(FORTUNE Magazine) – A small disclaimer: Compared with their counterparts in Silicon Valley, the eight non-American high-technology entrepreneurs profiled in these pages are not all surfing at the cutting edge of the next info wave. But their stories do put a compelling human face on the way the digital revolution is transforming business cultures everywhere in the world. A big thought. Just imagine what a few more years of such change will bring. Now read on.

TREND MICRO TAIWAN Revenues: $20 million Employees: 165 Private

Stroll through Trend Micro's offices in Taipei, and you might hear the sound of gunfire. Not to worry; it's just a few Trend engineers who have rigged their computers to emit the sound of a machine gun when they wipe out a virus.

With over 5,000 known virus strains around, they've got lots to shoot at. Says founder Steve Chang, 42, an American-educated software engineer: "Viruses are now being transmitted everywhere instantly, and demand for our products is growing like crazy." Those pesky programs purposely created by digital vandals to destroy computer data are often spread through the Internet, so Chang backs up his software products with a "virus alert" Website. When in August a serious new virus called Hare cropped up, in just three days 800,000 people logged onto the site.

Though more than seven million computer users rely on his protective software, Chang has long kept his company almost as invisible as the viruses it zaps. His software for networks is licensed to Intel and Novell, which sell Chang's technology under their own labels. Intel motherboards are getting a protective chip from Chang, called ChipAway Virus, that checks for viruses in milliseconds before a computer fully boots up. In Japan such companies as Fujitsu and Hitachi bundle Chang's software into all their computers.

Chang has become a global force, but only after much trial and error. Armed with a master's degree in computer science from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he went home to Taiwan and marketed software for Hewlett-Packard. In 1984 he scraped together $50,000 from savings and a couple of friends to buy the rights to an American database management software program--and adapted it for Chinese-language users in Taiwan. Says Chang: "Our problem was that everybody copied it." To stop rip-offs of his intellectual property, Chang and his engineering colleagues developed a little protective device that plugs into the serial port of a PC and contains special codes required to activate a program. Admits Chang: "We were purely a technology company and didn't know much about marketing then." In 1986 he sold the rights to that security device to Rainbow Technology in the U.S. for $125,000--which, he recalls, then seemed to be "all the money I would need in my life."

That was before one of his engineers gave Chang his first look at a virus, a program that just kept expanding to infect one computer file after another. Realizing that countering such threats offered plenty of profit potential, Chang used his capital to start Trend Micro in Los Angeles. Once it got going, he moved the company to Taiwan, where bright engineers seem to grow faster than bean sprouts in a damp cellar and their salaries are about half the level of U.S. counterparts. Chang keeps them happy with generous pay by local standards, along with the endless challenge of fighting some 200 new virus strains a month.

Success is finally allowing Chang to raise his own flag in the marketplace. His nifty new protective program for Microsoft's Windows 95, called PC-cillin 95, is being sold (in 18 languages) under Trend's own brand alongside that of its U.S. marketing partner, Touchstone Software. PC-cillin automatically adjusts its level of protection based on the virus threat it detects. Users can update virus patterns by simply dialing into Trend's database via a modem. In another new foray, Chang is giving Netscape the right to use Trend's antivirus software in its server products.

Trend's biggest sale yet is about to close. Attracted by its 38% pretax profit margins, the acquisitive Japanese conglomerate Softbank plans to buy a 40% stake. A much richer Chang will still own the rest. --Louis Kraar

SINOAMERICAN TELECOM HONG KONG Revenues: $12 million Employees: 130 Nasdaq

Pagers may seem like yesterday's technology in much of the West, but in China they are proving to be an extremely cool commodity, especially when they can receive a short voice message in Chinese without the aid of a telephone. "Phones are still very scarce in China," says pager inventor Allan Yuen, 48, "and our voice pager doesn't require users to call an operator to retrieve their messages." In a nation where fewer than one in 20 people has a phone, an astounding one in 71 has a pager. Yuen is already working on a digital version of his invention that will hold voice messages of far longer than the current 20 seconds.

