Qualcomm recently held the Demo Day and finals award ceremony for the 2023 Qualcomm Innovate in Taiwan Challenge (QITC). The top three winning teams are Agromeans, PetaRay, and CoolSo.
ST Liew, Qualcomm VP and president of Qualcomm Taiwan and South East Asia, stated that all the nominated teams were outstanding, a sign that Taiwan's local innovative energy is stronger than ever while also having the ability to launch mature products with market competitiveness. In the future, Qualcomm will continue its long-term collaboration with Taiwan.
The top three teams of this year's competition all proposed solutions related to AI or wearable devices, an indicator that these technological trends indeed have promising growth potential.
The champion team, Agromeans, focuses on developing AI vision perception technology for agriculture, fishing, and livestock. Its solution integrates spectral analysis, 3D vision, and edge computing to achieve remote and real-time monitoring of plant and animal growth/health.
The second-place team, PetaRay, is dedicated to providing a natural and comfortable mixed reality (XR) experience. Its light field projection technology revolutionizes how 3D content is displayed, transitioning from "projecting images to both eyes" to "projecting the light field onto the retina." This provides users with a dizziness-free viewing experience.
The third-place team, CoolSo, offers a gesture interaction algorithm and technical services for smartwatches, XR, and spatial computing scenarios.
Many of the teams that reached the final stage of this challenge have already expanded their business development reach to Southeast Asia. Regarding this, Liew expressed that he is glad Taiwanese startup teams are actively bringing innovative solutions to the SEA market.
He highlighted that the SEA region is vibrant, and business activities are rapidly developing, which presents excellent opportunities for innovative business models. Qualcomm looks forward to these teams expanding their presence in the SEA market.
Since its inception in 2019, QITC has seen eight participating teams invited to join the Qualcomm Advantage Network and become a member of Qualcomm's global business ecosystem, receiving an opportunity to expand to the global market. This includes RelaJet and Nestech from the first QITC, QT Medical, LUBN, Yallvend, VM-Fi, and ioNetworks from the second, and Nuwa Robotics from the third.
Regarding Qualcomm's future development in Taiwan, Liew stated that besides continuing to provide technical and experience support for local startup teams through the QITC competition, reducing the bottlenecks teams may encounter in the early stages of development, existing supply chain collaborations will also persist.
Qualcomm will continue to cooperate with Taiwan's robust ICT supply chain. For instance, the new Snapdragon X Elite PC platform launched in 2023 will actively engage with local PC brands and ODM companies in Taiwan to develop various AI PC products.
