If you’ve ever watched NBC’s The Office, you know the show makes hilarious use of business-world stereotypes. Granted, the personalities, quirks, and antics of the employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Co.

Well, this is getting interesting. For the past several months, we’ve had relatively partisan folks on each side of the medical device industry vs.

(Carl Zeiss: Jena, Germany) -- Carl Zeiss, a global leader of high-tech companies in the optical and opto-electronic industry, and Digital Surf, a developer of topography software and supplier of metrology components, have signed an agreement enabling Carl Zeiss to provide ConfoMap software.

(STAT A MATRIX: Edison, NJ) -- STAT A MATRIX Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that provides training to industry on quality-related topics, has released its Summer/Fall 2011 training catalog.

(Taylor Hobson: Leicester, UK) -- Congratulations to Rony Moreno, the winner of Taylor Hobson’s world record competition.

(Konica Minolta: Ramsey, NJ) -- Konica Minolta Sensing Americas Inc. (KMSA), a global leader in the industrial measurement of color, light, and shape, has launched its newest benchtop spectrophotometers, the CM-3600A and the CM-3610A.

(Thomson Reuters: New York) -- Techstreet, a Thomson Reuters business, has signed agreements with a range of construction and safety standards publishers to distribute standards, manuals, and codes online.

(ANSI: Washington) -- The U.S.

Since 2009, there has been a recovery in the white-light scanner market, and the manufacturing industry and metrology vendors acknowledge this. However, research indicates that there is still uncertainty among end-user spending.

A Minnesota-based manufacturer of high-quality ATV, snowmobile, and motorcycle parts and accessories had a design and development problem with a snow blade that created a lot of time-consuming rework.