The sales opportunities are eye-popping. China's first national paging system will use SinoAmerican products, thanks in part to Yuen's good business contacts. After working for companies like ITT, the telecommunications engineer struck out on his own. In 1991 he set up a factory in China's Shenzen economic zone just across the border from Hong Kong to make phones and assemble audio equipment. His biggest customer turned out to be the People's Liberation Army, which operates probably the largest collection of businesses in China--in addition to securing Beijing's national defense. The PLA's companies included a pager network operator that liked Yuen's products and invited him to help develop its network. Says Yuen: "The PLA contributes the frequency and the permit, while we bring in the equipment and share revenues."

A great prospect like that brings great challenges. He'll need $30 million worth of equipment for the Chinese network. For those funds, Yuen, whose company took over a Nasdaq-listed concern last year, is looking to Wall Street. --Louis Kraar

KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING SINGAPORE Revenues: $100,000 Employees: 13 Private

Lim Kwee Enn, 37, is probably what Singapore had in mind when it set out to create an "intelligent island." She harnesses artificial intelligence for such tasks as managing factory production and transportation fleets, and she has outgunned Sun, EDS, and IBM for contracts. Says Lim: "Because we're a new company, we use the latest technology. Competitors tend to use technology at least five years older than ours. And because we're small, we are very flexible." For instance, she improved the look of her computer screens after clients showed a preference for prettier ones.

After spending nine years in Australia studying artificial intelligence and applying it to operations of such companies there as ANZ Bank, Lim and an Australian colleague moved to Singapore looking for new challenges. Using her own funds at first, she also tapped into Singapore incentives aimed at building local prowess in information technology. In 1992, Lim won a $130,000 grant from the National Computer Board to develop an intelligent gate-management system for airports. At that time the island's Changi International Airport, widely regarded as one of the world's best, was eyeing the purchase of just such a system to assign passenger gates and baggage-handling belts smoothly for its average 400 daily flights. Lim studied for a year, then got Hewlett-Packard, which liked her design work for its own factory, to bid jointly with her. They won the $2.8 million contract.

Having developed what she claims is "the only system in the world" that integrates allocation of gates, baggage belts, and bus gates at an airport, Lim has also created software used by Singapore's ubiquitous Comfort taxi fleet to track its cabs using a satellite global positioning system. Says she: "When people fly into Singapore, they use our airport system. When they take a taxi, they use another of our products. Soon at hotels we'll have interactive maps of Singapore on TV screens showing visitors the shortest route to anything they want." Lim has kept the intellectual property rights to her software and is offering it to international airports in Sydney, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Since it may take a while before Knowledge sees big earnings from the airport contract, that could prove to be a smart move. --Louis Kraar

VARITRONIX HONG KONG Revenues: $879 million Employees: 1,200 Hong Kong exchange

Think of Varitronix as the custom tailor of the liquid-crystal-display industry. While Japanese giants dominate mass production, founder York Liao and his colleagues specialize in producing relatively small quantities of LCDs for airport and railway-station departure and arrival boards, navigation instruments, and even missile controls. As he puts it, "We make an average of one new product a day."

When he was a grad student, the idea of making money never occurred to Liao, 50, who began studying LCDs long before anyone found a commercial use for them. "Not in my wildest dreams did I think what I did was useful," says Liao. Then, in 1974, after earning a Ph.D. in applied physics at Harvard, he had a stunning revelation in Switzerland, where he first saw a wristwatch with an LCD display. He couldn't resist buying one of those watches for his father, even though it cost $400--a month's salary for him then as a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Soon Hong Kong companies were frantically assembling watches with LCD displays, inspiring the birth of Varitronix, which Liao formed with a group of academic friends from local universities. Its initial capital was $300,000. Quite a plunge for professors, but Liao points out, "Let's not forget that we kept our teaching jobs for a while."

His scientific savvy in a thriving new industry made up for lack of experience in production and marketing. Says Liao: "Our success was fortuitous. The market was kind to us, offering quite an opportunity and little competition. The technology was new to the Japanese. We were making stupid mistakes, but so were they." In a few years, though, things got tougher as a Japanese onslaught drove Western companies out of LCD manufacturing. The price of watch displays plummeted.

Liao's answer: Make custom-designed displays for such things as games, calculators, and even heart pacemakers. The success of Varitronix's most prominent product, a hand-held terminal that is used for placing bets on horse races by telephone in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia, was another happy accident. In the early 1980s a band of young European engineers hired Varitronix to make displays for a small terminal but failed to perfect it--and couldn't pay their bills. Says Liao: "They were ahead of the times. We helped them make it in return for shares in their company, which still could not survive. We were left holding the baby. I thought it was a good idea, so we persisted."

