• The Tucson, Arizona-based medical translation firm CyraCom is opening a 100-person call center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The center will provide translations in 150 languages between doctors and patients in hospitals.
  
  The Arizona Republic Tucson Citizen, 9 Jan. 2006

• Atlanta-based courier service A1 Express is opening a national call center at their corporate headquarters.
  
  PRWeb, 9 Jan. 2006

  Belgium is opening a national call center for its citizens in response to the avian influenza outbreak in Turkey, though it is on the other side of the continent. Those concerned may call 0800/99777.
  
  Brussels Review, 9 Jan. 2006

• SITEL India Limited is opening a call center in Hyderabad, India. 297 of the planned 1,000 employees have been hired so far. The company also has two 1,000 person call centers in Mumbai.
  
  Business Standard, 10 Jan. 2006

• Toronto outsourcer Minacs is expanding its Riverview, New Brunswick call center. They will hire about 270 more people for a total of 1,000 employees at that location.
  
  Canadaeast.com, 7 Jan. 2006

• Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based InfoNXX, a directory assistance outsourcer, held a job fair in Wichita, Kansas to recruit "several hundred" people for a new call center there.
  
  Wichita Eagle, 6 Jan. 2006

• Thunder Bay, Ontario will host a 450-employee call center for Denver-based StarTek.
  
  Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal, 5 Jan. 2006

• Nebraska-based Hamilton Relay will open an 80-person call center in Albany, Georgia this spring. The company helps the hearing impaired relay typed messages over the phone to hearing callers.
  
  WALB News, 4 Jan. 2006

• Minneapolis, Minnesota recently opened lines for its new 311 call center. It was designed to streamline citizen connection to local government and take pressure off the 911 emergency line.
  
  Governement Technology, 4 Jan. 2006

• Reno, Nevada-based Alere Medical is opening a call center in Lakewood, Colorado. The center will help monitor asthma and pulmonary disease patients. 30 employees will manage the cases of as many as 10,000 people.
  
  Denver Business Journal, 3 Jan. 2006

• Iowa telemarketer TMONE is moving into a call center that MCI closed last September in Iowa City. TMONE will use the center for outbound sales calls.
  
  Iowa City Press-Citizen, 3 Jan. 2006

Research and Markets is publicizing reports on two 'alternative' call center markets: Botswana and the Czech Republic.

Botswana is a landlocked country in southern Africa known for diamond mining, a progressive AIDS treatment program, and the Kalahari Desert. According to the Datamonitor report, the country is "aggressively pursuing" a call center outsourcing market. The report says that while the citizenry has superb English skills, scalability is limited and telecom charges may be high.

The Czech call center market is being billed as "nearshoring," for its Eastern European location. Czech call centers serve UK and the German-speaking markets, and tend to be more affordable than Western European alternatives. The Datamonitor report calls this a growing market.