The NTU Team Won the Championship in the 2010 Cross-Strait Collegiate Entrepreneurship Contest by Creating an Auction Platform Using Interactive Photos Which Makes On-line Shopping All the More Interesting

The 2010 Cross-Strait Collegiate Entrepreneurship Contest, an invitation tournament jointly organized by Shanghai Jiao-Tong University and Taiwan’s The Association for Chinese Elites, was held on October 16th in Shanghai Jiao-Tong University. Click Pick, the NTU Team, won the Gold Medal (championship). The NTU Team was comprised of four students from the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the College of Management. Mr. Chih-Wei Yu, the team leader, was from the Institute of Electronic Engineering, and guided by Professor Si-chen Lee. Miss Jung-Hsieh, was from the Institute of Applied Physics and guided by Professor Chih-Yu Chao. Mr. Zher-Chung Su, was from the Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering under the tutorship of Professor Jia-Ling Wu, Mr. Hao-Chung Yang, was from the Institute of Networking and Multimedia under the tutor ship of Professor Lin-Shan Lee, and Miss Chien-Yi Kao, who was from the Department of International Business. That the NTU Team was made up of students from different areas of study fully demonstrates NTU’s superb ability at interdisciplinary integration and team work.

Capitalizing on the booming trend of on line shopping, Mr. Zher-Chung Su and Mr. Hao-Chung Yang used their lab skills and their information engineering knowledge, and built an image-based auction platform called “:Click/Pick”, which primarily relied upon automatic image recognition technology and rendered the use of words superfluous. The users of this auction platform need only click through the images, find their favorite clothing, and arrive at the best outfit choice fast and precisely through interactive recommendation and a record system provided by artificial intelligence.

Aside from the research and development of technology, Mr. Chih-Wei Yu and Miss Jung Hsieh utilized the knowledge they learned from their courses at school and their competition experiences to turn their technology into products. In addition, they proposed an optimal business model for specialized customer groups. This optimal business model was geared toward male customers who do not love to do shopping. These male customers can acquire suggestions to their attire while they are flipping through the web pages, and, while they are web-browsing, they are often induced to make a purchase. This technology can be applied to intelligent cell phones by turning it into application software, which allows male web-shopping to be anytime, anywhere, fast and precise. The participating teams in this year’s entrepreneurship contest are as follows: for mainland China, the nine elite teams which made to the finals of Shanghai Jiao-tong University’s 11th entrepreneurship contest also represented China, including teams from Tsing Hua University, Peking University, and Jiao-tong University; for Taiwan, six teams that have won honors in domestic or foreign entrepreneurship contests before represented Taiwan and made their cross-strait trip to Shanghai. Take the Click Pick team, for example, its members Chih-Wei Yu, Jung-Hsieh, and Chien-Yi Kao were contestants in the 2009 “Young Entrepreneurs for the Future”(YEF) contest organized by the Epoch Foundation.

Of these three, Chih-Wei Yu and Jung Hsieh even emerged triumphant and became the 2009 YEF representatives of Taiwan, who later went abroad to interact with youth entrepreneurs in the Tsing-Hua University of Beijing, the Stanford University and UC Berkeley in California as well. Owing to their outstanding performance, they got invited to participate in this year’s cross-strait entrepreneurship contest.

That the NTU Click Pick team was able to win the championship in the entrepreneurship contest of Greater China is sufficient to prove that NTU faculty and students’ R&D capability, its interdisciplinary cooperation capability and its ability at technology commercialization are among the top in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and are destined to make more contributions to Greater China in the future. National Taiwan University spares no efforts in promoting entrepreneurship education. As we continue to foster creative talents for Taiwan, we hope that one day we will be able nurture successful international businesses like Google and Yahoo in the U.S.