Taoyuan City has been selected by Intelligent Community Forum as one of the global top-7 smart cities for two consecutive times. Cheng Wen-tsan, mayor of the northern Taiwanese city, pointed out during a recent interview by Digitimes that the core mission for a smart city is to solve problems by virtue of innovative technologies to hike efficiency and quality.

The advent of the smart car era is providing an overtaking opportunity for latecomers that can master domain know-how at the client end and know how to develop profitable product design, packaging and sales models based on the latest market trends, according to Wu Hsueh-liang, professor with the Department of International Business at National Taiwan University.

Co-chairman of SVT Angels and co-founder of Acorn Campus Ventures, T Chester Wang taught college courses in Saudi Arabia and invested in real estate in Silicon Valley before he began angel investing. From investing in real estate to investing in high-tech startups, from investing by himself to founding Acorn Campus Ventures with friends (Wu-Fu Chen and ‎David Tsang) and investing with a group of angel investors, Wang has many success stories as well as bad investments such as the one in eBay made without a real understanding of new business models.

LuxNet chairman, Hsing Kung, has founded three companies. Among them, SDL was established in 1983, specializing in manufacturing optical communication devices. It was sold for US$41.1 billion 16 years later, awarding early investors a 10,000 times return on their investment. Then, Kung soon started Pine Photonics in 2000, which was acquired four years later. During the same time, Kung also founded LuxNet. Both his own companies and those that Kung had stake in underwent the burst of the Internet and optical communication industry bubble in 2000 and sustained great impact. Kung has tasted both the sweetness of success and the bitterness of failure.

Power supply product maker Mean Well is seeing steady growth in sales from the industrial power sector - a sector that it has been working in for over 30 years - as more factories switch to automated manufacturing. The company's LED drivers business has also witnessed staggering increases in orders from the consumer lighting, plant lighting and medical care equipment segments. The firm currently is staying firmly as one of the top-tier power supply makers worldwide.

Technology only accounts for 25% of what makes a startup successful while the CEO's leadership can contribute to 50% of its success, said Chun P Chiu, national policy advisor to the president of Taiwan, InnoBridge Capital's Senior Advisor and an angel investor, who has funded more than 100 startups over a 20-year period.

Co-founder of Acorn Campus Ventures Bob Lin started six businesses, three of which succeeded and the others failed. In addition to being an angel investor, Lin is also the author of top-selling books. Lin has been through it all, from making a fortune to losing every penny. He put his thoughts and wisdom gained from four decades of experiences in his books in hopes of helping more people. Lin declined the title of a venture capital guru in modesty, stating that he continues to make investments and keeps writing about the industry he observes closely.

In a media career spanning nearly three decades, Tally Liu served as senior vice president of Knight Ridder, in charge of finances, operations, internal audit and new technologies at the second-largest newspaper company in the United States. Liu took part in Knight Ridder's investment deals and gained extensive experience in Internet business investments. Liu, now an angel investor, is a certified public accountant (CPA). He was also chairman and CEO at Newegg, a well-known online retailer of computer hardware and consumer electronics, giving him plenty of e-commerce know-how.

Sandy Chau, co-founder of Acorn Campus Ventures as well as an active real estate investor, engages in investment undertakings throughout the United States and Greater China. His success in startup investment and business operation can be attributed to what he experienced as he was growing up. Born in Shanghai, Chau received primary and secondary education in Hong Kong and Vietnam as he travelled back and forth between the two places. In Vietnam, he witnessed social unrest including the Vietnam War, political coup and student strikes, while in Hong Kong he saw the social stratification and inequality between Chinese citizens and the British ruling class. He learned how to quickly adapt to new environments and figured out how to survive and thrive. Such characteristics helped him reach success.

Wretch Chien, principal of AME Cloud Venture, was himself an entrepreneur when he founded a community website Wretch.cc in Taiwan. Since then his career has taken several turns, taking him from Taiwan to Silicon Valley: he joined Yahoo Taiwan after his website was acquired by Yahoo; he later traveled to Silicon Valley to work for Yahoo US; and then he left the company to study at Stanford University where he obtained an MBA. Chien is now a venture capitalist.