Hasta La Gadget!

Starbucks and Spotify are teaming up to to build a music ecosystem across retail stores. By joining forces with the popular streaming service, the giant coffee chain hopes to create an experience that will benefit loyal customers, particularly those …

Looks like Mercedes Benz is joining the league of BMW and Volkswagen, the auto giant has announced its own app for the Apple Watch. The main function of the application would be to help the Benz owners to navigate easily.

The users would just require to enter destination on their Watch or iPhone and it will be transmitted to the internal navigation system of the vehicle. As soon as the user step out of the car, the navigation shifts to the Apple Watch to guide him/her to the exact point while they are walking.

By using the companion app on the Apple Watch or the iPhone, users will have an ease to choose the device they would like the navigation information on. The app is not just about directions, it also provides users with handful of other information. Users are also provided with information such as fuel level, maintenance codes and odometer readings, range, all that will be displayed on their wrists.

The application has been designed by Benz’s Silicon Valley R&D center and it is dubbed for a release sometime later this year and it will be compatible with Benz’s C-class and S-Class cars that come equipped with COMAND online navigational systems. It’s compatibility will be stretched to other Benz models too, maybe sometime after the launch.

Mercedes Announces MB Companion App For Apple Watch , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Very rarely am I accused of saying something solely to make someone feel better. I encourage the use of tough love every chance I get. When someone who is considering a position managing people or human resources tells me “I want to do this because I like helping people,” I want to tell them to consider a different option.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an ogre. I like people and I do want to be helpful. I particularly like the people I work with at 2U. To really help them, I know I can never tell them something solely to make them feel better. Among the best leadership advice I have received is to tell employees what they need to hear, especially when they don’t want to hear it.

As a leader, particularly as a new leader, people often believe that their employees will work harder for a leader they like. Where they are mistaken is in the reasons leaders are well liked. It’s a blend of encouragement and honest feedback. The best compliment a leader can receive is “I always know where I stand with you.”

Warm and Fuzzy

The problem with warm and fuzzy is the fuzzy part. That tends to lead to soft language which gives a false impression that things are better than they really are. Warm and direct is what you want. “I know this is hard to hear but” is a good opening for a frank conversation.

I once had an employee come to me after a conversation with his manager. He was confused. He laughed nervously as he told me he was sure he was either about to get fired or about to get a raise but he wasn’t sure which one. Having spoken with the manager, I knew it was the former.

I asked him to tell me about the conversation they had. The manager told the employee what he was doing well and said “it would really help me lobby for you if you could improve in some areas.” The manager did tell the employee what those improvements needed to be. What he left out was what he was lobbying for and why lobbying was necessary. The employee admitted to me he was afraid to ask.

When I went to the manager, he felt the conversation had gone well. He thought the employee clearly knew that immediate changes had to be made. I asked a simple question, “Did you tell him that his current performance is bad and if he doesn’t make the changes, he’s in danger of losing his job.” The response? “Not in so many words.” If you haven’t told the employee in “so many words,” you haven’t told him in any words.

Framing the conversation

People want to know what’s expected of them and how they measure up to those expectations. Failing at your job and not even knowing it is the worst place you can be. When talking to your employees start with the expectations and how success against those are measured. If they are meeting or exceeding those expectations in some areas, point that out.

Then comes the hard part.

“Let’s talk about where you’re falling short.” Be direct and specific in the feedback. Leave no room for interpretation. State how you’re going to be evaluating improvement. Define the standard you expect and that anything short of that means getting fired.

If someone is in danger of getting fired for performance, say it simply. Be clear about a time frame in which you need to see improvement and the fact that at any point in that time frame you may make a decision either way. If there are metrics you will be tracking, state what they are and who constitutes improved performance in them.

If you’re a leader with an employee who is failing and that employee doesn’t know it, you’re failing as the leader, not matter how much they like you.

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CHICAGO — In a move that shows why Chicago’s called “clout city,” United Airlines may have used its political influence to strong-arm Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) into reversing his stance on an air-travel measure he previously supported.

The Open Skies policy allows international airlines to fly to the U.S. without any governmental interference in establishing routes, airfare and other operational factors, as a means of promoting economic competition, tourism and trade. Over the last two years, several Middle Eastern airlines, including Emirates and Qatar Airways, have signed Open Skies agreements with the city of Chicago to offer nonstop flights between Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Dubai and Doha. Emanuel has heralded the presence of the airlines, as they contribute to his desire to mold Chicago into a larger economic force and a more “global” and “world-class” city. Part of this involves ambitious goals to increase international tourism to the city.

