Taiwan Tries to Regain Its Lead in Consumer Electronics

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek Computer, has epitomized the Taiwanese electronics engineer for a generation: a slender figure in rumpled, baggy trousers, he once helped Intel solve heat problems in its Pentium 4 microprocessors.

So it has been a surprise over the last several years to see Mr. Shih, now 60, reinvent himself with snug-cut Italian suits, innovative designs for tablet and notebook computers and scathing criticisms of Taiwan’s test-obsessed, engineering-oriented educational system.

“I don’t think the Taiwanese got very good training to drive the mentality of innovation,” he said during an interview at Asus’s headquarters here on the outskirts of Taipei. (Mr. Shih also demonstrated his flexibility in the interview, assuming the lotus position while wearing a dark blue Armani suit with a sky-blue Armani tie.)

Fostering innovation has become a mantra among corporate leaders and government officials alike in Taiwan this year because the island’s huge consumer electronics industry has run into serious trouble.

Worldwide sales of PCs, for which Taiwanese companies control over 90 percent of the final design and manufacturing, are declining steadily. Sales of smartphones, for which Taiwanese companies control less than a fifth of the market, are rising briskly. Tablets based on the Android operating system, which most Taiwanese companies, with the exception of Asus, have been slow to embrace, are also on the same upward trajectory.

“Outside of Asus, all the others are struggling,” said Helen Chiang, a Taiwan electronics specialist at the IDC research firm.

Foxconn and Acer have each reported that sales in the first quarter dropped 19 percent from a year ago. HTC’s sales plunged 37 percent, although that was partly because the company began shipping the annually improved version of its best-known smartphone in late March instead of February. At Quanta, a 70,000-employee contract designer and manufacturer of notebook computers, sales have shown double-digit percentage drops from year-earlier levels for 14 consecutive months.

Foreign rivals have proved more nimble. In South Korea, Samsung is expanding rapidly in smartphones, tablet computers and other sectors. After embracing the Android operating system early, the company has built on its huge economies of scale in the mass production of components, like display screens and microprocessors.

In China, Lenovo and many smaller manufacturers are relying on labor that, while no longer cheap, is still less expensive than in Taiwan. That helped make Lenovo the only one among the top five PC makers worldwide to eke out a gain in shipments in the first quarter — although by only a tenth of a percent.

And in the United States, Apple, Google and Amazon have shown themselves adept at producing breakthrough consumer products, while pending legislation would allow them to import more foreign engineers at a lower cost than hiring and training domestic engineers.

As notebooks and other Windows-based PCs have lost ground, first to Apple tablets and now to Android-based designs, even Microsoft has been indicating dissatisfaction with the pace of PC innovation in Taiwan. Despite a longtime aversion to hardware, Microsoft recently introduced its own Surface tablet.

“The Surface tablet is a pretty strong signal to the whole Taiwan PC ecosystem that they’re not innovating enough,” said Bill Whyman, a senior managing director at the ISI research firm.

One exception to Taiwan’s difficulties is Asus. Its many new Android-based tablets, including one that it has branded with Google, allowed it to surpass Amazon in the first quarter of this year to become the third-largest player in the global tablet computer market, behind Apple and Samsung, according to IDC.

And some of its designs are downright clever. One new model, the PadFone, lets the user slide a cellphone into the back, turning the tablet into an oversize cellphone. Another tablet, the Transformer, features a detachable keyboard with a wireless connection and a two-sided display panel that can show a movie on one side to entertain children or guests while the other side is a regular computer display for the owner.

Special Report: Technology & Innovation: Robotic Gadgets Are Becoming Within Reach of Average Consumer

His creation, the Hexy, is a six-legged, crablike creature that can navigate its own environment and respond to humans with a hand wave or other programmable gesture. Mr. Schlesinger said he had been able to lower production costs by using free software and by molding a lot of the plastic parts locally in Massachusetts, not in China.

Since setting up his company, ArcBotics, in suburban Somerville, Massachusetts, Mr. Schlesinger has built a backlog of more than 1,000 orders. His goal, he said, was to become “the Ikea of robotics.”

“I think the market for consumer robotics is poised to explode,” said Mr. Schlesinger, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “We are only at the beginning.”

Since the 1960s, robots have assumed major roles in industrial manufacturing and assembly, the remote detonation of explosives, search and rescue, and academic research. But the devices have remained out of reach, in affordability and practicality, to most consumers.

That, according to Professor Andrew Ng, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in California, is about to change. One big reason, Mr. Ng said, is the mass production of smartphones and game consoles, which has driven down the size and price of robotic building blocks like accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors.

On the edges of consumer consciousness, the first generation of devices with rudimentary artificial intelligence are beginning to appear: entertainment and educational robots like the Hexy, and a line of tireless household drones that can mow lawns, sweep floors, clean swimming pools and even enhance golf games.

“I’m seeing a huge explosion of robotic toys and believe that there will be one soon in industry,” said Mr. Ng, an associated professor of computer science at Stanford.

