Climate change is changing many aspects of our everyday life. Transportation is one of them. Seeing the boom of e-bikes and the opportunities of green mobility, Marcel Yang, Giant Bicycles' special assistant to CEO, mentioned that Giant is creating an economic ecosystem in the cycling industry where all the partners can work closely together. He also shared his experience in driving innovations in this bike manufacturing company.

The southeast Asian region has become another innovation hub in the world. With a valuation of US$340 billion in 2020, the region attracts many venture capital firms and startups to innovate the local economies. Rachel Lau, managing partner at RHL Ventures, a Malaysian private investment firm that focuses on growth capital investments in Southeast Asia and the US, shares her insights on the latest innovation trends, brought by major startups in Southeast Asia.

Poland-based Renderro was selected by the Epoch Foundation Garage+ Accelerator in early June as one of the 46 must-see startups to participate in Computex Taipei 2021 Virtual Exhibition. It provides a cloud-based solution for creative production desktop platform service that targets 55 million users worldwide to overcome the restrictions of time and geographical boundaries. Ronderro founder and CEO Piotr Chomczyk talked to DIGITIMES recently about what inspired him to create this solution and his vision for future developments.

The demand for smart metering and asset tracking solutions is growing. Many countries are adopting many smart techs, especially IoT solutions, to optimize energy consumption and to well manage buildings and facilities. In light of these trends, IoT startup UnaBiz, based in Taiwan and Singapore, developed IoT solutions on smart water/power/gas meters as well as smart tracking of assets and people, for smart management in buildings and industrial/commercial facilities, according to the company's Taiwan managing director Carter Ho at a Digitimes interview.

Industry 4.0 is no longer a new concept, but there are always some parts of the manufacturing process that are so difficult to automate, including quality management or quality assurance (QA). Relimetrics is a startup that offers full-stack computer vision and machine learning software for quality audit, process control and predictive maintenance in Industry 4.0 applications, according to company founder and CEO Kemal Levi. In a recent interview, Levi shared with DIGITIMES about his vision of Relimetrics' role to play in the Industry 5.0 era and their solutions for high-precision QA automation.

eCommerce continues to penetrate the global retail market. Big companies are competing to adopt new technologies in order to win the game, which also provides many new opportunities for startups.

Electric vehicles (EV) are changing the ecosystems of the carmaking industry. Many companies with different backgrounds, such as in ICT or even the smartphone industry, are entering this market. More and more startups are also expected to join this game in the future. MIH Alliance, a Foxconn (Hon Hai)-led initiative for developing EVs, has built an open platform to connect the carmaking companies and components suppliers. MIH even aims to electrify all buses in Taiwan in the next five years, according to Jack Cheng, CEO of MIH Alliance.

Vitaly M Golomb is a technology investment banker with over 20 years of experience on all sides of the table as a venture-backed CEO, venture capitalist, M&A, and financing advisor. Golomb, who hosts a popular podcast on mobility, will be the host of the fireside chats with MIH Alliance CEO Jack Cheng and Monika Mikac, CBO of Barcelona-based QEV Technologies and former COO of Croatian EV startup Rimac Automobili at the "Asia Venturing (II): Tech-Driven Mobility" event to be hosted at 8am Taipei time on August 10, 2021.

Monika Mikac is CBO of Barcelona-based QEV Technologies, and former COO of Croatian EV startup Rimac Automobili. She started her career as a journalist but joined Rimac when the company was only an 8-person team. Mikac witnessed its lean beginning and helped grow the team and business. She is the "superwoman" of the EV world, helping with fundings and investments, establishing business connections and managing marketing operations for QEV and Rimac all these years. She will join MIH Alliance CEO Jack Cheng at the "Asia Venturing (II): Tech-Driven Mobility" event to be hosted at 8am Taipei time on August 10, 2021.

IKKA Holdings (Cayman), a maker of precision plastic injection molded components, was successfully listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange on May 31, 2021. DIGITIMES recently talked to Vincent Hu, chairman and COO of IKKA, about why the company focuses on plastic injection and how it is going to work more closely with automakers in China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Although digital signature of remote documents is no longer a problem, how to distinguish the authenticity of signature documents and how to verify that the signature is made by the countersigner in person is a pain point. Hungarian start-up Birosign, which was selected by the Epoch Foundation Garage+ Accelerator in early June as one of the 46 must-see start-ups at Computex 2021's virtual exhibition, provides a solution to this problem by using sensor technology and machine learning.

Cheng Wu, a general patner at Taiwania Capital Management, has founded several high profile companies with total market value of NT$180 billion (US$64 billion). Wu has been embracing a different approach to investing in startups.

Mike Noonen has witnessed the vicissitudes of the semiconductor industry over the past 20 years. With a vision to lower the threshold of innovation for semiconductor startups, he co-founded the world's first semiconductor startup accelerator, Silicon Catalyst. Now he serves as CEO of MixComm, a startup that manufactures beamforming ICs used in mmWave components and 5G infrastructure.

Scale AI is Canada's artificial intelligence (AI) platform dedicated to building the next-generation supply chain and boosting industry performance by leveraging AI technologies.

Selected as one of the 46 must-see startups by the Garage+ program of Epoch Foundation at the Computex Taipei 2021 Virtual Exhibition, Netherlands-based InPhocal develops laser technology, which it demonstrated during the event.