SlatorCon is coming to New York City. On October 12, 2017, senior language industry executives, investors, technologists, and buyers will gather at the Dream Downtown in Manhattan.

Who invests where in language services and why? What’s coming up from Silicon Valley? What’s next for TransPerfect? What’s new in translation productivity tools. How are large buyers shifting spend, and how will neural machine translation impact the industry?

The stacked speaker line-up features the world’s two largest language service providers, an up-and-coming challenger from Silicon Valley, a large private equity investor about to enter in the market, a leading neural machine translation researcher, and a C-level procurement executive.

Presentations are in a TED-style format, and each presenter will speak for 20 minutes. Following the presentations will be a speakers’ panel, which provides an additional opportunity for participants to engage in the discussion.

SlatorCon New York also provides ample time for networking with CEOs, founders, senior industry peers, investors and buyers before the event, during the afternoon break, and at our VIP reception post event in the Electric Room.

SlatorCon New York builds on the success of the sold out London event held in May 2017.

Speakers

Phil Shawe, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, TransPerfect

Strategies for Organic Business Growth

Bio: Phil Shawe is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of TransPerfect, a global family of companies and the world’s largest privately held provider of language and business services. Phil has overseen the day-to-day operations of the company for over 25 years, and grown the business from 2 people to an industry leader with over 4000 and 100 offices worldwide. Under Phil’s leadership, TransPerfect has received numerous awards and distinctions. The company is a seven-time honoree of the Inc. 5000 Award, a six-time honoree of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and has earned multiple Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service. Phil has been named Entrepreneur of the Year for New York City by Ernst & Young, and named to Crain’s New York prestigious “40 Under 40 list” as one of the top young executives in New York.

Rory Cowan, Chairman of the Board, Lionbridge

A Seller’s Journey from a Buyer’s Perspective

Bio: Prior to founding Lionbridge in 1996, Rory Cowan was executive vice president and member of the Management Committee for R.R. Donnelley & Sons. He also was chief executive officer of Stream International Inc., a multi-billion dollar division of R.R. Donnelley. Cowan joined R.R. Donnelley in 1988 as senior vice president of the Documentation Services Group, and later became group president.

May Habib, CEO, Qordoba

A Data-Driven Approach to Predicting Content Impact

In both the B2B and B2C worlds, sophisticated marketers are using data to inform what content to produce for their audiences. When it comes to global marketing, however, the data lens goes out the window, and at best, only the top performing English content is localized. This presentation is about the techniques, strategies, and processes used by bleeding edge global marketers to create and target content to diverse international audiences – across language, segments, and applications – using data to predict which content will have the most impact.

Bio: May Habib is co-founder and CEO of Qordoba, a software platform that helps companies internationalize their products and marketing content. Previously, May was a vice president at Mubadala, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, and an investment banker focused on tech M&A with Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, based in New York. At Mubadala, May worked with a small team that invested $4B in global technology companies. May graduated with high honors in economics from Harvard, where she also studied Arabic and Hebrew and wrote an award-winning thesis on the economics of the Iraqi insurgency.

Kevin Giblin, Chief Procurement Officer, Dun & Bradstreet

Inside Global Procurement

Dun & Bradstreet’s Chief Global Procurement Officer, Kevin Giblin, will discuss the fast-changing procurement landscape. What is category management, are sourcing cycles accelerating, and how is supplier management deployed to achieve an optimal procurement mix? As spend on language services and technology is being increasingly centralized, understanding how Procurement approaches a spend category is vital to identifying and winning global contracts and becoming a trusted partner to a client.

Bio: Kevin Giblin is the Head of Global Sourcing at Dun & Bradstreet. In this role, he leads a team that manages both direct and indirect spend, defining sourcing strategies and establishing ongoing SRM to ensure continuous supplier value. As part of this role, he also oversees the Oracle P2P team.

Prior to Dun & Bradstreet, Mr. Giblin was a Senior Director at McGraw Hill Financial, where he led the implementation of sourcing, procure-to-pay, and contract tools to drive efficiency and standardize practices. In 2012, he received the Green Supply Chain Award from SDCE. Mr. Giblin was the recipient of IACCM’s “Collaborate to Innovate Award” at the 2011 ProcureCon USA Conference.

Kyunghyun Cho, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University

State-of-the-Art in Neural Machine Translation

Bio: Kyunghyun Cho is an assistant professor of computer science and data science at New York University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Montreal until summer 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, and received PhD and MSc degrees from Aalto University early 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Juha Karhunen, Dr. Tapani Raiko and Dr. Alexander Ilin. He tries his best to find a balance among machine learning, natural language processing, and life, but almost always fails to do so.

Ronald Kuehl, Managing Director, Frontenac

A Private-Equity View on the Language Service Industry

Private equity firm Frontenac has an investment thesis on the language services industry. Ron Kuehl, Managing Director at Frontenac, will introduce the firm and provide an update about what private equity is looking for in a language service provider. He will discuss why his firm likes the language industry and highlight key industry trends and drivers. Ron will outline the opportunity Frontenac sees and how his firm is planning to invest in the space.

Bio: Ron is a Managing Director at Frontenac, a leading private equity firm, based in Chicago. Frontenac has raised over $1.5 billion of capital since inception and has made 200+ investments. Ron focuses on investments in the commercial, industrial and business services sectors. He is a director at Liquid Technologies, Sigma Corporation and Wenner Bread Products. Ron’s prior investments and directorships include Portfolio Group and Ohio Transmission Corp. Ron joined Frontenac in 2006 and previously worked in private equity at Churchill Capital and H.I.G. Ron started his career as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. A Minnesota native, Ron graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and received an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Florian Faes, Managing Director, Slator

The Language Industry’s Most Important Stories and Trends in 2017 and Beyond

2017 is shaping up to be a year of breakthrough developments the language services industry. In technology, neural machine translation is finding its way into the supply chain. On the corporate side, the industry’s largest players are going through major changes, while the M&A cycle continues apace.

Bio: Based in Zurich, Florian Faes spent over eight years working in Asia, stationed in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Before launching Slator in 2015, he was with CLS Communication as Head of Asia and he was part of group management during the trade sale to Lionbridge.