In 1987, when the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which runs local racing, asked for tenders for such a terminal, Varitronix was the only bidder able to submit a working prototype. Now Varitronix is finding other uses for this gadget, called the Customer Input Terminal. It's already being used for personal banking by Maybank in Malaysia. And Liao is developing versions for stock trading and inventory control.

The professors, meanwhile, have learned a few lessons about business. For instance, they still develop products in Hong Kong but have shifted some manufacturing to lower-cost sites in southern China and Malaysia. --Louis Kraar

ADVANCED RISC MACHINES CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND Revenues: $16 million Employees: 140 Private

How does a company steer a course through the unpredictable peaks and troughs of semiconductor demand and avoid getting stuck with millions of surplus microchips? One answer: Let others make chips--you just design them.

ARM designers focus on products with "embedded intelligence"--cyberspeak for the smart telephones, pocket computers, Internet TVs, and even intelligent kitchen appliances that are increasingly popping up in homes. Because these devices need light, portable computing power, their microprocessors must be tiny and energy-efficient--able to run for hours off a few volts of battery power. ARM meets those specs by relying on RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chips. While other semiconductor companies, such as Motorola, IBM, and Silicon Graphics, build RISC chips, most tend to be powerful but also bigger and more expensive--and thus impractical for carry-anywhere devices such as the Apple Newton. Says ARM chief Robin Saxby, 49: "The competition is designing RISC chips that go really fast and cost a lot. We're designing ones that go pretty fast and are cheap." At around $20, he says, the simplest ARM chip is two to three times cheaper than competing RISC products and a tenth the price of an Intel Pentium chip.

That strategy has helped ARM, founded in 1991 by Saxby, a former senior executive of British PC maker Acorn, and some former colleagues, to reel in big-name customers that include Motorola, Apple, Texas Instruments, and Samsung--while making money almost from day one. Earnings this year are running 40% ahead of 1995's $5.1 million.

"They've got this niche almost to themselves," says David Tee, a senior industry analyst with SRI International in London, who sees a division of Japan's Hitachi as the main competitor. Next year ARM chips will appear in a new line of Psion hand-held PCs and the next-generation Nintendo Game Boy. The last Game Boy sold more than 60 million units, so these lads could be poised for one wild ride. --Richard Evans

ADROIT INTERNATIONAL SINGAPORE Revenues: $3.7 million Employees: 69 Private

Meet a fellow who aced out his former employer. When Singapore's seven leading banks were about to sign up IBM to develop interactive kiosks for their electronic transfer system, Lim Jui Khiang, who once worked for Big Blue, came in with a killer counteroffer: He'd develop an alternate system at his company's expense. Lim, 40, a British-educated computer engineer, has now won orders for an initial 50 kiosks. At the same time, Adroit has nimbly kept the rights to the multimedia designs, which it plans to peddle abroad. Says Lim: "Being small and agile, we can run circles around big organizations."

His company's custom-designed interactive street kiosks use sound and video to do everything from selling tickets to entertainment events to collecting parking fines. Clients include the British-owned Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, for which he created a kiosk that allows customers to talk to a banker via teleconferencing. Singapore Airlines and Deutsche Bank use his multimedia training systems. To keep the cash flowing and cover overhead while tackling long-term projects, Adroit has taken on such jobs as designing a Website for Hewlett-Packard.

Adroit is also allying itself with the big boys. It has teamed up with NTT of Japan to provide a tenant information support system for the developer of a complex of offices and apartments in Singapore. The system allows tenants to receive services--such as reserving squash courts or watching news broadcasts--either via custom-made kiosks in the building, which work over phone lines, or through a TV hookup.

Lim, who flunked plenty of exams as a young student, says he has prevailed by learning to survive failure. After attending a Singapore technical college, he went on to graduate with honors at the University of Essex. Says he: "I know how to get up after falling, which is important for anyone starting a business."

