Yelp Reviewers File Class Action Lawsuit, Want To Get Paid

(jdong)

Last fall, while we were covering fake Yelp reviews of real businesses and real Yelp reviews of fake businesses, a lawsuit questioning the nature of online reviews in a different way was filed on the West Coast. The lawsuit was dismissed in February, but has since been filed again with different attorneys and a different lead plaintiff. Their argument? Elite Yelp reviewers provide a service to the site, and some reviewers are paid, so all of them ought to be.

Regular Consumerist readers know that we already question the value of Yelp’s “Elite” program, where prodigious reviewers receive virtual swag on their profiles and real-life swag and special parties from restaurants. There’s another, lesser-known program of Yelp “scouts,” who file reviews in new areas for the site and are paid for their work.

We weren’t able to obtain a copy of the complaint in this current lawsuit, but in the suit last fall, the plaintiffs complained about how they were treated differently from paid reviewers while performing the same functions. They seek wages under the Fair Labor Standards Act, pointing out that it’s unfair that some Yelp reviewers are paid for their work while others aren’t.

What’s the difference between a Yelp “Scout” and a regular reviewer? One gets paid, the defendants point out, while others don’t.

Not only must the wage-paid and non-wage-paid writers follow the exact same rules dictated by Defendant, but when looking at the profiles of the writers on Yelp’s website, there is no distinction made between them, other than a rare “Scout” or “Ambassador” badge for a wage-paid writer. This discretionary method of paying some employees wages, but not others, is in violation of the FLSA.

The plaintiffs haven’t specified how much money they’re seeking, but do point out that Yelp is making a lot of money off their unpaid labor. Will this class action suit be dismissed, too? We’ll keep you posted.

Lily Jeung et al v. Yelp Inc [Internet Archive]

Yelp Reviewers Want to be Paid [Courthouse News]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Soon You Can Use Your Xbox One To Stream Live TV To Your Phone (But Not In The U.S.)

(Al Ibrahim)

The Xbox One gaming console is getting a new function added to it, Microsoft announced today. As of this fall, the late-2013, next-gen, still-new gaming and media device will also function as high-tech rabbit ears for your TV.

Of course, it’s a little more than just being a TV antenna: owners of the Xbox One will soon be able to use their consoles to capture and stream live TV signals to their Windows, Android, or iOS devices. Microsoft made the announcement today during their press conference at the Gamescom event in Germany, The Verge reports.

All it takes is buying and hooking up an Xbox One digital TV tuner adapter. Then that tuner captures the signal, turns it around, and zips it across your home network to a phone or tablet running the Xbox SmartGlass companion app.

American Xbox owners probably shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for this feature, though. That TV tuner accessory that makes it all work won’t even launch until October. And when it does, it’s starting out in five European nations only: Italy, Germany, Spain, and the U.K.

It’s not at all hard to blame Microsoft for treading lightly in the American market, as slinging live broadcast TV signals around on internet networks and connected devices is still a bit of a murky area under U.S. law at the moment.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled against startup streaming service Aereo, finding that the way their tech violated copyright law and constituted illegal retransmission. Broadcasters have also been going after Dish Network’s stream-to-device service Dish Anywhere, but in July a federal appeals court refused to issue an injunction and instead allowed Dish to continue operation until a trial actually takes place.

Microsoft could easily argue that attaching a TV tuner to your Xbox is basically the exact same as attaching one to your PC, which is perfectly legal. So is playing back the video you recorded at home on a different device, like your iPad.

But court battles and legal arguments cost both time and money. For now, American Xbox owners will have to get their broadcast TV fix some other way.

Xbox One will stream TV to your phone or tablet with upcoming update [The Verge]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

Customer Wants Salon To Pay Her $1,000 For Pain And Suffering After A Haircut Gone Wrong

(ashi)

There’s the occasional bad haircut — if you’ve ever founds yourself with a bowl on your head or decided to cut your own bangs, you know what I mean — but one woman is demanding that a local salon give her $1,000 to ease the pain and suffering she’s undergone after she claims a stylist butchered her hair.

