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Wednesday 12 November 2025
StatsInsight develops a home-grown baseball Hawk-Eye system with AWS hybrid cloud architecture
In modern competitive sports, the margin between victory and defeat often depends on who can capture and analyze data more effectively. Taiwan's triumph at the 2024 WBSC Premier 12 was not only the result of exceptional player performance and precise coaching but also the scouting team's ability to provide rapid, on-site opponent analysis. As a key member of the scouting team, StatsInsight played a pivotal role. Leveraging its stadium optical tracking system and StatsInsight analytics platform - both built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the company provided real-time data insights to players and coaches, making it one of the unsung heroes behind Taiwan's championship win.StatsInsight co-founder Leh Shyu noted, "As sports technology evolves rapidly, baseball has long moved beyond the era of paper scorecards. Professional leagues in both the U.S. and Taiwan have adopted electronic and camera-based systems to record every detail of practices and games. StatsInsight is the only company in Taiwan focused exclusively on baseball analytics and sports technology integration. Our goal is to build a solid foundation for the next generation of baseball data development in Taiwan by delivering comprehensive solutions and customized services that bring technology into every ballpark."Products validated through real-world performance: adopted by pro and national teamsBaseball is a sport defined by subtle details and strategy that are difficult to capture with the naked eye. Founded in 2020, StatsInsight has long specialized in baseball data collection and analysis. Its "Electronic Strike Zone" system has become a familiar presence to Taiwanese baseball fans, offering advanced statistics derived from ball flight trajectories and player motion reconstruction.StatsInsight's scouting data systems and analytics services have been widely adopted and highly recognized by both professional baseball teams and the national team.A former baseball player himself, Shyu entered the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) draft in 2019. Although not selected, his deep knowledge and experience earned him a place on the national team's scouting staff. That opportunity inspired him to co-found StatsInsight with like-minded partners to develop Taiwan's own baseball scouting system.Shyu explained that while the U.S. has a more mature sports technology ecosystem, its systems are often expensive and come with language and support barriers for Taiwanese teams. StatsInsight, though a later entrant, built its system in-house and proved its reliability through multiple competitions. With its ability to deliver customized solutions and localized support, the company successfully partnered with the national team to build an international scouting platform and has since collaborated with professional clubs.Leveraging AWS services to realize a hybrid cloud architectureStatsInsight has deployed its full system and website on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for managed database operations. Video data is securely stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) ensures smooth and fast content delivery for optimal user experience. The company is also developing an optical computer vision system and, through resources provided by the Startup Terrace Kaohsiung AWS Joint Innovation Center (JIC), received direct technical guidance from AWS experts to implement and validate its hybrid cloud architecture.Shyu shared, "U.S.-made Hawk-Eye systems are highly advanced and purpose-built for baseball stadiums, but renting one costs around NT$7 million per year, with a minimum four-year lease. Including technical support, total expenses can exceed NT$30 million. Our vision system is designed to match the performance of those systems, combining similar-grade cameras with small on-premises servers and AWS cloud services to deliver a more cost-effective hybrid solution. Taiwan's next baseball era will require comprehensive data and biomechanical analysis. By developing our own system, we aim to provide an affordable and effective option to drive Taiwan's baseball technology transformation."Currently, StatsInsight is collaborating with the National Sports Science Institute in Kaohsiung to deploy its system in baseball stadiums and create a next-generation smart baseball field. This collaboration will also serve as a testbed for validating the company's self-developed optical vision system and as a model for future smart stadiums in Taiwan.
