We have not changed our outlook—the economy should avoid slipping into a broad-based recession for most, if not all, of 2008.

  In the past, corporate environmental plansvwere mostly cost burdens relating to regulatory compliance, with perhaps a touch of the public relations image of being socially responsible. In the past few years, this has changed dramatically—“green” is becoming a business profit opportunity.

 The IC-DISC is attracting renewed interest as an opportunity for companies engaged in export sales to benefit from lower corporate taxes.

  The first questions that people are asking right now are, “Do we face a near-recession in the near-future, or is talk of a recession (partly due to housing pressures) overblown? Will business spending slow by the end of the year?”

 "I can think of no faster path to a worldwide recession than for the United States and China to turn against one another."

 The latest generation of machine vision technology offers significant benefits for applications outside the semiconductor industry— a primary past beneficiary of huge investments in the technology.

 Have automation vendors hit the wall, when it comes to technology innovation?

 I’m in mobile phone purgatory. My cellular provider was purchased last year in what I thought at the time was a great move. You see, I didn’t like the service I had all that much and thought the new company would be an improvement.

 Cutting costs has become an obsession in the automotive and aerospace sectors, driven by intense competition, shorter product lifecycles and elements of a commodity business.

 The automotive industry’s migration to a build-to-order paradigm is full of challenges, not the least of which is aligning the hundreds of component suppliers to an automotive manufacturer.

 The concurrent engineering required for new product designs between design engineering and manufacturing engineering has always been a critical focal point for manufacturers to shorten time-to-market, accelerate time-to-volume and minimize cost of production.