The most advanced robots remain exotic workhorses like NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, which cost $2.5 billion, and the LS3, a doglike robot being developed for the U.S. military that can carry a 400-pound, or 180-kilogram load more than 20 miles, or about 30 kilometers. The mechanical beast of burden, whose price is not public, is being made by a consortium led by Boston Dynamics. In Menlo Park, California, engineers at Willow Garage, a robotics firm, are selling the two-armed, 5-foot-4 inch (1.63-meter) rolling robot called the PR2 for $400,000.

A video on Willow Garage’s Web site shows the PR2 fetching beer from a refrigerator, which while an engineering and programming feat, is an expensive way to get beer.

“I think we’re still some years away from useful personal robots making pervasive appearances in our homes,” Mr. Ng said.

Right now, for the masses, there is the CaddyTrek, a robotic golf club carrier that follows a player from tee to fairway to green through tall grass, up 30-degree slopes and in snow, for as many as 27 holes on a single charge. Players wear a remote control on their belts, which acts as a homing beacon for the self-propelled cart, which trails six paces behind the player.

Golfers can also navigate the robotic cart, which is made by FTR Systems, to the next tee while they finish putting.

“Someone ran up to me last week and said that my golf cart had broken free and was rolling through the parking lot,” said Richard Nagle, the sales manager for CaddyTrek in North America and Europe. “Most people just stop and stare. They’re not used to this.”

FTR Systems does not disclose the proprietary technology it uses to power the CaddyTrek, which sells for $1,595, but Mr. Nagle said sales of the robot carriers had been strong, and the company had been rushing to meet orders in the United States and Europe.

Bits Blog: Decide.com Pays to Get Consumer Reports's Reputation

Decide.com, a start-up that describes itself as “the next generation Consumer Reports,” prides itself on using artificial intelligence and algorithms to make unbiased product recommendations to consumers without taking money from advertisers. In an effort to prove it is better than the venerable product evaluation magazine, which also doesn’t take advertising, it hired a company that concludes it is better.

Published Tuesday, the report was conducted by Ant’s Eye View, a part of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Not surprisingly, the authors found that recommendations made by Decide were more consistent and easily understood than those made by Consumer Reports. It says Decide.com reviews more and newer products than Consumer Reports.

In an interview, Decide’s chief executive, Mike Fridgen, said that even though his company sponsored the study, its results were objective.

“I get the cynicism,” he said. “We sponsored the study, and the results are positive. But I’d ask you to look at the results and look at the methodology and draw your own conclusion.”

The study, though, is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Decide’s main feature is its price predictions. It doesn’t do its own testing, but pulls in data from reviews across the Web. So naturally it has a deeper product database than Consumer Reports, which buys its own products, even cars, to do its own testing.

Decide, a 30-person company in Seattle, has a lot of work to do if it really wants to compete with Consumer Reports. Mr. Fridgen declined to disclose the Web site’s traffic and said it was not on par with Consumer Reports’ audience. Compete.com, the analytics site, estimates that Decide has 50,000 regular visitors a month. Consumer Reports says it has 3.2 million Web subscribers and 4 million print subscribers.

Ken Weine, a spokesman for Consumer Reports, dismissed the study. He noted that Decide had recently pursued a partnership with Consumer Reports, a proposal that it rejected.

“Now, Decide.com has publicized a report that they paid consultants to write about themselves,” he said in a written statement. “We remain unconvinced working with Decide.com makes sense for our readers, or more broadly consumers.”

Slipstream: Acxiom Consumer Data, Often Unavailable to Consumers

I recently asked to see the information held about me by the Acxiom Corporation, a database marketing company that collects and sells details about consumers’ financial status, shopping and recreational activities to banks, retailers, automakers and other businesses. In investor presentations and interviews, Acxiom executives have said that the company — the subject of a Sunday Business article last month — has information on about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. Acxiom also promotes a program for consumers who wish to see the information the company has on them.

As a former pharmaceuticals industry reporter who has researched all kinds of diseases, drugs and quack cures online, I wanted to learn, for one, whether Acxiom had pegged me as concerned about arthritis, diabetes or allergies. Acxiom also has a proprietary household classification system that places people in one of 70 socioeconomic categories, like “Downtown Dwellers” or “Flush Families,” and I hoped to discover the caste to which it had assigned me.

But after I filled out an online request form and sent a personal check for $5 to cover the processing fee, the company simply sent me a list of some of my previous residential addresses. In other words, rather than learning the details about myself that marketers might use to profile and judge me, I received information I knew already.

It turns out that Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark., furnishes consumers only with data related to risk management, like their own prison records, tax liens, bankruptcy filings and residential histories. For a corporate client, the company is able to match customers by name with, say, the social networks or Internet providers they use, but it does not offer consumers the same information about themselves.

Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Acxiom’s chief privacy officer, said that the company kept consumer data in different databases and that its system was not designed to assemble all the information it had amassed on a single person.

“We do not have the capability to look up an individual’s data in the system,” Ms. Barrett Glasgow said. “We don’t have a search-by-name capability.”

Data brokers like Acxiom have developed advanced techniques to collect and collate information about consumers’ offline, online and mobile behavior. But they have been slow to develop innovative ways for consumers to gain access to the information that companies obtain, share and sell about them for marketing purposes.

