During two weeks of visits to business process outsourcing (BPO) firms in Shanghai and Beijing, we come away with our first impressions of how these companies affect the service industry. Will this year’s bad news about pet foods and toy recalls in the manufacturing sector affect offshoring?

We went to SpeechTEK in New York City earlier this week, where we met with a bunch of speech specialists and sat in on a few interesting presentations about the intersection of speech recognition, machine translation, and customer service. The goal: A better customer experience, wherever that customer might be.

Everybody complains that there are too many language industry conferences, often scheduled on top of each other and with very little to distinguish one from the next. When will conference organizers wake up to the problem?

The debut of J.K. Rowling’s latest novel underscores a big problem faced by global brand managers – how can you synchronize the global release of a product?