Chinese Gamer International Corp’s Outstanding In-house R&D Capability has Enabled the Company to Establish a Dominant Position in the Online Gaming Market
By Lin An-Ni
Shortly after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a group of four young people who had achieved impressive results in game design competitions – Ch’en Chia-P’ing, Lu Hsueh-Sen, Liu Yu-Min and Wu Tsung-Chou – and who were overflowing with the confidence of youth, got together to establish the Taichi Workshop
“You should think very carefully about this; making it big in the game industry isn’t as easy as you think.” When Soft-World International Chairman Wang Chun-Po heard that they were planning to set up a game design workshop to develop new games, he warned them that they should be very cautious about making this decision. At that time, very few computer science graduates went into the gaming industry; people who had studied computer science at university usually found jobs with companies in the Hsinchu Science Park. In the end, however, Wang Chun-Po took the bold decision to provide the four young people with seed capital, enabling them to establish the business that later became Chinese Gamer International Corp.
By 1999, Chinese Gamer International had launched its first online game – “Three Kingdoms Online,” the company’s first foray into the Chinese-language game market. However, “Three Kingdoms Online” was not a success; no sooner had it been launched than it succumbed to fierce competition from the South Korean online game “Lineage.” Nevertheless, the Chinese Gamer International team had gained valuable experience. They took steps to improve the stability and security of their servers, and in 2002 they finally succeeded in launching a game that was both a critical and financial success: “Legend.”
Fate can play strange tricks. If it hadn’t been for the global financial crisis of 2008, it is likely that no-one would have noticed how profitable online gaming companies were, particularly Chinese Gamer International. The major improvements in networking and server hardware, and in the software environment, that had been achieved over the past few years have provided an unseen boost to online gaming, and to online gaming companies.
Today, Chinese Gamer International Corp. is included in the MSCI Taiwan index. Despite having total capitalization of only NT$860 million, Chinese Gamer International now ranks alongside TSMC and Formosa Plastics as a major target for investment by overseas institutional investors.
An epoch-making dialog between high technology and the media sector is pointing the way towards a bright future for publishing
By Hu Hsiu-Chu
Digital publishing is growing rapidly, while the traditional print media are faced with falling advertising revenues and a declining readership. Whether the fusion of high technology with the media sector will create conflict and disruption, or whether it represents an important turning point that will lead to the emergence of major new business opportunities, depends largely on the decisions that those involved make, and how they respond to changing circumstances. Ideas organized a special forum on “The Epoch-making Dialog between High Technology and the Media Sector,” creating an opportunity for leading experts on technology and the media to share ideas and brainstorm new concepts for innovation.
Shih Mu-Piao, head of Chunghwa Telecom’s Mobile Business Group, noted that last year Chunghwa Telecom rolled out its new Hami e-bookstore service, which makes available books from leading publishers, while also incorporating comprehensive, easy-to-use back-office management services, including e-bookstore network management interface, e-book reproduction, content management, e-book “cloud computing,” etc. The idea behind this new service is to make it easy and convenient for publishers to convert existing paper books into an e-book format with digital rights management (DRM) protection that can be uploaded onto the Hami e-bookstore site for sale to consumers.
Yu Kuo-Ting, Chairman of the Magazine Business Association of Taipei, explains that e-ink e-paper solves the problems associated with reading based on conventional printing technology of the type that people have been familiar with for centuries. The methods of reading that are emerging now represent something completely new, making it possible to reproduce vast quantities of text and graphics, and to integrate reading with multimedia content.
Udn.com CEO Liu Yong-Ping notes that, in the future, the media will mean more than just print media and newspapers that have to be opened out to be read; it will be possible to present the news through media other than paper. Liu says that the United Daily News Group will be launching a major new editing platform in July this year, which will make extensive use of hi-tech systems to achieve digital convergence within the Group. Experienced editorial staff will decide whether each piece of content should be presented online, via mobile phone handsets, or through e-book readers.
"EP Synchronization" – Digitalizing the Editing Process
By Li Luo
Faced with the rapidly growing demand for information in the age of the Internet, traditional publishing and broadcasting processes are finding it hard to keep pace with the rate at which data needs to be updated.