The Florida grandmother says her bad ‘do is ruining her life, after the salon at her local Great Clips left her with strips of hair gone, a bald spot and uneven shaping all around.

“I attend church regularly, I have a social life, I can’t go anywhere with my hair looking like this,” she told Local 6 News. “I said, ‘You can’t use the clippers, you need to use the scissors,’ she said, ‘I’m blending.’ She stepped this way and that’s when she took my hair off,” she explains.

The manager of the salon admitted that the haircut is unacceptable, and has offered the customer free hair products, $60 to buy a wig to cover up the damage, free weekly visits and fired the the stylist in question. But they won’t be handing over any more money than that, the salon told Local 6.

That’s not good enough, the customer says — it’s too hot out to wear wigs and she isn’t accustomed to wearing them anyway. She’s hoping instead to just wait out the awfulness.

“I take pride in my hair. My appearance means a lot to me, but now somebody looks at me they might think I’m a man with my hair all cut off like that,” she said.

Central Fla. grandma: ‘Bad haircut is ruining my life’ [Local 6]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Pianist Serenades Travelers At Prague Airport With Impromptu Concert

(YouTube)

You show me someone who’s enjoying sitting at an airport and I will show you a liar. Bearable at most, the experience of traveling is never fun, unless you’ve got something to take your mind off the dreariness of waiting. Travelers passing through Prague’s airport recently had quite the opposite experience, after a pianist connected with an airport piano.

The musician from Lebanon who put on the impromptu concert, playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” tells the Daily Star he’d been in Europe for two weeks without touching a piano, when he and his friend came upon the piano sitting at the airport.

“While we were looking for the gate to board our next flight, my friend stopped me and he pointed toward a piano,” he says, “and so like a baby who has found his mother after getting lost, I ran to it.”

He tickled the ivories through his own versions of the Beethoven piece, as well as what he called a “remix” of the theme from Titanic.

“I have previously tried the Arabic remix once for ‘Für Elise’ at home,” he explained, “but the other remixes I played were [thought up] on the spot.”

Lebanese pianist delights airport crowd in Prague [The Daily Star]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

10 razones para usar Twitter en la búsqueda de #empleo #infografia #infographic #socialmedia

Hola:

Una infografía con 10 razones para usar Twitter en la búsqueda de #empleo. (la infografía se ha creado con Piktochart)

Un saludo

10 razones para usar Twitter en la búsqueda de #empleo

Archivado en: Infografía, Inserción laboral, Redes Sociales, RRHH, Sociedad de la información Tagged: Infografía, Inserción laboral, internet, redes sociales, RRHH, tic, Twitter, Web 2.0.



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Borden Shrink Rays Cheese Package, Forgets To Destroy The Evidence

Elsie the Cow, mascot of Borden brand products, is good at many things. She can give milk, apparently. She looks very pretty, and can smile in her official portraits, even though we’re pretty sure cows can’t actually smile. What she isn’t very good at is covering her tracks. When Borden recently Shrink Rayed their packages of cheese to seven ounces, Elsie forgot to destroy the evidence.

“Borden cheese shrank their bag from 8 ounces to 7 ounces but never fixed the barcode on the back,” explains reader Mark, who bought this presumably delicious package of shredded cheddar cheese. “It still says 8 ounces” on the back, above the barcode. Oops.

Need a zoomed-in view of the new size on the front? You got it.

Meanwhile, on the back of the package…

We get it: it’s easier to shrink quantities slightly than to ask consumers to accept higher prices. Do they have to remind us all of that extra handful of cheese that we’re missing by putting this on the back?

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Yet Another Airline Passenger Arrested For Groping Sleeping Woman

(Sathish J)

To all air travelers, but mostly to my fellow males — What the hell is wrong with some of you? It pains me to write yet another story about a passenger accused of molesting a sleeping woman in the seat next to him, but it apparently happened over the weekend on a United flight from Tokyo to Newark.

According to the AP, the female passenger fell asleep at some point during the 12-hour trip, only to wake up to find the man next to her — who she did not know — touching her breast through her shirt.

She says she also touched her neck and tried to slip his hand down the front of her top. When the woman told him to stop, she says he got up and went to the lavatory.

