Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

MoMo Taipei 17 kicked off with a security presentation from one of our
sponsors, Thales Group. With operations in 50 countries, 68,000
employees, and 17 billion dollars in annual revenue, Thales is a world
leader in Mission-critical information systems for the Aerospace,
Defence and Security markets. Dr. Welland W. N. Chu, Regional Business
Manager for North East Asia for their 400 person Information Systems
Security group, delivered a convincing explanation of the importance of
this market.

Thales implemented the contactless cards and tokens for our MRT and the
tickets for our high speed rail, along with the readers on Taipei’s
buses and parking lots. Thales handles the payments securely, and
disburses the money. Thales technologies are used in payment terminals,
bank communication networks and the secure manufacturing of bank and
credit cards. In the financial sector, more than half the world’s banks
and most major stock exchanges rely on Thales technologies. With nobel
laureates on their research team, they also discovered giant mageneto
resistance, without which your hard disks and laptops would weigh 25 kg.

In vital markets such as security, there is of course competition. One
Thales advantage lies in their strong existing connections to
government, defence, and intelligence communities worldwide. If any of
our readers is unsure of the need for security, in response to a
question Dr. Chu noted that in testing customer sites they can
compromise 95% of their networks.

Thales system also features a unique ability to seamlessly traverse or
roam sundry fixed and mobile networks and protocols, while maintaining
ironclad security. A turnkey approach to security not only minimizes
training costs, it also keeps the network safe. Their product operates
on Windows mobile PDAs (about 12% of smartphones). Momo readers will
also want to know that Thales Transport’s new generation ticketing
system is ready to accept transactions by NFC.

Resources:

Thales
Smartphone

CyWee is a 1 year old startup, spun off from years of research at Taiwan
government-industry think-tank ITRI, with funding from ITRI and SBCVC. Their
CyWee Z is now for sale: a PC input device like a Nintendo Wii on
steroids. Check out their demo:

The Z is the only one of its kind with a
3-axis accelerometer and a dual-axis gyro. And rather than a bunch of cheap plastic
attachments, the controller itself bends and twists into 4 different
shapes: sports, gun, car wheel, and airplane yoke. Rather than being
limited to low res Wii graphics, the Z can drive any game on your PC,
since the Z maps useful keyboard strokes into physical actions on the controller.
It currently comes with support for 10 offline and 2 online games.

By some estimates “The total market value for PC gaming hardware
in 2008 was just over $20 billion, and that will grow to over $34
billion by 2012.” And as a 3D mouse, the Z is also part of the PC input device
market. CyWee plans expansion to the international market, and
has numerous other products in their R&D pipeline.

The Z is sold in Taiwan for NT$3990 bundled with 3 game titles, while supplies last.
Shopping at PC Home

Resources:

PC Home
Worldwide PC Gaming