Now federal regulators are pressuring data brokers to operate more transparently. In a report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that the industry set up a public Web portal that would display the names and contact information of data brokers, as well as describe consumers’ data access rights and other choices.

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, said consumers should have access to all the details that data brokers collect on them, as well as any analyses that the companies sell about their behavior.

“I include in that not just the raw data, but also how that information has been analyzed to place the consumer into certain categories for marketing or other purposes,” she said. “I believe that giving consumers this kind of granularity will greatly increase consumer trust in the information flow process and will lead to more accurate marketing.”

At the moment, however, information brokers have wildly different policies. Acxiom lets people opt out of its marketing databases, while Epsilon, another marketing services firm, allows people to opt out of having their data rented to third parties. Epsilon says it will also furnish individuals, upon request, with general information about their past retail transactions — including the categories and years of purchase. But it does not include exact product or retailer names.

Andrew Frawley, the president of Epsilon, says his company has set up a task force to explore giving consumers greater access and choices.

“We agree in principle that more transparency is better,” he said.

But setting up a system for consumers to gain access to their own marketing data could be costly and technically challenging for data brokers, said Stuart Madnick, a professor of information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Companies would have to develop security systems to verify a consumer’s identity and to ensure that no one else could have access to that individual’s record, he said. At the same time, they would have to be prepared to respond to people who questioned the accuracy of the records.

“How correct is the information they have and are disseminating on you?” Professor Madnick asked. “How do they know who is asking for it?”

Information security experts said data brokers might be reluctant to make public access easier lest consumers react by wanting to opt out of the data collection process altogether.

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

Slipstream: Acxiom Consumer Data, Often Unavailable to Consumers

I recently asked to see the information held about me by the Acxiom Corporation, a database marketing company that collects and sells details about consumers’ financial status, shopping and recreational activities to banks, retailers, automakers and other businesses. In investor presentations and interviews, Acxiom executives have said that the company — the subject of a Sunday Business article last month — has information on about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. Acxiom also promotes a program for consumers who wish to see the information the company has on them.

As a former pharmaceuticals industry reporter who has researched all kinds of diseases, drugs and quack cures online, I wanted to learn, for one, whether Acxiom had pegged me as concerned about arthritis, diabetes or allergies. Acxiom also has a proprietary household classification system that places people in one of 70 socioeconomic categories, like “Downtown Dwellers” or “Flush Families,” and I hoped to discover the caste to which it had assigned me.

But after I filled out an online request form and sent a personal check for $5 to cover the processing fee, the company simply sent me a list of some of my previous residential addresses. In other words, rather than learning the details about myself that marketers might use to profile and judge me, I received information I knew already.

It turns out that Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark., furnishes consumers only with data related to risk management, like their own prison records, tax liens, bankruptcy filings and residential histories. For a corporate client, the company is able to match customers by name with, say, the social networks or Internet providers they use, but it does not offer consumers the same information about themselves.

Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Acxiom’s chief privacy officer, said that the company kept consumer data in different databases and that its system was not designed to assemble all the information it had amassed on a single person.

“We do not have the capability to look up an individual’s data in the system,” Ms. Barrett Glasgow said. “We don’t have a search-by-name capability.”

Data brokers like Acxiom have developed advanced techniques to collect and collate information about consumers’ offline, online and mobile behavior. But they have been slow to develop innovative ways for consumers to gain access to the information that companies obtain, share and sell about them for marketing purposes.

Now federal regulators are pressuring data brokers to operate more transparently. In a report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that the industry set up a public Web portal that would display the names and contact information of data brokers, as well as describe consumers’ data access rights and other choices.

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, said consumers should have access to all the details that data brokers collect on them, as well as any analyses that the companies sell about their behavior.

“I include in that not just the raw data, but also how that information has been analyzed to place the consumer into certain categories for marketing or other purposes,” she said. “I believe that giving consumers this kind of granularity will greatly increase consumer trust in the information flow process and will lead to more accurate marketing.”

At the moment, however, information brokers have wildly different policies. Acxiom lets people opt out of its marketing databases, while Epsilon, another marketing services firm, allows people to opt out of having their data rented to third parties. Epsilon says it will also furnish individuals, upon request, with general information about their past retail transactions — including the categories and years of purchase. But it does not include exact product or retailer names.

Andrew Frawley, the president of Epsilon, says his company has set up a task force to explore giving consumers greater access and choices.

“We agree in principle that more transparency is better,” he said.

But setting up a system for consumers to gain access to their own marketing data could be costly and technically challenging for data brokers, said Stuart Madnick, a professor of information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Companies would have to develop security systems to verify a consumer’s identity and to ensure that no one else could have access to that individual’s record, he said. At the same time, they would have to be prepared to respond to people who questioned the accuracy of the records.

“How correct is the information they have and are disseminating on you?” Professor Madnick asked. “How do they know who is asking for it?”

Information security experts said data brokers might be reluctant to make public access easier lest consumers react by wanting to opt out of the data collection process altogether.

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.