The female passenger alerted the cabin crew to what had just happened and authorities were waiting for the man when the plane arrived.

The man, who was apparently on his way to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he is a visiting scholar, admitted to the FBI that he’d touched the woman’s chest with his hand.

He did not enter a plea when he appeared before a federal court on Monday, and faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

Here are just a few of the inflight-groping stories we’ve covered in recent years:

•Off-Duty Delta Pilot Accused Of Groping 14-Year-Old Asleep Next To Him On Flight

•United Passenger Guilty Of Sexually Assaulting Sleeping Female Traveler

•Man Prompts JetBlue Flight To Make Emergency Landing Because Groping Pregnant Women Isn’t Okay

•JetBlue Passenger Charged With Putting Hand Under Sleeping Woman’s Skirt

Prosecutors: Man groped woman aboard flight [AP]

FBI Busts Ivy League Scholar In Plane Molest [Smoking Gun]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Restaurant Gives Mom The Boot After She Changes Baby At Table

(The Joy of the Mundane)

A mom in Texas claims that a local pizza restaurant overreacted when it asked her and her kids to leave because she had changed her baby’s diaper on a table, but the eatery’s owners are sticking by their decision.

The mom tells KHOU-TV that she’d gone into the bathroom at the restaurant to change the baby but found no changing table. So rather than take the baby and her two other children, ages 4 and 8, back to the minivan to do the changing, she used their table as a last resort.

“I’ve got my own changing pad, she’s tiny, she fits right here on the chair,” she explains to KHOU. “So I laid her down quickly and quietly changed her diaper.”

The mom claims that no one actually saw her changing the diaper, but employees tell the station a different version of the story. They says the process did not go quickly and that customers were complaining. One diner even texted a manager to gripe about the scene.

“I don’t want to lose all these other customers because they see a dirty diaper,” explains one employee.

The manager says that, “As soon as you start opening the diaper, people start complaining about the smell… Last thing I want is a customer throwing up.”

The family did get their food, but it was given to them in to-go containers.

Meanwhile, the restaurant says it is considering adding changing tables to the restrooms.

[via Eater]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Woman Climbs Airport Fence To Try To Stop Her Cheating Husband From Flying Away

(kevindean)

A word to those hurting hearts out there: We feel your pain, but if you think your husband is flying off to see another woman, there are other ways to go about mending that broken heart other than climbing a 10-foot high barbed wire fence at an airport to try and stop his plane from taking off.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested a woman at the Halifax Stanfield International Airport after she made it over the top of a secure fence and onto the tarmac, reports the Chronicle Herald. She apparently believed her cheating husband was on the plane and was heading to another woman’s arms.

The woman first reportedly went to the counter to ask the airline to stop the plane in order to keep her husband from leaving to see another woman, said one employee. When that didn’t work, she drove toward the hanger and hopped the fence.

“She ended up going onto the bigger runway and she was essentially wandering around there,” the employee said. “She was literally going to try to stop the plane.”

Workers managed to nab the woman and get her into a truck, keeping her there even after she opened the door of the truck and started shouting. The Mounties won’t be charging her with anything.

Airport officials had to reroute another small plane that had landed and moved onto the taxiway, after air traffic controllers spotted the woman on the fence.

She had several minor cuts as a result of her climb and was taken to the hospital, an RCMP spokesman said, though her husband wasn’t a passenger on that plane in the first place. Officials contacted him to make sure.

An airport security spokesman says this type of incident hasn’t happened before, that he can recall.

“I’ve been there (for more than) eight … years and this is the first incident of its kind that I’m aware of,” he said. “The fact that she was seen by the (navigation) tower very soon after she got on the airfield … is important in that they were able to ensure that no aircraft ever came near her.”

He adds that he thinks their system is secure, though his team is going to review the situation to spot any issues.

“We don’t believe that there are (any gaps),” he said. “But the details of how she got over that fence will be reviewed just to see if there’s anything else we would need to do in that area to ensure the airfield is as secure as we can make it.”

Woman scales fence at Halifax airport [Chronicle Herald]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Cursos INTEF: convocatoria Septiembre

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