Michelle Ross

Sometimes manufacturers have no choice but to hire unskilled labor, but how do you go about looking for the right candidates who’ve got potential? And once you’ve got new recruits, how do you train them? We’ve got four realistic strategies for you: apprenticeships, returnships, public-private partnerships and knowledge sharing technology.

What if we told you there are thousands of workers looking for the kind of jobs you offer? They want work that’s not only reliable but offers a career path, exactly what manufacturing provides. Where can you find all these great workers? Take a look at our list of 7 unexpected types of workers you can hire to kick the labor shortage.

Monitoring equipment doesn’t have to be a headache. If your team is ready to tackle condition-based maintenance, you will need sensors, cameras and other analytical devices to predict equipment failures. Have you heard of these 8 innovative tools that you can use to collect data on your machines and cut back on downtime costs?

Move over millennials, AARP has its own tech innovation lab. They’re using VR technology to fight loneliness in seniors and relieve its harmful health effects. We’ll spotlight AARP’s solution, Alcove, and their partner, Rendever. Both build products to help seniors reconnect with family, memories and their old adventurous selves. We’ll also discuss how companies could use augmented reality (AR) for seniors.

Quick tips to help you command the screen, not the stage. Public speaking is a whole new ballgame now that most talks have moved online. Conferences, summits, expos, trade shows, seminars, workshops, you name it, are all now located on your laptop. That means the speaker, the person inside the screen, the person that could be you, needs to also adapt.

Get to know the Ario team. Next up is Eric Hedden who also loves mindfulness meditation and woodworking. He designed his first computer animation when he was five-years-old on an Amiga 1000, happens to live one mile from the first house he’s ever lived in, and has performed songs at cathedrals in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Italy. One cool chap.

The tournament is back. In this round of AR vs. VR, we’re hopping into the beer industry. Although breweries’ attempts to blend augmented reality (AR) into their labeling/packaging pale in comparison to wineries, they have really pulled into the virtual reality (VR) space with some crafty experiences. In this batch, we’re looking at the different ways breweries use immersive reality. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beer holder, so try some of these experiences for yourselves.

Get to know the Ario team. Next up, Raj Sathianarayanan who we recruited from Boston and convinced to move on down to Norfolk, Virginia, for some warmer weather and beach vibes. Raj has visited over 20 countries (goal is 50!) and is mixed handed. For strength he uses his right hand, and for precision he uses his left. If he didn't become a programmer, his next choice would’ve been to study astrophysics.

Developers are everywhere. Your life wouldn’t be what it is today without their fingerprints on a software system you take for granted. You wake up to an alarm on your phone. Dev. You find your podcast app and play the morning news while you dress. Dev. How do they do it? If you’re a nondev and are never planning to be a dev, we’ve broken down the steps to their creative process in a quick, digestible way.

We meant to issue this in a press release, but we were busy curating our playlists. Ario would like to announce ten new accidental hires. They were originally hired for ops or design or bizdev, but are transitioning to the roles of disc jockeys. With this new responsibility, they will be wearing ironic trucker hats, swapping out their keyboards for turntables, and reporting to the CMO (Chief Music Officer). They will not actually be doing any of these things, because we’re joking. In all seriousness, we did put together our working playlists, so if you’re looking for something new to listen to, we’ve got you covered.

Are you a developer pro? How about a connoisseur of crosswords? Try and complete our dev jargon puzzle without scrolling down for the answers.

Many baby boomers do not want to retire when they turn 65. Pushing out baby boomers means pushing out years of expertise and acquired knowledge. While younger workers are typically cheaper and less susceptible to illness, they have underdeveloped skills. There’s a way to avoid this conundrum by bringing boomers back into the workforce with different roles.

3D Modeling has been adopted by many industries from architecture to product design, but one industry embraced it early on to tell stories: film. We’ve recounted the history of how 3D modeling found its way into movies, from Pixar to the Disney empire.

Learning a new language can be a tedious exercise, and traditional textbook/lecture methods have substantial shortcomings. You can memorize words, spellings, and sentence structures, but great recall doesn’t mean great improv skills. Mondly VR is there for you to practice, and Google Translate is there for you when you can’t.

A revolution is a rotation. A replacement. A radical change. So what does that mean in context of the industrial revolutions? We’ve quizzed family and friends on the industrial revolutions and discovered most people can’t remember what the different revolutions signified. There’s no need to go back school, we’ve summarized an abridged history of the four industrial revolutions. Strap in. Time and tech move fast.

