Fantastic News
Well, we have to admit that we really don't have much earth-shattering news.
We're not buying up any companies. Other companies aren't buying us. We're
not mentioned in the newspapers or on TV. In fact, most of the work we do is
confidential, and most of our clients would not like it if we were suddenly a part
of a news story. We just quietly make our transcripts in a nondescript office
building in downtown Boston. So we don't update this page much. If the news seems
a little old when you read this, please forgive us.
That being said, 2010 so far is only a little better than 2009, and last year was
our slowest year in terms of revenue since 2003. When you take into account that our
rates and expenses are somewhat higher than back then, based on the actual amount of
work we received, the year looked more like 2002 when the country was recovering
after the World Trade Center terrorist attack which really wrecked the economy.
In terms of transcription, 2009 was finally the year when nearly all of our clients
switched to digital recording. It's been a long time coming, and we had clients who
stubbornly hung onto their cassette recorders right through 2008. But last year was
the year that our cassette transcribers started collecting dust. More than 95% of
our work came in on digital files.
This means that we're able to do more to improve the "quality" of the audio we
receive. We can bump up the volume and cut down some of the background sound fairly
quickly, without having to spend time digitizing an entire tape in real time. When
our transcriptionists can hear the audio better it results in better quality
transcripts.
Other than that, we did have some in-house news. Jamie Hull left us after seven years
as manager. During the time he was with us, he put himself through Suffolk Law School
and has snatched a position in the legal department of a large bank based here in
Boston.
This meant our co-manager Jean King was able to move up to sole manager, and
we created an assistant manager spot which we filled with Annie Chuprevich who had
been working for us as a transcriptionist just as Jamie had.
And our final piece of news is that we redesigned our Website to look a little
more graphical and to take advantage of upgrades in both browsers and bandwidth.
We kept our Website mostly text-based for a long time so that it would load very
quickly and would be compatible with older browsers. We know that businesses, in
particular, upgrade their software slowly, and there were probably a lot of
Windows 95 and Windows 98 machines on dial-up modems out there when we started our
business in 1998. By now, nearly all businesses have made it to at least Windows XP,
so we felt we could bring our Website up to at least the early 2000s.
To conclude, we are anxious to see where this year leads us. Our business is a good
indicator of what is happening in the economy and things have been slow. Right now,
we are a little above last year and we hope that trend continues.
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