21 May 2019     

Announcing the 36 Winners of COMPUTEX Best Choice Award

Asia’s leading B2B ICT trade show, COMPUTEX TAIPEI will return from May 28 to June 1. As the organizer of the show, Taipei Computer Association (TCA) will announce the winners of COMPUTEX’s official awards: Best Choice Award (BC Award) on May 21. 36 winners are announced on the day, which includes: ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, NVIDIA, Infineon, Realtek, and more. This year, 2 startups who exhibit at InnoVEX also won the Award: Ubiik and Embrace Audio Lab. The 5 winning categories of BC Award 2019 are: AI & IoT, Gaming Entertainment, Video Streaming, Enterprise Application, and Commerce& Lifestyle. In addition to the 35 winning products, the winner of the “Best Choice of the Year” award will be announced in the opening of COMPUTEX 2019.

Personal, Home, Vertical Market Networking Applications as the Main Trend

To ensure that the winning products are truly outstanding, the organizer has invited Professor Chih-Kung Lee, Chairman of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and Institute for Information Industry (III) as the chief judge of BC Award. Professor Lee stated that as BC Award enters its 18th year, there were changes in the industry. With the popularity of AI, Big Data, and IoT; users are now looking for total solutions. This also made some changes within BC Award that went from a hardware focused award to a more application oriented one.

This year, 334 products registered for the competition. The largest increase of participants come from AI and security solutions; while the largest proportion of participants from gaming and peripherals & accessories. Of the 334 products, 90 products were selected after the first evaluation round and the final 35 winners were selected from the final evaluation round. Compared to the previous years, the most distinct features of this year’s award winning products is that total solutions are more sought after rather than single application hardware products. In addition, the demand for personal, home, and networking applications; as well as entertainment, smart solutions, and security solutions all significantly increased.

BC Award Selected 35 Winning Products; Key Feature: Hardware – Software Integration

The organizer stated that judges of BC Award are from academia and industry. In total, 35 products won 36 awards from BC Award; with 1 product winning 2 products and 8 of the 35 products won the Golden Award. The Jury’s Special Award was especially established to award products from international companies and SMEs or startups that have the 3 criteria of BC Award: Functionality, Innovation, and Market Potential. The added key selection criterion of the Best Design Award is the industrial designs of the products where design experts served as judges to the award.

The judges pointed out that in both the consumer and vertical market; users want the technology they use to be able to solve their pain points. This key mindset is why vendors now integrate hardware and software and take into account the users’ needs during their product design phase. The focus of the judges’ review becomes finding products that solve user pain points and create a sustainable, long term profit model. In terms of gaming products; manufacturers take into account the limited space available for their products and now design miniaturized models. In the software side, they have deepened the integration between hardware and software; even created an AI auto-detection system to respond differently to the different games being played. Being able to solve user pain points, improve UX, and lower the user complexity will definitely build brand loyalty.