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Amazon spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021 alone
Amazon spent around $4.3 on consultants last year in an effort to prevent unionization of its warehouses, according to company filings.
Apple Retail's alliance with OnForce: A bad deal for consultants, consumers?
Apple Retail is changing the way that non-warranty support calls currently handled by certified Apple consultants are assigned, and that's making some members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN) unhappy. In the past, a consultant who had gone through Apple's rigorous certification process and paid the annual ACN program fees could be interviewed by local Apple Store managers to be added to a referral list. If an Apple customer had an issue that could not be handled in-store by the Genius Bar, the store would provide him or her with a random selection of business cards from local ACN members who were on the list, and the customer could set up an appointment with the ACN. While this program worked well for many years, it apparently rubbed Apple Retail (the current organization behind the ACN program and the Apple Stores) the wrong way. They had no control over the rates charged by ACN members and also had no way -- other than by word of mouth -- to verify the quality of the work that was being performed by ACNs. That all began to change in 2009 when Apple began testing a new support structure that used an existing organization, OnForce, to distribute support calls to ACN members who wanted to sign up as part of the program.
MacTech Boot Camp 2011 coming to four more cities
If you missed MacTech Boot Camp before Macworld this year, you may have a chance to attend if you live in or around Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles or Chicago. In fact, there happen to be major airports in all of those towns, so if the cost of flying to San Francisco was out of reach, you're in luck! What is MacTech Boot Camp? A one-day session geared towards the home user, small business users and anyone who may assist those users (your family's computer guy, for example). We've been quite impressed with the MacTech events we've attended so far, and attendees at the San Francisco Boot Camp were quite enthusiastic with what they learned. Full press release on the next page, but we've listed the locations and dates of the upcoming events below. Dallas, Texas: April 27, 2011 - Sessions Chair: CV Rao, and Nathan Toups Boston, Massachusetts: May 18, 2011 - Sessions Chair: Andy Espo, and Leon Lincoln Los Angeles, California: July 27, 2011 - Sessions Chair: Sean Colins Chicago, Illinois: August 31, 2011 - Sessions Chair: Douglas Ward, and Ben Greiner
Open source video blimp controlled by an iPad
So far, we've seen a car, a helicopter, and even a Dalek controlled by an Apple device, so here's another form of transportation: a blimp, this time controlled by an iPad. Bonus points for making the video interesting and fun, too -- we get a well-edited and shot video montage of how the iPad got hooked up via code to a blimp, equipped with a propeller, a camera, and even some lights. The blimp is actually a "Blimpduino," a low-cost open source blimp design connected to an arduino controller. This blimp's controller is connected to an iPad's accelerometer, so tilting the iPad determines the blimp's movement. Plus, it looks like they even threw in some basic augmented reality through the camera, too, just for the heck of it. Very cool. Speaking of augmented reality, Yelp's Ben Newhouse suggested a while back that the relatively inexpensive iPad could be used for all sorts of tasks that previously required much more specialized computers, and something like this proves that the iPad makes an excellent and cheap touchscreen and accelerometer-based interface for any kind of remote control. I don't know if we'll be flying real blimps with iPads in the future, but any sort of remote interface could definitely make use of a quick app that hooks up our actions to mechanics on the other end. [via MacStories]