Tuesday 11 November 2025
Connecting the last mile of human factors in manufacturing, PowerArena boosts both efficiency and safety with its AI data platform
The AI-driven paradigm shift is prompting manufacturers to extend real-time data optimization from management decisions to every detail of the production line. Despite advances in automation, up to 30% of production processes still rely on manual operations. PowerArena, a smart manufacturing solution provider, combines industrial data with AI computer vision to close this "last-mile" gap in automation. Through its platform-based model, PowerArena establishes a mechanism for continuous optimization, helping manufacturers accelerate their digital transformation."Pyramid architecture" enhances factory data utilization and boosts ROI in smart manufacturingAccording to Ian Peng, Solutions Director at PowerArena, the company's core platform, the Human Operation Platform (HOP), integrates AI computer vision and IoT technologies to continuously collect and analyze workstation images and data. It identifies operation cycles, idle times, and SOP compliance, replacing traditional walk-around management or paper-based records. The platform directly addresses three major pain points for manufacturers: increasing human-factor variability caused by labor shortages, management gaps arising from production line relocation, and the lack of real-time visibility in quality control.HOP has been widely adopted in EMS electronics, semiconductor, and automotive assembly line management. Using a pyramid-architecture approach, the platform first collects foundational workstation data through IoT implementation, then applies AI vision to analyze manual assembly processes, and finally focuses on the top 1 to 3% of critical production steps to ensure SOP precision-maximizing economic efficiency and investment returns for manufacturers.PowerArena is also developing a large language model (LLM) specifically for manufacturing applications. The model integrates industry knowledge with platform data to provide real-time production line analysis, data aggregation, and improvement recommendations. Peng noted that this feature is especially valuable for new factory training, as it shortens employee onboarding and enhances productivity.To ensure continuous optimization and rapid scaling of both the HOP platform and the LLM, data infrastructure plays a crucial role. Peng explained that manufacturing data is highly proprietary, difficult to obtain, and massive in scale. To manage this, PowerArena leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), it securely stores authorized images and generative AI simulation data for model training and optimization. Once uploaded to the cloud, the data is analyzed and retrained through high-performance computing resources, enabling continuous AI refinement.PowerArena also utilizes Amazon Route 53 for DNS management and AWS Fargate for serverless container deployment in hybrid environments, allowing for flexible scaling, maintenance, and multi-region deployment. The upcoming launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region in 2025 further strengthens enterprises' confidence in AWS's security and compliance standards. These cloud advantages not only accelerate product iteration and time-to-market but also empower PowerArena with greater deployment agility-serving as a key enabler of innovation.By integrating the HOP platform with AWS cloud services, PowerArena has already delivered tangible results for global manufacturers. A top-five global electronics manufacturer improved production capacity by 5% and reduced yield fluctuation by 70% within just four weeks. Another semiconductor materials company uses AI computer vision to monitor high-risk operations, ensuring employee safety and regulatory compliance while advancing its ESG performance.PowerArena leverages AWS JIC to expand globally and Startup Terrace Kaohsiung to grow market footprintFrom its inception, PowerArena has maintained a strong international focus, with operations spanning North America, Mexico, East Asia, and Southeast Asia - the latter seeing particularly rapid project growth in recent years. Its global strategy centers on replicating best practices: digitizing high-yield production data from factories in Taiwan and China and transferring it to new plants, enabling faster ramp-up and stable capacity contributions for multinational enterprises.In Taiwan, Kaohsiung's industrial landscape is shifting from traditional heavy industries toward high-tech and smart manufacturing. To deepen local engagement, PowerArena established an office at Startup Terrace Kaohsiung through its participation in the AWS Joint Innovation Center (JIC) program. This new base reinforces PowerArena's long-term commitment to the region and serves as a key hub connecting southern Taiwan's industrial ecosystem.Looking ahead, PowerArena will continue leveraging industrial data and AI technologies as its core competencies "accelerating international expansion while strengthening local partnerships" to play a leading role in driving the next wave of smart manufacturing upgrades.