“EP Synchronization” is an experimental technology developed for use in the editorial process by Ideas magazine and the Institute for Information Industry’s Innovative DigiTech-Enabled Applications and Services Institute (IDEAS). The term “EP Synchronization” is used to refer to the simultaneous publication of electronic (E) and paper (P) versions of the same work. Given that the general public as a whole is already used to using the Internet, and that mobile phone handsets and e-book readers can now be used to display electronic publications, it makes sense for publishers to adopt “EP Synchronization” mechanisms, which enable them to expand into electronic publishing at very little cost.
“EP Synchronization” needs to support all of the different specification and format requirements of different reader devices. With “EP Synchronization”, once the editing work on the paper version of the publication has been completed, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) web page design language can be used to design an additional, electronic version suitable for delivery via the Internet, mobile phone handset or e-book readers.
The “Electronic Error Correction” system is another useful aid for the modern editor. Two years ago, there were complaints from a large number of elementary school and junior high school teachers that the widespread use of “Martian Script” (Internet slang using non-standard Chinese characters) by schoolchildren was leading to a decline in their Chinese language capabilities; the children’s writing was riddled with errors. The teachers expressed the hope that computer technology and the Internet could be leveraged to develop effective methods for supporting children’s learning. An Institute for Information Industry R&D team collaborated with a group of schools on this project. The “Electronic Error Correction” system can be used with an ordinary word processing application such as Microsoft Word to perform error correction directly on the text. Tests conducted by Ideas magazine found that the system was able to correct 92.59% of errors. This should significantly reduce the amount of manpower that publishers need to allocate to proofreading; it will be sufficient just to give the corrected content a final read-through.
Leveraging ICT Technology to Achieve Renewed Growth in High-end Agriculture in Taiwan
By Ch’in Chen-Chia
Of the three main possible orientations of agriculture – production, lifestyle, and ecology – Taiwanese agriculture has gradually moved away from being production-oriented towards a new orientation that emphasizes ecology and environmental protection. The main focus in Taiwanese agriculture today is on developing high-end agriculture. In 2009, the Executive Yuan formulated the “Plan for the Development of High-end Agriculture”, and high-end agriculture has also been included as one of the government’s “Six Key Emerging Industries.”
Deputy Minister Hu Hsing-Hua of the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan explains that the “Plan for the Development of High-end Agriculture” that the Council of Agriculture promulgated in 2009 includes three key elements. First, there is “healthy agriculture,” which means increased emphasis on the safety of the food that Taiwan’s citizens eat. Second, there is “excellent agriculture,” which involves leveraging the power of high technology to help unleash the full potential of Taiwanese agriculture. Finally, there is “LOHAS agriculture,” which embodies a move away from production-oriented agriculture towards lifestyle-oriented agriculture, leveraging Taiwanese culture and local regional specialties to achieve this.
Professor Ch’en Chia-Chung of National Chung Hsing University notes that the ancillary measures needed to support the development of high-end agriculture include: the establishment of clear production targets, the identification of suitable target markets, the formulation of detailed plans, and the cultivation of new-generation agricultural talent.
Ch’en Shih-Hsiung, Chairman of the Association of Taiwan Organic Agriculture Promotion (ATOAP), points out that “high-end agriculture” involves encouraging farmers to cultivate high-unit-price, high-value crops, but that the emphasis in high-end agriculture should not be placed only on tangible monetary value; other aspects – such as ecology, environmental protection, carbon reduction, energy conservation and fair trade – are also important.
Lai P’eng-Chih, President of Wild Fun Eco-Enterprise Ltd., notes that many people are under the mistaken impression that “LOHAS agriculture” just involves a lot of eating and drinking. Lai believes that, on the supply side, LOHAS agriculture should be positioned as a healthy, environmentally-friendly method of agricultural production, while on the consumption side it should be defined as a form of agriculture that is good for both the individual and the general public as a whole, and as a wise form of consumer behavior that helps to protect the environment.
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