創新發現誌

Media X at Stanford University: the Ubiquitous Virtual Relationship

Narrated by: Chuck House 

Media X focuses primarily on the influence of science communication and the humanities mainly through research projects sponsored by corporate members or partners, as well as through workshops and seminars. Our teams discuss with these members or partners, select research subjects, and publish research results. We collaborate with these firms in conducting forward-thinking research projects. These projects are of different sizes, with short-term projects lasting between 6 and 12 months, and long-term projects lasting between 5 and 7 years. We are approached by firms with a wide variety of backgrounds about projects. An example is research projects by big businesses such as Intel on science communication. These projects research varying geographic areas that include California, Taiwan and Bangalore. 

In addition to big companies – Intel, Phillips, and Cisco, to name but a few – we collaborate with small or emerging businesses. We also help them interact with big companies, encouraging brainstorming and discussion at seminars. For instance, Forterra provides distributed enterprise virtual world software capable of providing corporate customers and partners with real-time 3D web solutions for education, healthcare and more. 

The reason that iPhone attracts so much attention is by no means its voice quality and communication advantages. Rather, it is because of the huge influence it exerts in scientific and technological applications. It is how iPhone achieves complete user experience and application that appeals to people, as it all has to do with “people”, which coincides with Media X’s consideration of the whole subject from the humanities angle. 

Xu Qing-qi, Vice President, Institute for Information Industry:

The Policy to Promote E-Books

Compiled by Hu Xiu Zhu 

  The Office to Promote the Digital Content Industry, an agency that helps develop an industry worth tens of billions of US dollars, was unveiled on September 29, 2009. The establishment of this agency is testimony to Taiwan’s intention to develop its e-book industry. Xu Qing-qi, Director of the Office to Promote the Digital Content Industry responsible for the development of the digital content industry, and Vice President of the Institute for Information Industry, notes the government plans to invest NT$2.134 billion over five years to develop Taiwan’s digital content industry, with the aim of establishing 2-3 Chinese-language e-book content exchange centers by 2013. 

  To construct the infrastructure, the Office has decided to adopt the e-PUB international format standard and establish e-PUB planning taskforce. Once a standard format is decided, the digital content in the e-book platform trading centers may be readily exchanged, making it easy for carriers such as e-readers, mobiles and MIDs to read the content as long as files are converted. 

  Development of the digital publishing industry is also one of the Office’s top priorities. The Office hopes that it can create sufficient value for Taiwan’s digital publishing industry to play a major role in the world by 2013. Other goals include creating a society in which people enjoy reading and leading the world in the publication of Chinese-language materials. In the digital publishing industry chain, Taiwan has a competitive edge in the R&D of e-paper and readers. However, there is plenty of room for improvement in terms of the content of e-books, content trading centers and innovative applications. 
 
  

Service Design Expert Birgit Mager:

Thoroughly building enterprise innovate service

By Qin Zhen-jia 

To improve the service sector’s innovative capacity, Innovative DigiTech-Enabled Applications & Services Institute (IDEAS) held a 2009 Taiwan Service Experience Engineering International Forum – Customer Value-Oriented Service R&D, inviting Dr. Birgit Mager, the founder of Service Design Network (SDN) and a well-known service design and experience research expert, to visit Taiwan to share her experiences. The following is a summary of an interview with her: 

  To an enterprise or organization, service design is a planning activity. The process is to first set up an internal service procedure, followed by creating useful, usable and desirable user experiences from a user’s standpoint, and culminating in profits and differentiation of the services provided for the enterprise or organization. 

  In the mid-1990s, we collaborated with many German businesses and multinational banks such as Siemens and Deutsche Telekom to develop more logical and rational services. Generally speaking, companies paying attention to technological applications consider injecting technology into service design. 

  In fact there is more than one way to implement service design. In addition, it should vary in scope depending on a business’s needs. A business may consider starting from a small project. An example is an airport in Australia that is trying to implement a weeklong small service design project aimed at analyzing passengers’ behavior pattern in order to improve its service. 

  Another example is Deutsche Telekom, who believes all departments must provide good services to each other before it can provide good services to customers. Therefore, the company changed its corporate culture through large service design projects. We work with many department heads to jointly improve businesses’ internal service flows in order to raise employees’ awareness of customer needs. 

  In research we conducted on the world’s service cultures, the results reveal that Asian countries pay more attention to the quality of interpersonal interactions and the extent of friendliness of personal relationships, whereas in North America companies stress service flows and the quality of the service framework, without paying particular attention to personalization. However, globalization has enabled services designed by major service providers to be applied to different parts of the world, with relevant standards already established. Consequently, the fundamentals of service may indeed be applied to various parts of the world without much differentiation. Adjustments are needed only when different customer expectations caused by cultural differences are factored in. 
 
 

Interactive Experiential Shop – An Innovative Smart Vending Machine

By You Pei-hua, He Ling-wei 

If there is a smart vending machine that allows you to interact with the machine and obtain a sample of the product you are interested in without having to ask a sales clerk for help or fill out a form on the seller’s website and wait for the sample to arrive, would you be interested in finding out more about it if you see it in one of the major sales outlets? 

Foreseeing Innovative New Digiservices (FIND) of IDEAS participated in the “2009 Project to Develop Software for Service-Oriented Machines Built on an Open Platform” sponsored by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and developed the “Interactive Experiential Shop”, a smart vending machine based on the concept of “affinity, word-of-mouth marketing”. The machine combines smart vending machinery, preference analysis and personalized recommendation techniques to allow businesses to give away samples to the target groups in return for their feedback in order to fine-tune their marketing strategies. FIND launched Livex – a prototype of its interactive experiential shop – in September 2009 at the Taipei International Invention Show & Technomart. Visitors were tempted to experience Livex at first hand thanks to its “New Product Experiential Service” and “Exhibition Hall Instant Survey” applications. 
 
 

Contact Information:

Crystal Ko 886-9-20577-510 e-mail: ttk@iii.org.tw