Tuesday 11 November 2025
Bringing AI to the production line AWS helps eCloudEdge make NeoEdge a digital bridge for smart manufacturing
As AI continues to converge with IoT, edge computing has emerged as a key technology driving digital transformation across industries. Founded in 2024, eCloudEdge focuses on two core areas: edge computing and operational technology (OT) data governance. Through its proprietary NeoEdge platform, the company enables customers to extract, transform, and load (ETL) sensor data directly from factory sites while deploying AI models at the edge. By integrating physical AI with multi-sensor fusion, eCloudEdge addresses long-standing challenges in OT-IT integration faced by the manufacturing, transportation, and energy sectors. Leveraging a SaaS-based architecture and Amazon Web Services (AWS)' global cloud infrastructure, the company lowers adoption barriers and accelerates deployment, expanding AI applications across diverse industrial environments.Sensor Fusion + Edge Computing: NeoEdge Brings AI to the Factory FloorAccording to Rick Peng, CEO of eCloudEdge, the company's NeoEdge AIoT Edge Orchestration Platform adopts a software-defined hardware architecture that allows industrial computers to function as smartphone-like devices by installing different protocols and functional modules to flexibly meet on-site demands. The platform comprises two major components: NeoEdge X, which is deployed on industrial computers to handle data collection, preprocessing, and AI inference, and NeoEdge Central, which is hosted on the cloud to enable remote management and rapid deployment, ensuring flexible operations across multiple factories, production lines, and large-scale environments.Peng emphasized that eCloudEdge's product strategy focuses not on building AI models, but on ensuring AI's effectiveness in real-world operations. Unlike solutions centered on model training, NeoEdge highlights AI model deployment and sensor fusion. In equipment maintenance, for example, the platform collects controller data for generative AI analysis and uses AI agents to automatically generate work orders, enabling engineers to complete maintenance in a single visit and significantly boost efficiency.In the area of energy management, eCloudEdge partners with local system integrators in Kaohsiung to use NeoEdge as a core platform for rapid OT/IT system integration, helping SMEs establish energy management dashboards. The platform also supports remote diagnostics to pinpoint whether connectivity issues stem from sensors, gateways, or databases-reducing on-site maintenance costs and improving response times.Establishing a global presence from Kaohsiung, eCloudEdge builds a digital bridge connecting cloud and edgeeCloudEdge's global expansion strategy is anchored in the AWS ecosystem. Built natively on AWS, its platform is listed on AWS Marketplace, allowing global customers to easily subscribe to its services. Among AWS services, AWS IoT Core "a fully managed service that connects IoT devices to AWS without the need to provision or manage servers" plays a pivotal role in cloud integration, while ensuring that data can be returned securely to customers' internal systems.Through the international resources of the AWS Joint Innovation Center (JIC), eCloudEdge was recently selected for the Go Malaysia program, gaining visibility at an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. At the same time, the company is strengthening its local presence in southern Taiwan through Startup Terrace Kaohsiung, leveraging workspace and business matchmaking resources to deepen connections within the local industrial ecosystem. Peng noted that Kaohsiung's manufacturing sector has a strong appetite for digital transformation, and eCloudEdge's role as a "digital bridge" enables traditional manufacturers to connect with new technologies. Its subscription-based SaaS model provides SMEs with an accessible path to gradual digital upgrading, while large manufacturers can accelerate system deployment and broaden AI applications through NeoEdge's multi-sensor fusion capabilities.Global Ambitions: A Bridge for Digital TransformationLooking ahead, eCloudEdge plans to continue deepening its roots in Taiwan in the short term, working with its strategic investor eCloudvalley to deliver complete OT-to-IT-to-cloud solutions. In the mid-term, it aims to expand into Southeast Asia and Australia to meet the growing needs of manufacturing relocation and the energy transition. Over the long term, eCloudEdge intends to promote its global SaaS model, beginning with Europe.The company is also preparing to launch a new version of NeoEdge, further enhancing platform functionality and brand visibility. Ultimately, eCloudEdge envisions itself not merely as an edge computing platform provider, but as a key bridge connecting edge and cloud, empowering enterprises to seize opportunities amid digital transformation and global supply chain restructuring.