TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The 2019 Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival will take place on Feb. 16 and Feb. 19, New Taipei City’s Tourism and Travel Department (TTD) said on Tuesday.

New Taipei City mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) said that the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival has evolved into a powerful tourist magnet over the years, and last year alone 6.98 million tourists visited Pingxi.

This year’s sky lantern festival will take place at Pingxi Junior High School from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 16, and at the Shifen Sky Lantern Square from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, when Taiwan celebrates the Lantern Festival.

New Taipei City, the largest municipality in northern Taiwan, has been selected by Intelligent Community Forum, an international organization, as one of the global top-7 smart cities for three consecutive years due to its achievement in promoting application of smart city solutions to its administration and services, deputy mayor Yeh Hueh-ching said during a recent interview by Digitimes.

The large population of nearly four million people of diverse background and the big gap in urban and rural developments have been motivating the government to enlist smart city solutions to tackle its problems and provide services, Yeh explained.

Taiwanese beauty technology startup Perfect Corp. has created a series of mobile applications that use augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to help users test products such as makeup.

The firm headquartered in New Taipei City says the apps have been downloaded more than 550 million times around the world since their launch in March 2014. Perfect Corp. presented its flagship at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Taiwanese electric scooter startup, Gogoro, is a young startup targeting the smog-choked streets of Southeast Asia in its quest to expand its business overseas. Backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Gogoro develops and sells electric scooters and battery swapping infrastructure. In September 2017, Gogoro secured a $300 million Series C round of investment from Singapore’s Temasek, Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, and French utility Engie and Generation Investment Management, a company co-founded by Al Gore. To date, the company has raised $480 million to date. The total investment raised puts Gogoro’s valuation at around $800 million.

The New Taipei City Government and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today held a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a Joint Innovation Center. The initiative is designed to integrate industry and academic resources in nurturing entrepreneurship, and to enhance the startup ecosystem in New Taipei City (NTPC) via five major aspects: driving adoption of global cloud services; fostering venture capital investment; consolidating industry counseling resources; nurturing cloud skills and talent; and integrating local industry advantages.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — They’re as likely to be spotted in the Tour de France as they are on the street.

Founded 45 years ago in Taiwan, Giant Manufacturing has built bikes that have cycled terrain the world over. But before gaining its own name recognition, Giant got its start making orders for others, including Schwinn, one of the U.S.’s most well-known brands.

“At that time in Taiwan, nobody will ever think of making their own brand, if you are doing [exporting],” Bonnie Tu, who became Giant’s chairperson in January, told NBC News during a sit-down interview at Giant headquarters in Taichung, Taiwan. “I think most Taiwanese think you just make products for American or European companies.”

The Gogoro electric scooter looks like a toy come to life, but it’s just raised a very serious amount of money, ensuring that more people take seriously its borderline adorable 6.4 kilowatt motor.

The two-year-old, Taiwan-based startup announced this month it had received a massive $300 million Series C round of funding. Gogoro offers its scooter subscribers an app-based sharing platform to quickly and easily swap out dead batteries for fully charged ones at stations that dot a metro area. Imagine: no waiting to charge a battery. In addition to this distinguishing feature — one Tesla appears to be investigating — the company may soon be looking into more than just scooters, and looking to do so with artificial intelligence.

Taiwan’s major urban areas are best suited for advancement as smart cities, Virginia-based public-private partnership MeriTalk reported.

World-famous for its PC and motherboard manufacturing industry, Taiwan is primed for piloting smart city programmes, according to Taiwanese officials who attended MeriTalk’s Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) expo in Washington DC.

Taipei, April 23 (CNA) Singaporean bike-sharing startup oBike launched its services in Taitung City, the seat of Taiwan's southeastern county of Taitung, on Saturday.

oBike, the first public bike rental system in the county, provided 500 bicycles for rent and will provide another 500 in the near future, Taitung County official Yu Ming-hsun (余明勳) said.