After working 11 years for IBM in Singapore, he decided that Big Blue was "too box-oriented" and not alert to the full potential of software, and left to form his own company with five colleagues in 1993. Lim got $200,000 in seed capital from Steven Tiong, a friend and a professional investor. Once Adroit showed what it could do, Nomura of Japan privately invested over $1.5 million to acquire 20%. --Louis Kraar

PLUSTEK TAIWAN Revenues: $25 million Employees: 200 Private

Whirring with enviable ingenuity, Plustek turns out new economy-priced models of computer scanners about every six months. IBM, among others, happily slaps on its own label and sells them in the U.S. Says Karen Ku, 37, president and 50% owner of Plustek: "We wanted to find a niche that would allow our R&D team to develop its full potential." Indeed, her smart company perfectly epitomizes what Taiwan trade promoters term "inno-value"--applying technology to create new products with a few special features and a rock-bottom price.

For Ku, though, the company is more of a family affair. Her husband, Bob Lin, an engineer who designed one of Taiwan's first IBM-compatible clones, wanted to start his own business with a few friends. They gathered $200,000 in capital from seven founding partners and friends and relatives. Karen turned out to be an ideal chief executive. She earned a Ph.D. in international trade at National Chengchi University, and her dissertation on the management challenges faced by the European subsidiaries of Taiwan computer companies became a virtual bible for businesses and government on the island. Says she: "Frankly, the reason I got into this business was to help out my husband and his friends. They are engineers who love the technical side but don't like to get involved in finance, sales, and so on. And after so many years of study, I welcomed the chance to get some practical experience."

While President Ku keeps the orders rolling in and pays the bills, her husband leads the 20-man R&D team--which Plustek, showing unexpected flair for self-promotion, describes as collectively having over 300 years of experience. The division of labor works well. In May the engineers rolled out a color scanner called OpticPro--being sold under both the Plustek name and others. OpticPro, which can be plugged into a PC or notebook computer without adding an interface card, is compact, works with the touch of a button, and retails in the U.S. for $299. Pop in a printed page, and the scanner's built-in software swiftly converts it to a word-processing document. Press a button on the OpticPro, and its Action Manager software pops up to file, fax, copy, or simply save the document on your computer.

Clever as Plustek's engineers are, they cannot afford to stop coming up with new wrinkles. Explains Ku: "Within six months other companies in Taiwan introduce copies of our products, so we must push out new products quickly." The company farms out production of such components as printed circuitboards to subcontractors so that its own technical talent can concentrate on product development. Adds Ku: "Before we do R&D, we have to know that a product will have a market. We try to manufacture in volume in order to survive." Plustek focuses on imaging products because they are relatively easy to sell. That approach has been profitable, though Plustek won't reveal precisely to what extent.

While Taiwan is filled with mom-and-pop companies that dream of cashing in by going public one day, Ku and her partners have adopted an unusual strategy. Says she: "So many computer companies get started by people who have their eye on the stock market and just want to make a lot of money from an IPO. Our goal is to have modest but steady long-term growth and to operate with a close-knit team that's like a family." Well, it is led by a family. --Louis Kraar

BARON TECHNOLOGY HAIFA, ISRAEL Revenues: $0 Employees: 20 Private

Even in this keyboard-pounding age, there are times when nothing but pen and ink will do--say, when you need to take notes during a presentation or jot down an address while walking through an airport. Enter BarOn Technology with a solution: a pen that uses sensors to capture handwriting movements, which can then be converted to text for use in word processing or other applications.

Unlike other gadgets that record writing made on pressure-sensitive pads, BarOn's MotionPen actually writes on paper--in ink. Founder and inventor Ehud Baron, 50, expects his device to appeal to people who don't normally use computers or who don't want to carry a laptop on the road. Users will just have to bring a cigarette-pack-size receiver operating on batteries.

Scheduled to hit the market early next year, the pen will be priced under $300, not much less than PDAs that can do a lot more. That could make it a "hard sell," warns Tom Rhinelander, an analyst at Forrester Research.

To crack the big leagues, BarOn is looking for alliances. Already an Israeli subsidiary of Japan's Toyo Ink has invested about $500,000 in BarOn, figuring that its technology could prove useful in coping with a multi-thousand-character language such as Japanese. "Who they partner with is the real key to success," says John Jerney, editor of the journal Pen-based Computing. "Israeli companies produce high-quality, innovative technology but often fail on the marketing front." Better make a note of that, fellows. --Sheree R. Curry