 international visitors from 167 countries attended the show, a 1% increase from last year. Countries with the highest visitor growth include Thailand (30.63%), Indonesia (22.52%), India (20.86%), Vietnam (20.44%), and Russia (14.81%). During the show, TAITRA organized 955 sessions of 1-on-1 procurement meetings to directly link 181 VIP buyers with 297 exhibitors. This clearly indicates COMPUTEX stands as the international procurement platform attracting buyers to invest and further leads the world ICT industry to build global technology ecosystems. In addition, InnoVEX, in a short 3-day period, attracted 14,977 visits to InnoVEX, an increase of 36% from last year.

AI, regarded as one of the strategic technology trend for 2017 by Gartner, shined at COMPUTEX this year. Jensen Huang, Founder, President and CEO of NVIDIA, indicated during the NVIDIA AI Forum that effectiveness can be raised by 10-50 times through the heterogeneous computing of GPU. And during NVIDIA AI forum, Gogoro attracted visitors’ attention with its VR equipment which is the collaboration with Holodeck technology. Jeffrey A. Rhoda, General Manager Greater China Group IBM Corporation, pointed out that AI will ubiquitous and he believes artificial intelligence enhances what humans do, not replace humans. Meanwhile, ARM announced DynamIQ CPU: Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 and BenQ debut its first Made in Taiwan delivery robot, called DiBot. With so many prospective trends and product launches, COMPUTEX turns into the largest and most international AI discussion platform, taking itself to the next AI level.

IoT Applications

COMPUTEX 2017 is filled with wearable devices, smart healthcare, smart life, and all kinds of innovative solutions. From France, Digitsole, a smart shoe, that provides smart heating and accurate tracking of daily health. Cinema2Go from Israel is the development
of optical solution, through wide-angle virtual displayed technology, which users may watch movies through mobile phones anywhere and anytime with theatrical effect. iBand+ from the Netherlands is an auto-learning software algorithm that helps improve sleep quality. ITRI, one of Taiwan’s most important innovation research institutions, focuses on 3 main exhibits: intelligent vision, intelligent healthcare, and intelligent city, with nearly 30 newest technologies and applications.

InnoVEX: Largest Networking Platform

Taiwan is the sprouting place for startups and InnoVEX has become Asia’s largest networking platform for startups, attracting global startups and enterprises to build the future technology prototype. The InnoVEX Pitch Contest, with a grand prize of $30,000 US dollars was won by Amaryllo. Addweup received the Foxconn Technology Group Special Award of $10,000 US dollars. Startup motivation was in full force at InnoVEX: Embrace Audio Lab of Taiwan offered a gum size of XPUMP signal processor which brings support to mobile devices with 3D surround sound effect; Nexstgo breaks the previous framework restrictions, released world’s first sandwich design of commercial smart phone; and Travis, which was able to achieve a 785% on fundraising platform, Indiegogo, presented the translation device that was able to translate 80 languages.

COMPUTEX 2017’s InnoVEX exhibit attracted 272 startups from 23 countries/territories, showcasing innovations from around the world in IoT, AI, health management, VR/AR, cloud computing, wearables, and mobility. InnoVEX featured startups, VCs, and accelerators collaborating to build a new ecosystem for the information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

A packed schedule of keynotes, panels, forums, and demos provided a rare opportunity for startups to efficiently connect with international VCs, angel investors, incubators and accelerators, potential strategic partners, and future customers–all in a single venue. InnoVEX included five elements critical to start-ups: display, demos, forums, pitch contests, and matchmaking. InnoVEX was introduced to COMPUTEX in 2016; in two years, it has become one of the leading global innovation events.

In InnoVEX 2017, there were eight U.S. startups such as BioInspira, Holojam, SparkAmplify and VaGenie. In addition to individual startup exhibitors, prominent U.S. companies such as Amazon, IBM, and Intel were among the show’s speakers. Several American high-profile venture capital firms and accelerators such as Acorn, Fenox, Indiegogo and Alchemist participated. The Netherlands Trade and Investment Office featured a Dutch Startup Showcase. The French Tech Space also had a significant presence at InnoVEX this year.

Gartner predicted by 2017, 50 percent of all IoT solutions would originate in startups less than three years old, signaling that innovative business models are becoming the focus of R&D in the global ICT industry. “In recent years, emerging technologies have revolutionized ICT sectors and business models around the world. TAITRA recognized this trend, and added the InnoVEX exhibit last year. Now, it is one of the leading global innovation events. COMPUTEX is a platform to match resources for innovators and startups globally to drive the industry’s growth and development,” said Walter Yeh, president and CEO of COMPUTEX organizer TAITRA.

The culminating event of InnoVEX—the “Startup Pitch Competition,” at Center Stage was a highlight of InnoVEX at COMPUTEX 2017. Around 100 startup teams around the world registered and competed for the five categories of award prizes plus the InnoVEX Grand Prize of US$30K. International juries from U.S. and Taiwan provided insightful questions and practical comments before an enthusiastic and engaged audience. Eight startups were selected as finalists and six startups received awards provided by companies and organizers.

