While many might be deterred by the hefty costs of starting a semiconductor company, there are still many other entrepreneurs with a silicon dream knocking on the door of Silicon Catalyst (SC), an incubator and accelerator for semiconductor startups.

Cyber security is a key issue for the era of big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G. Cybersecurity Ventures has predicted that, globally, businesses in 2021 will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, and the cost will top US$20 billion.

AImazing, founded in 2015, was groomed by Taiwan-based accelerator AppWorks. AImazing, which set up its headuqarters in Singapore and R&D base in Taiwan in 2017, was about to take off with its acoustic application when regulation changes in the Southeast Asian city state curbed its mobile payment services.

Taiwan's investors should change their mentality about entrepreneurships, giving more support to startups, according to Wistron chairman Simon Lin.

The key to whether something sells or not is not the superiority of the product technology, but whether consumers are willing to pay for it. That's a key message Laura Huang, associate professor of Harvard Business School, delivered at SparkLabs Taipei Demo Day 4 held recently.

COVID-19 has been hammering the world, with many companies facing tremendous challenges amidst risks and uncertainties beyond their control. But many startup teams demonstrating their prowess at the recent Demo Day held by SparkLabs Taipei have seen double-digit growths.

In terms of the maturity of the startup ecosystem and digital economy among Southeast Asian countries, Singapore is the leader, followed by Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, according to AppWorks partner Jessica Liu.

Connectivity has become an essential commodity that determines how people live, work and play, according to John Mathew, co-founder and CEO/CTA of Cavli Wireless, an Internet of Things (IoT) module company that works with telecom operators to provision local IoT data in LTE/LPWAN technologies like NB-IoT, LTE-M on eSIM technology.

Taiwan will focus its next wave of technology development on materializing smart healthcare, precision medicine, smart city and digital data governance by leveraging its robust semiconductor prowess to incorporate AI, IoT and blockchain technologies into diverse vertical applications, eventually embracing a smart new future featuring high-security Internet of Everything and thriving digital economy, according to Tsung-Tsong Wu, the country's minister of science and technology.

Small- to medium-size manufacturers are important to Taiwan's economy, but most of them lack the human resources and cannot afford the expensive equipment and services needed for digital transformation. That is where Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) can help them, according to Chien Chen-fu, director for Artificial Intelligence for Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Research Center (AIMS) at National Tsing Hua University.