Hello everyone—I’m Meghan Goth, the newest addition to Speech Technology magazine. I’ll be keeping you up to date on all of the latest speech happenings around the world on our Web site, as well as posting my thoughts and questions for you here on the blog.

I’ll be taking over for Lauren, whom I have unfortunately never met, but whose shoes I’ll do my best to fill.

A little bit about me—I’m a recent graduate from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and am excited to get my feet wet in the speech tech world. I moved to New York about a year ago from Cincinnati, where I got my undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Cincinnati.

I’m a quick learner and a curious person, so I would love feedback and input from all of you on whatever topic you’re excited or wondering about. My goal is to make this blog an interaction between Speech Tech mag and you—a place where we can pose and answer questions to each other and update other techies on what’s new or interesting in our realm.

Feel free to email me at mgoth@infotoday.com with questions, comments, input or ideas about discussion topics for the blog. I’m excited to be here and hope to lend an interesting perspective to Speech Technology mag.

See you around,

Meghan

So it turns out I could have cashed in my government bonds and bought EDS, guys. Because I own almost $14 billion in bonds, right? Sure. Anyway, HP announced today that it’s buying Texas-based Electronic Data Systems. You might recognize EDS from our own little magazine–EDS’ Alex Halikias writes a column for us called “Inside Outsourcing.”

The announcement means HP will be able to stake a claim in the technology outsourcing space, and directly compete with IBM. As more ginormous companies and government agencies turn to outsourcing tech projects, the market is expected to grow, according to analysts quoted in the news article. The acquisition means HP will now have 210,000 employees in 80 countries. Whoa — we have three editors at Speech Tech.

HP makes the big bucks in selling printers, PCs, and servers, but also made $16.4 billion in revenue in business consulting. The EDS acquisition will only further strengthen the company’s grip on business and technology consulting. We’ll keep you updated with news when we hear more. Also, EDS’ CEO, Ron Rittenmeyer, will stay on board with the same title. [MercuryNews.com]

In other news– Though Nuance ended its second fiscal quarter with revenue above expectations, the stock has been sliding. Goldman Sachs analyst Derek Bingham is quoted in the article as saying:

“Nuance’s March report showed that the company’s Network Speech business is not immune from macro slowing, consistent with slowdowns we’ve seen in other large-deal areas of software.”

The company’s stock is down almost 7 percent today. [Barron's]

[Image: LearnMergers.com]