This year’s InnoVEX Grand Prize of US$30K was awarded to security-as-a-service start-up Amaryllo from the Netherlands. When Amaryllo President and Founder Marcus Yang was asked what advice he would give future start-ups wanting to enter the pitch contest, he said, “Don’t focus on touting your products. Focus on your business model—that’s what the judges look for—it has to be tangible and sustainable. I’ve found InnoVEX to be an excellent opportunity to meet investors and VCs from around the world and to meet (and even secure deals with) potential partners and large customers. I attended InnoVEX last year and will be back again next year. It is an honor to receive this year’s Grand Prize recognition, thank you.”  Although Amaryllo still qualifies as a start-up, the company has already achieved significant success and landed some large clients. This is one start-up to watch.

CPX Conference: From Mobility to Intelligence

COMPUTEX 2017 with a complete supply chain, and IoT and startup ecosystems, kicked-off the second day of its three-day CPX Conference, “From Mobility to Intelligence,” as artificial intelligence and IoT took center stage today. Top executives from the world’s tech leaders shared insights into what their companies are doing to win the world of machine intelligence technology, deep learning and the internet of things in addition to its opportunities and challenges. In line with information and communications technology (ICT) industry trends, AI & Robotics is a new theme this year at COMPUTEX, and IoT continues to be a strong focus and theme of the show. The SmarTEX exhibit was introduced last year and continues this year to highlight IoT innovations at COMPUTEX.

As ICT industry leaders weighed in on AI’s future, perhaps the top take-away was that global innovations in the field of artificial intelligence are going to redefine virtually every aspect of our lives.

Jefferey A. Rhoda, general manager of the Greater China Group at IBM commented when asked if artificial intelligence would replace humans, “Even at this point when Watson can see and read better than humans do…our stance continues to be that it will augment what humans do—make our call centers better, help doctors make diagnoses and more.”

Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solution Architecture and Engineering at NVIDIA, talked about the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in the world today, all powered by its GPU computing technology. “Much of the rise of GPU, in the past few years, was thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence,” he noted.

IoT Era

As the internet of things drives significant lifestyle transformation, most data will be processed in the cloud. Industry leaders shared insights on the opportunities this dynamic presents as well as how they are meeting the challenges of scaling IoT solutions.

Miller Chang, the vice president of Advantech’s Embedded-IoT Group, said his team was working on creating what he referred to as a much needed common standard for sensing and communication technology to support IoT applications. He further emphasized the importance of partnerships in the new IoT era and “the need to create a value chain dimension for each industry to work better together… The value chain has to be domain focused,” he said.

Dinesh Patel, president of the IoT Services Group at ARM, echoed Chang’s thoughts on forging and maintaining strong partnerships and stressed how crucial that is to a company’s success, saying “In addition, having an active developer community on your platform is very important.”

AI Revolution

The world’s biggest high-tech companies gathered at the CPX Conference and shared insights on the future of technology at COMPUTEX 2017. Speakers continued to offer new perspectives on applications in areas from the IoT to AI, and leading companies like IBM, NVIDIA, Intel and Appier also explored new business models enabled by AI. As AI has been adopted in various industries, AI solutions are spreading out  to different exhibition areas of COMPUTEX 2017— especially at InnoVEX, where a variety of attention-grabbing AI applications are on display. The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), one of the organizers of COMPUTEX, said with all the exhibitions, forums and competitions during COMPUTEX, it hopes to help  global technology companies step up and position themselves for new opportunities created by AI.

The CPX Conference started with a keynote speech entitled “An Amazing World of Possibilities” by Rene Haas, President of ARM Holdings PLC’s Intellectual Property Group. The speech focused on the infinite possibilities of AI and ARM’s latest solutions in this area. Haas said as AI computing technologies are maturing and accelerating the development of related applications, the world is expected to have 275 billion connected devices by 2035 and they will help lay the foundation for an Internet of Everything (IoE) in the future. In view of that, ARM is developing industry-leading silicon technologies that can also address security issues and other key challenges. The company is also seeking to form partnerships and build a competitive ecosystem of innovation so a smarter future where everything is connected can become possible, according to Hass.

In another much-anticipated forum of the CPX Conference this afternoon, IBM Greater China Group General Manager Jeffrey A. Rhoda shared with over 700 audience how augmented intelligence has disrupted business models and redefined various industries, and the case study was shared by DBS Taiwan Head of Technology Spencer Wang with DBS’s own experiences of conquering the challenges brought by new technology. Rhoda said COMPUTEX has shown the latest trend from IoT to AI, showing that Taiwan will be a base for various innovations to grow. The global trend of business reformation, cognitive technology, cloud, and data have become the key for different sectors to respond to the AI boom and achieve transformation, as these technologies can bring infinite possibilities to each sector and at the same time help build a better society for tomorrow. Therefore, IBM will keep accelerating the application and adoption of Watson, helping partners all over the world realize the optimum of AI. In the latter part of the forum, AI pioneers such as NVIDIA, Intel and Applier also joined the discussion and shared their revolutionary advancements on AI.

