The Eye on Taiwan news staff
The New Taipei City Government and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has agreed to set up a joint innovation center to integrate industry and academic resources in nurturing entrepreneurship.
The two sides recently signed a memorandum of understanding in New Taipei City for such establishment, designed also to enhance the startup ecosystem in New Taipei City, according to the economic development department of the city government.
Under the memorandum, the startup ecosystem could be enhanced via five major aspects: driving adoption of global cloud services; fostering venture capital investment; consolidating industry counseling resources; nurturing cloud skills and talent; and integrating local industry advantages.
“New Taipei City established the first local government-led accelerator InnoSquare in 2014. Since then, we have mentored 126 startup teams,” Mayor Eric Chu said. He noted that to enhance the startup ecosystem in New Taipei City, the city government and AWS will launch Taiwan’s first NTPC-AWS Joint Innovation Center in Taipei Far Eastern Telecom Park.
Chu said the project will focus on education and application strategies to deliver five major aspects to help advance the startup sector.
Startups in New Taipei City will be able to access more of the resources they need for development, and local small and medium enterprises will receive support for business enhancement and transformation, he said.
These companies can leverage the NTPC- AWS Joint Innovation Center as a springboard to global markets, which will help further establish New Taipei City as the first stop to connect Taiwan to the world,” said Chu.
“New Taipei City is the most populous city in Taiwan, and many well-known international enterprises have established headquarters here. It’s a vibrant community for small and medium companies, and many startups have come together to form a strong community,” said Alex Yung, Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of AWS Greater China.
He said AWS helps startups around the world with an extensive Cloud services portfolio, constant innovation, and the experience that comes from working with thousands of startups over the years. “We are honored to contribute to the cloud computing industry in New Taipei City with this new Joint Innovation Center,” Liu added.
The Economic Development Department of the New Taipei City Government said that the establishment of the Joint Innovation Center with AWS will drive the development of solutions for the local cloud computing industry, based on core areas such as Innovation and startup, or International Connectivity.
The Joint Innovation Center is expected to attract the interest of globally-renowned enterprises, startups and technical professionals, promote local industry innovation and economic enhancement, and create a more complete cloud ecosystem in New Taipei City. The project will provide technical training, business support, and technical counseling in cloud services for small and medium companies. AWS’s wide range of cloud technologies and services, including Internet of Things (IoT) and big data core services, will help enterprises in a variety of industry sectors to accelerate innovation, reduce cost, and increase business agility, the department said.
The Joint Innovation Center will include an international incubator to help local startup companies go global by connecting them with well-known incubators overseas while attracting foreign startups to New Taipei City, it noted.
“AWS is internationally recognized as an enterprise that delivers continuous innovation and offers advanced artificial intelligence (AI) services that provide cloud-native machine learning and deep learning technologies such as natural language understanding (NLU), automatic speech recognition (ASR), visual search and image recognition, and text-to-speech (TTS). AWS will help Taiwanese entrepreneurs and traditional companies connect to a rich array of global resources,” said Chi-Yuan Huang, Chairman of FCC Partners, operator of the NTPC- AWS Joint Innovation Center.
