Steven Ho, founder and chairman of 91App, outlined the development of e-commerce in Taiwan over the past 30 years, emphasizing the shift from consumer-to-consumer (C2C) to business-to-consumer (B2C), and currently direct-to-consumer (D2C) models. Speaking at a recent Taiwan Venture Capital Association (TVCA) forum, he noted that Taiwan’s e-commerce penetration rate remains at 13.5%, with over 80% of sales still occurring through physical retail channels, highlighting considerable growth potential for online retail.

The future of global defense is on display in Taipei, centered on unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. At the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition, Taiwan’s leading defense research institute unveiled a powerful joint arsenal created with top US defense startups. Their goal is to build a large, domestically produced deterrent fleet.

DeepSeek unveiled its next-generation large language model, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, on September 29, 2025, and released it as open source on Hugging Face. The new model features a sparse attention architecture that reduces computational resource consumption while improving inference efficiency, especially for long-text tasks, advancing China’s AI software-hardware collaboration.