Now in its second year, the InnoVEX exhibit is showcasing the momentum of AI innovation from startups in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the U.S. and Netherlands. The Taiwan-based DT42 is building a platform for intelligent vision applications or other smart solutions with AI solutions that can operate quickly on hardware equipments. Meanwhile, PVD PLUS is displaying a motion intelligence cloud service that can enable motion recognition capabilities on wearable devices.

Ambi Climate, the first product of Hong Kong’s Ambi Labs, aims to improve smart air conditioner control at homes and make home interaction smarter and more in line with human thoughts. As for business application, an AI business solution called Flax Scanner from Japan’s Cinnamon can understand and reformat various business documents and texts, which in turn can help businessmen to manage, access and get insight from documents in various formats more effectively. Also on display is a smart business and marketing service from the U.S.-based SparkAmplify that can carry out big data analysis with machine learning technologies.

To help startups grab AI-related opportunities, InnoVEX also arranged the “AI & Deep Learning” forum in the afternoon of May 30. Speakers included Zane Moi, Head of Business Development-HKT, Amazon Web Services; Eric Chang, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Microsoft Research Asia; Yurong Chen, Senior Research Director of Cognitive Computing Lab, Intel Labs China; and Jeffrey Liu, Member of the IBM Academy of Technology and IBM Master Inventor, who shared their experience through keynote speeches, demos, case studies, and discussed with startups and buyers on site regarding the trends and evolution of AI and robotics applications. These industry leaders all shared the same observation that AI will see a much greater demand in the segment of image and video recognition, and that related applications and capabilities will be widely adopted. They also forecasted that AI will then be used in smart cloud, and a variety of new AI segments will emerge and enable more innovative, world-changing solutions.

 “As leaders and startups in the global technology ecosystem are gathered here for COMPUTEX 2017, we are bringing the event to a whole new level by organizing the biggest and the most globalized platform for AI discussions. We believe that by showcasing global market dynamics in areas from IoT to AI, the event will continue to demonstrate momentum for smart technology innovation in the next three days of exhibition,” said TAITRA President & CEO, Walter Yeh.

Finally

Besides the five main themes, COMPUTEX 2017 has feature four exhibition areas— SmarTEX (IoT solutions in security, automotive electronics, smart home and entertainment, smart tech, and wearables), InnoVEX (the best platform for global startups), Gaming & VR (featuring high-performance gaming and VR products) and iStyle (showcasing Apple MFi-certified peripherals with great design and aesthetic value). These exhibited bring together technology companies from all over the world, along with newly launched products and technologies, unveiling the next generation of global technology ecosystems. More than 100 keynotes and forums have taken place during COMPUTEX 2017 in the five days. COMPUTEX 2017 has set to deliver an amazing experience of diversified activities and numerous innovations for international visitors.

Highlights

Mr. Walter Yeh, President   & CEO of TAITRA

“COMPUTEX has been going through positive transformation the past two years with featured exhibits and forum topics in sync with the global technology trends and maintaining its leading position internationally. COMPUTEX showcases the complete ICT supply chain while expanding into the IoT ecosystems and AI applications of today. We hope to bring global innovations and startups to join COMPUTEX and become the best platform for big corporations and startups to establish strategic partnerships.”

Mr. Ralph Wiegmann , CEO, International Forum Design

“This is the 10th year anniversary of COMPUTEX and D&I Awards. 10 years ago when we select first applications everything was much more functionality, real physical product and conceptual approaches, after 10 years our judges figured out that we have many more applications which are immediately ready to market instead of just conceptual. What we figured out is of course the new application areas as we talk about IOT, UI (User Interfaces), as ten years ago those things are existing but it was a technical Engineering discipline, now its turn to be a core design as today without any good functioning user interface there is no option to sell any product in global market. So the change is due to rapidly changing market, what I like very much is the makers approach and really involving startup companies, and startup companies are very important for the traditional entity  because they put a question mark behind everything and that’s very necessary.”

Mr. Eric Wei, Sr. Sales Director, Asia, Viewsonic :

“Viewsonic has 30 years of history in display technology, so we have our own unique display technologies, by which we are capable of manufacturing much better monitors then our competitors. Many other brands in this display category are various other products and not mainly focus of monitor itself, but Viewsonic  is different, we have our specialize engineers to fine tune the colors, the contrast and fine-tune the quality of  our monitors so that Viewsonic customers can enjoy better experience  in  term of color, in terms of response time.”

Mr. Samuel Lai, Deputy Manager. Silicon Power

“We have showcased our latest product lines which are ready for India market, first we have our latest alkaline and zinc models batteries both in AA and AAA variant also we have showcased our wide range of portable hard drives,  we have future ready  anti-shock and water resistant models which are getting tremendous response throughout.”

Mr. Calvin Yang , Asia Sales Sr. Director, PNY Technologies Asia Pacific Limited

“ We at PNY this yeas showcased our  complete range of products including flash memory cards, USB flash drives, SSDs,Type-C products, and GeForce  Gaming Series for home-users, gamers as well as professionals, and other IT  peripherals in Computex 2017.”

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