EXCITING TIMES!

What a crazy few weeks it has been and I have to say it’s not been all work.  I managed to have a really fantastic trip to South America with my wife visiting Brazil and Argentina – truly stunning countries.  Michele only caught me on two occasions sitting on the edge of the bath in the bathroom looking through my emails.  Oh the curse of the internet!  That little phone keeps shouting to me ‘Look at me!  Read me!  Explore me!’  I was relatively well behaved on vacation and did actually turn off my cell phone some of the time.  On the other hand, because I was able to be in contact with the business it also took some of the stress away from wondering what was happening.  If any of you have any ideas on how to deal with mobile phone obsession syndrome then please let me know!

So what has been going on since we last spoke?  So many things - wow!  Firstly, we won our second largest Interpreting contract in the history of the business which due to confidentiality reasons it’s another 14 days until I can tell you about it but it does mean that we will create approximately 70 full time jobs to fulfil the contract, which will last up to three years. 

The business over the past year has been focussing on our technology.  It is getting so exciting and I’ve had a number of serious warnings from my co-directors not to share any information without their permission. 

Over the last year thebigword has increased our technology team from 33 to almost 70 people within the group as we make our final push to launch our new technology – shhh.

I can tell you that the technology will make a huge difference, not just to our customers but to our linguists as well.  To support many of the changes we’ve had to increase our learning and development department four-fold and we’ve contributed over £500,000 ($800,000) to the International School of Linguists. There’s no point in bringing out new technology if people don’t understand how to use it so over the next month you’ll see new courses appearing on ISLinguists including technology enabling courses for translators – it’ll blow your mind.

At the moment I’m in New York and the weather is very cold and damp but in the next few weeks I’ll be visiting our offices in Beijing, Japan and back to Leeds in the beginning of May so now my vacation’s over I’m looking forward to keeping you all up to date on a weekly basis.

Have a great week

Larry.