Lee Feng Chien, general manager of Google Taiwan, has stated that the concept of wearable devices has been around for years but it did not turn into a marketable product until 2013. Taiwan-based firms should cooperate with academics to seize the business opportunities offered by Google Glass.
Google Glass was first introduced in Google I/O developers' conferece in 2012, and in 2013 there are third-party firms and teams providing digital content. In addition, the Google Glass platform now supports Google's in-house services such as Google+, Google Voice Search, Gmail, Google Now, and Google Maps.
Chien believes Taiwan-based firms should do more than manufacturing and as the wearable device market moves into a new era, the firms should cooperate with the academics to develop products for this market.
For a long time, there has been a big communication gap between Taiwan's academics, R&D institutes, and hardware firms and getting them to work together is a challenge, said Chien. However, an open platform can solve this problem, he added.
Mass production of wearable devices is not yet possible for Taiwan-based hardware firms, but investments into this type of product should have begun, said Chien.
For example, several thousand software developers have obtained the Google Glass hardware and have been creating new applications to support the device. However, Taiwan-based firms should focus on IC design.
Chien stated that Taiwan-based hardware ODM firms usually need to wait for the client to finalize product specification before putting in large amounts of investments or begin volume production. ODM firms cannot do anything beforehand and this has been limiting the innovation potential of in-house software engineers.
Currently there are many small teams of software developers that used to work for Taiwan-based large-size hardware firms. The small teams should attend as many developers' conferences as possible and showcase their competitiveness, Chien suggested. Most Taiwan-based software engineers graduated from electrical engineering majors and have strong experience in hardware, which is a quality that software engineers in the Silicon Valley lack, added Chien.
Taiwan should maintain the domestic IC industry especially when China has yet to catch up, said Chien.
Article translated by Jackie Chang
