Taiwan Life

Life and Business in Taiwan 101

Google for Broadband: Taiwan, HK and Korea

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With increasingly large parts of the population connecting via broadband, esp. in Taiwan ADSL, Google has been running experimental new pages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea that seek to take advantage of some of the extra bandwidth available to users.

I’ve included a look that shows how the Google or iGoogle page looks in Taiwan at the moment, just in case you can’t access it. Features to note are: a current time (based on the pc clock) in the top left, nicely presented triple column themes with configurable content, links to videos and images in the news section.

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The central column links to Google’s search results: images, videos, etc. The right column includes links to your email, picasa, and calendar. To view this, in Firefox, you will need to choose the appropriate language in the View Menu. I’m using UTF-8 which works well. This story was linked from PC World – Google Testing New Homepage Design in Taiwan, Hong Kong . Unfortunately, by the time I came to write this posting, the Korea page had returned to its normal look.

When it’s hot in Taiwan, what do you do?

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When it’s hot in summer, it’s HOT! Temperatures during the summer days are a hot and sultry 35C, it cools off at night, too. But not that much. Night time is a relatively cool 28-30C! So what do the locals do to keep cool…? Well, let’s follow my charming wife as she finds her way to a local ‘ice’ store. What will she buy?

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Well, here it is. It’s a kind of ice block that is very finely shaved, called ‘shaved ice’. It was late at night, so the seller was out of most flavors, we ordered the following dish, which included a syrup, caramel pudding layer and lots of wonderfully cool ice. Now both of us have tried the shaved ice in Hawaii, but this is so much better: the ice is finer, and the flavors are stronger!

100 1885 100 1888As you can see, my wife is enjoying this very much! And the price is just right. It’s about US$1.10 for each dish, and you can choose upto four different flavors. Tonight we went back for their other choice: “Snow Ice” which is made with ice and milk for a much finer texture even than the shaved ice.

Both of these dishes are very cooling on a warm summer evening! And quite tasty. Pity that I can’t buy this in the UK… Still, could be a good business idea if anyone wants to try this!

Business the Taiwanese Way 101

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100 1698For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, I’m actually based in Taiwan . I’m married to a local lady, and we live in Tamsui, which is a lovely sea town north of Taipei. We live in the town, but we are very near some beautiful natural environments, riverside and mountains! So if you see us, say hi!

We’ve lived here in Tamsui for about 5 years, but for much longer, I have noted in the Taiwanese a tremendous willingness to do business. In fact, in this area, there are a plethora of small business that are quite unique to Taiwan, and don’t have allegories in the U.K.

Over the next few months, I’m going to feature small businesses I find in Taiwan, and discuss their ins-and-outs. Naturally, I’m no expert, but I’ll try to provide a realistic idea of what makes them unique, and what value you could take away from studying them, and their approach to doing business.

#1 is coming up on Monday!… Smells good, too!