Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda have announced plans to begin negotiating a free-trade agreement aimed at deepening trade and investment ties between the two nations.

Corporations in the U.S. and Europe will move an additional 750,000 jobs in IT, finance and other business services to India and other low-cost geographies by 2016, according to new research from The Hackett Group. But levels of additional offshoring in these areas will begin to decline by 2014, and in the next 8 to 10 years the flow of jobs offshore is likely to cease, as companies simply run out of business services jobs suitable for moving to low-cost countries.

It turns out that small- and medium-sized brick and mortar companies can use analytical tools just as the largest corporations can-or the hottest Web-based social media start-ups or the biggest intelligence agencies with three-letter names.

Advances in analytic technologies and business intelligence are allowing CIOs to go big, go fast, go deep, go cheap and go mobile with business data.

Properly planning for the unplanned - a supply chain disruption of any kind and for whatever reason - means optimizing your distribution center network, having the right modes lined up to transport your goods to market, and ensuring that you choose the best ocean port, says John A. Moseley, general manager, trade development, at the Port of Houston Authority. It also means having a backup port just in case.

Two years ago, the director of sustainability at a $1bn consumer-products company suggested the corporate budget committee add a new criterion in deciding which capital projects to approve: the project's environmental impact. The director devised a metric for measuring the impact in categories such as water usage, waste reduction, packaging and carbon emissions. The idea saved $20m the first year.

California-based auto glass wholesaler Mygrant Glass is eliminating the need for paperwork for delivery verification, by equipping its drivers with mobile RFID interrogators that read passive EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags on the products being delivered, and then forward that information to Apple iPads.

A rise in cargo theft reporting is attributable to improved collaboration and data sharing between the insurance and transportation industries and law enforcement, according to a report from CargoNet.