We know that you are just dying to hear what we’re reading. Probably not, but we will over share anyway. This past month, we’ve discovered some compelling stories on the Internet and compiled our favorite April reads (and products). Although the coronavirus seems to permeate every subject, we saw fascinating new tech products completely unrelated to COVID-19 and interesting tech developments charging through the pandemic.

The transition from working in an office or facility to working from home is always jarring. For the industrial workplace—warehouses, factories, and power plants—the concept of continuing production while working remotely is so absurd it seems like a farce. Fortunately, the digital revolution has provided humanity with several tools to supplement remote work and make this modus operandi highly functional. Here’s a compilation of our thoughts on time management, security, communication, and augmented reality (AR) softwares to help your company maintain operations when working remotely.

Scientists are using VR to study coronavirus proteins. Doctors are using mixed reality to visualize organ damage and alert the public of coronavirus misconceptions. Newspapers, social media, and search engines have even jumped on board to educate the public on social distancing and COVID-19 statistics, facts, and guidelines. Take a look at the novel and virtuous projects developed by hospitals, academic institutions, and various media platforms.

Our very own Nate Fender was invited to speak in the webinar “A New Reality: AR/VR Transforming Collaboration.” The event was hosted by Alley, an accelerator program working with entrepreneurs, Fortune 500s, media partners, and corporate partners to “Create Good Change” where substance is valued over style. The webinar featured five panelists, and we’ve pulled our favorite answers to the various questions and topics posed.

Get to know the Ario team. Next up, we have Robert Chrzanowski, our Senior Android Developer. He's a big Texas Pete fan and our resident Bayesian statistics guru. Find out more about this robotics connoisseur as he answers his 10 non-work related questions.

A sanitary facility has become even more imperative since the spread of COVID-19, and enforcing proper cleaning and disinfecting procedures is crucial to maintaining production and saving lives. To help, we’ve delineated the appropriate cleaning methods for hard surfaces, soft surfaces, laundry, air, mobile devices, and yourself. Moreover, we’ve consolidated tips and checklists to keep your company in line to flatten the corona curve.

In this series, we're walking through some of the best AR experiences we can find no matter the industry. We covered home improvement in our last article, but are moving on to wine this time around. With everyone stuck at home, we could all certainly use some entertainment—so we've ranked our top six AR wine labels, plus a few honorable mentions.

Get to know the Ario team - starting with our 3D modeling, graphic design slaying, movie-loving Creative Director. He's answered 10 non-work-related questions, telling you more about himself than just his favorite hex code.

Senior iOS developer, Brett Keck, shares his favorite podcasts and dives into why he’s hooked on them. With over 4,000 episodes across the 16 podcasts with themes ranging from Star Wars to trivia to improv comedy and tech - there's certainly plenty to choose from.

Both AR and VR are becoming more mainstream - but are you familiar with how various industries are implementing these up-and-coming technologies? In this series, Ario will walk you through some of the best AR and VR experiences we can find - starting with home improvement.

Augmented reality is older than your grandparents. It has a “net worth” far surpassing the richest billionaire in the world. And, it’s undergone more makeovers and wardrobe transformations than any performer you can name. Augmented reality is an enigma with a future that has yet to be written. We’ve compiled a short quiz on the history and current events of augmented reality to put your knowledge to the test. How well do you know augmented reality?‍

The Oxford English Dictionary is the queen bee of dictionaries, the A-list gatekeeper who decides which words make it and which words bury and die under incoming novelty. So dear Oxford, we’d like to throw our hat into the ring for the Oxford’s New Words List 2020.

We don’t know if you’ve heard, but we won first place in the Verizon “Built on 5G Challenge” to prepare our product on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband. Thank you, yes, we are thrilled. Yet when we told our family and friends, we promptly discovered most people do not really know what 5G means. We played our own version of MythBusters, and asked friends in the coworking space a few questions about the mysterious 5G.

The theme of Distributech this year was clean energy and decreasing the utility industry’s carbon footprint. A few Ario team members attended the conference in San Antonio, Texas, to show off our platform and observe innovations in electricity transmission and distribution, particularly those advancements addressing climate change. The trip allowed us to reflect on our energy consumption at Ario and how we reduce our carbon footprint.

Our experience at CES 2020: exhibiting, our favorite tech finds and team retreating.