When someone well-known drops out of a company we always wonder where they went. That mystery was solved for several well-known personages earlier this month.

• Hanspeter Siegrist, a co-founder of the STAR Group who left the company in 2003, is now an angel investor with holdings in software, services, and real estate. Siegrist stopped by with Peter Vaihansky, vice president of StarSoft Labs, a 450-person application development firm headquartered in Russia and a U.S. office in Massachusetts. Vaihansky positioned his firm against competitors like Wipro in India: “if you have an urgent job, you call the Americans. If you have a large job and a specification, you call the Indians. If you have an impossible job, you call the Russians.”
• Ian Harris, technical director of thebigword, left that UK-based LSP last year to found Search Laboratory Ltd. His new firm will help companies with search engine optimization (SEO) for multilingual websites. Harris says that “translation of
  keyword lists can lead to poor results, regardless of the quality of the translation, because translation of keywords results in a dilution of ideas.” We’ll write more about his work in a future entry.
• Phillipe Mercier left his position as IT & Localization Manager at Telelingua International to work for Locordia SA, a Belgian LSP. Mercier joins Georges Boussingault, former operations manager of Telelingua, with whom he had developed T-Remote Memory, the first web-based translation memory.
• Longtime Kronos localization manager Marcia Sweezey crossed over to the vendor side, taking up residence as manager of Idiom’s LSP Advantage program. Meanwhile, Idiom re-announced a bunch of news that it announced in the publicity dead zone of 19 December. It also announced that Tony Dolph and Ed Spies, language industry outsiders, had joined its executive team.
• Last month Carsten Kneip who had left Cisco last year for LSP Sinometrics hopped back over to the buy side into Microsoft’s Developer Division Localization Team.
• Dan Kuperstein, EMC’s Globalization Director, signed on as EVP of Globant, a 200-plus person IT solutions and outsourcing company based in Buenos Aires. Kuperstein will introduce Globant services to the U.S. market.

Movement between client and supplier, from language services to services that support other aspects of globalization, and immigration into the field are all signs of a healthy industry.