Author's note (May 2026): I wrote this on the flight back from Taipei to Santiago, in June 2018. It was the first time we had represented Chile outside the Americas. Reading these notes now, it still feels surreal.

Computex Taipei 2018: A Stand Among Giants

How we got here

In June 2018, two Venezuelan engineers based in Iquique landed in Taipei to represent Chile at Computex — the world's largest hardware technology event. It wasn't a coincidence.

ProChile — the Chilean government's export and internationalization agency — selected TALS as one of four of the most innovative Chilean startups to participate in InnoVEX, Computex's dedicated startup pavilion. The selection criterion was the global viability of the solution and its potential to attract international investment or manufacturing partners.

Going from Iquique — a frontier city in Chile's extreme north, 1,800 km from Santiago — to Taipei was the sharpest leap of our journey to that point. And the most clarifying.

What Computex Taipei actually is

Computex is not a standard technology fair. It's the Mecca of hardware.

Five days. Over 1,600 exhibitors. More than 145,000 professional visitors from 160 countries. The Nangang Exhibition Center becomes the place where ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and every major component manufacturer on the planet unveil what the industry will look like in the next twelve months. If something is going to exist in the consumer or professional hardware market next year, it first appears at Computex.

We were an accessibility startup from Iquique with a Raspberry Pi prototype in a 3D-printed enclosure. We were surrounded by the silicon giants.

It was exactly the right place for us.

Preparation in Iquique

The weeks before Taipei were feverish.

We redesigned the TALS prototype's enclosure. The "Frankenstein" of exposed cables and PCB boards that had won hackathons had to become something that looked like a product on its way to commercialization. We 3D-printed a clean housing, painted it, and assembled everything with a presentation quality that said: this is real, this is not a university experiment.

We printed materials in English and Traditional Chinese. It was our first lesson in internationalization: if your materials only exist in Spanish, you're not really at InnoVEX — you're at a regional event.

The biggest logistical challenge was protecting the hardware for the journey. 30 hours of flying, two layovers, voltage changes, tropical humidity. All the equipment traveled in carry-on luggage. TALS did not leave our hands.

The journey: Iquique → Santiago → Tokyo → Taipei

My first time crossing the Pacific.

The layover in Narita, Japan, was the first cultural shock. The silence. The order. The precision in every detail of the airport. White-gloved employees. Technology integrated seamlessly without looking like a showroom. Things that in Latin America we associate with "the future" were simply everyday there.

Arriving in Taipei, we were welcomed by the humid summer heat and a city that breathes electronics. Night markets selling electronic components. Neon signs over shops specializing in cables, circuits and displays. The densest hardware manufacturing ecosystem on the planet, compressed into an island of 36,000 km².

We were exhausted. The adrenaline kept us awake.

The stand: the reality

Our stand was inside the Chile pavilion at InnoVEX. We had two square meters. A table, a monitor, the TALS prototype set up, and our bilingual brochures.

On our sides: Taiwanese, Israeli, and American startups. In the background: ASUS and MSI booths the size of entire floors.

The first day was a trial by fire. Visitor flow was constant from opening. They came to InnoVEX looking for the next disruptive technology, not an accessibility demo for deaf people. We had to learn quickly how to capture attention in the first five seconds and adapt the pitch based on who was standing in front of the stand.

With a hardware engineer: "We're using real-time computer vision on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with TensorFlow Lite. The challenge is latency — we need to stay under 300 milliseconds for the translation to feel natural."

With an investor: "The assistive technology market for deaf people exceeds $5 billion annually. There is no affordable computer vision solution in any language other than English."

With someone who just stopped out of curiosity: Turn on the system and show the demo. Darwin's hands signing, text appearing on screen in real time. No more words needed.

The conversations that mattered

Most visitors were surface-level curiosity — a demo, a photo, a brochure, and on to the next stand.

But some conversations were worth the entire trip.

An engineer from a Taiwanese depth sensor manufacturer spent 40 minutes with us. He analyzed the hardware, asked about the detection algorithms, and told us something we've used as a guiding principle ever since: "Your idea works because it uses standard hardware for a niche problem. That's scalable. Expensive hardware only works for prototypes; cheap hardware builds markets."

We also had meetings with low-power OLED display manufacturers interested in the use case. For a dedicated sign language translation device, the display is as critical as the camera.

What the photos don't show

The photos from the stand show smiles, colorful booths, and the international atmosphere of Computex. What they don't show:

We slept four hours. We ate at Taipei's night markets to save the budget for other things. On the second day of the fair, the Raspberry overheated from hours of continuous operation under the stand's spotlights. We improvised a cooling system with a USB fan bought 200 meters from the venue, at a shop that sold cables and electronic accessories by weight.

Pure industrial hacking in the middle of the world's most sophisticated hardware event.

The moment that defines everything

It was at the end of the third day. The stand was being packed up, few visitors remained in InnoVEX. A Taiwanese man in his fifties stopped in front of the demo. He watched the system in silence. Then he made a sign — not to interact with the system, but genuinely, spontaneously.

I asked him, in English, if he knew sign language. Using his phone's translator, he explained that his son was deaf.

He watched the demo again. The system identified the gesture, the text appeared on screen. The man smiled. He nodded several times. He said something in Mandarin I didn't understand, but the gesture of gratitude was universal.

In that moment, TALS stopped being a technology project and became what it had always been: a tool for two people who don't share a language to understand each other.

The real impact of Computex

What Computex did for TALS wasn't closing contracts or securing immediate investment. It was something more valuable at that stage:

Global market validation. We understood that the accessibility problem for deaf people is not a Latin American problem. It's a universal problem with dozens of distinct sign languages, and the solution we had built in Iquique had applicability in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Supplier network. Contacts with sensor and display manufacturers in Taiwan opened the door to a global supply chain that would have been impossible to access from Chile.

International credential. Back in Chile, "we just presented at Computex Taipei" worked as a business card with ministers, investment funds, and large corporations. In the Chilean ecosystem, that status opened doors that had been closed.

What Taiwan teaches about innovation

I brought back from Taiwan something that didn't fit in a suitcase: respect for manufacturing.

In Latin America there's a false dichotomy between hardware — seen as difficult, expensive, "for big companies" — and software, where we feel comfortable. In Taiwan that dichotomy doesn't exist. Every small workshop, every component manufacturer, every parts distributor is part of an integrated ecosystem where hardware and software are inseparable.

I learned that real technological sovereignty starts with understanding how things are made, not just how they're programmed. A country that doesn't manufacture hardware will always depend on those that do.

I returned from Taipei with that conviction, with 200 business cards from manufacturers and distributors, and with the certainty that what we had built in a desert city in northern Chile was relevant at global scale.

The deaf cousin from that afternoon in Guanare never knew his casual visit would change a trajectory — and take that trajectory all the way across the Pacific.