Taiwan Goes Upmarket with Software Shops

Here in Taiwan, the land of motherboards and heat-sinks, software has started making a move toward the limelight.
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Taiwan functions as the base of the electronics hardware industry. Its manufacturers employ hundreds of thousands of people to make iPods, Kindles, PlayStations, PCs and servers. But the island’s next act may come through code developed both by start-ups and new divisions at the manufacturers.

“We are past the time when industrial design is a real differentiator,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive at the graphics chip maker Nvidia, here at the Computex-Taipei trade show. “Software needs to be Taiwan’s next story.”

Here is one of those stories. Started in 1996, CyberLink stands as perhaps Taiwan’s most successful software company.

CyberLink’s flagship movie playback software PowerDVD sits on more than 100 million computers sold by companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer. With its base here, CyberLink has a direct connection to PC manufacturers, which helps the company make its pitch for ending up on brand-name computers.

In 2000, CyberLink went public in Taiwan, and today it brings in about $170 million a year in revenue, said Alice Chang, the company’s chief executive.

The company’s next iteration of multi-media products looks to make better use of the graphics chips inside of many computers. The applications will send tough tasks like analyzing photos or adding animations to movies off to the graphics chip rather than the main chip made by Intel or Advanced Micro Devices.

Ms. Chang says this approach should result in sophisticated new features that could appeal to consumers.

For example, CyberLink showed me some Web-cam software that can track peoples’ faces and then add special effects to an image of a particular person. For example, you can put a cartoon hat on someone and have it stay on the person’s head throughout the course of a video. CyberLink offers a host of other animated effects all of which open up new ways for people to customize their videos.

Companies like H.P and Asustek shipped earlier versions of this YouCam software on their computers Thursday.

CyberLink also makes touch-screen software for H.P., Dell and others, including programs aimed at kids. Some of this software lets children draw pictures and use those same cartoon animation tools.

Such software tends to runs counter to the big cloud-computing push that receives so much media attention. The complex effects that CyberLink can deliver to PCs require some pretty beefy underlying hardware, including a graphics chip from Nvidia or A.M.D. So, there’s life yet in the big boxes.

More and more companies have set up labs in Taiwan to give their software added kick. Novell, for example, has a lab here working on software for netbooks and Intel’s Moblin operating system. Such a lab makes sense since Novell gains direct access to the biggest sellers of netbooks like Acer and Asus.

Meanwhile, the huge manufacturers like Foxconn have started hiring developers here and in China by the thousands, while they also invest in a variety of software start-ups. The end goal for such companies is to sell a total package – software and all – to their customers and tap into higher profits.

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BY Ashlee Vance
Source：The New York Times

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company.