“Chicago is pleased to welcome Qatar Airways’ world-class service to our global gateway, O’Hare International Airport. This new international air service creates additional economic opportunities, increases tourism to our city and strengthens Chicago’s cultural and business connection to the world,” Emanuel said in a press release in 2013.

Likewise, he championed the arrival of Emirates last year as another addition to Chicago’s “global connectivity.”

But this month, Emanuel appeared to abruptly pull his support from these airlines. In a letter to the U.S. Departments of State, Transportation and Commerce, he called out the Middle Eastern airlines for allegedly violating the Open Skies agreements, saying that their governments unfairly subsidize the airlines. The letter went on to argue that the subsidies provide too much competition to American airline companies — including United, which is headquartered in Chicago and has its largest hub at O’Hare.

“In the past, I welcomed the expansion of Qatar and Emirates to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and while I continue to encourage international airlines to bring their flights and passengers to our city, I have serious concerns about the unfair government subsidies and benefits the Middle East carriers have received and the impact on the U.S. airlines,” Emanuel wrote in the letter.

Emanuel, who was sworn in for a second term on Monday after facing a runoff election, has received almost $140,000 in campaign donations from United since 2011.

In addition to its political clout, United is a major contributor to Chicago’s economy, employing over 14,000 people in the city, including in its downtown corporate office and its O’Hare operations office. United is also a member of Emanuel’s World Business Chicago, a collaboration between the city and Chicago-based corporations to promote economic globalization.

However, the company is angling toward a larger presence in Houston. Last week, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport broke ground on an expansion to the airport, supported by United. Ever since United merged with Houston-based Continental Airlines in 2010, the company has started basing more of its major flights in Houston.

Emanuel’s office and United could not be reached for comment.

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In the real world, the Fourth Amendment is often irrelevant. That’s the provocative claim that Radley Balko makes in a recent blog for the Washington Post. Balko focuses on two recent stories involving police conduct that seems to defy the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment rulings. One involves DUI checkpoints that appear to have less to do with preventing drunk driving than with generating revenue from minor traffic violations; another involves a frightening and brutal encounter between two border patrol agents and a young woman who got shot with a stun gun after asserting her Fourth Amendment rights. Balko’s conclusion: “When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the law as it’s laid out in Supreme Court opinions is often quite a bit different than the law on the ground.”

What can be done to ensure that police officers are held accountable for Fourth Amendment violations? The only way to ensure police officers are appropriately sanctioned for violating people’s rights and victims are made whole is consistent judicial engagement. What follows are three proposals for making the law on the ground more consistent with the law of the land.

1.) Make the government prove consent

The Supreme Court has held that police officers may question and search citizens without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, so long as the encounter is consensual and a reasonable person would feel free to leave. Courts routinely find consent when officers use request-language (“May I search your backpack?”) rather than demand-language (“Drop the backpack and raise your hands”) and people comply with those “requests.”

But such “consent” is often more fiction than reality. In a recent case, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a young man confronted by several officers in tactical gear and asked whether he had a weapon was not “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes. As Judge Janice Rogers Brown pointed out a separate opinion that accepted but criticized applicable precedent, “viewing such an encounter as consensual is roughly equivalent to finding the latest Sasquatch sighting credible.” Despite the Supreme Court’s insistence in Terry v. Ohio (1968) that stop-and-frisk searches must be supported with specific facts suggesting that the subject is armed and dangerous, Judge Brown explained, “officers frequently construe citizens’ varied reactions to their probes as rationalizing a Terry stop.” That is to say, had the young man refused to respond to the officers’ “request” to engage in a “consensual” conversation about whether he was carrying an illegal handgun, he knew he would be forcibly searched: “The choice [people] face is to ‘voluntarily’ acquiesce to the officers’ request or to have any reaction to the officers’ inquiries… serve as the factual predicate justifying a Terry search.”

Judges should not perpetuate the fiction of consensual encounters that are plainly anything but. Rather, they should place the burden on the government to prove that individuals have voluntarily consented to an encounter with the police, instead of inferring it from compliance with “requests” that are perceived as (and in fact are) demands, backed by force.

2.) Don’t let exceptions swallow the rule

The Supreme Court has determined that the Fourth Amendment’s ordinary requirement of individualized suspicion does not apply in certain, limited contexts. These exceptions are questionable in their own right, but they are more problematic still when they are extended beyond their intended scope, and judges must ensure that they remain limited.

In a recent case, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the district court for the District of Columbia provided a blueprint for doing so. The Supreme Court has held that routine border checks can be conducted without probable cause and without a warrant. Pushing the envelope of this exception, federal agents intercepted a Korean businessman on the jetway of his return flight and seized his laptop computer, which they hoped would contain evidence of an export-control violation. In a subsequent prosecution, Kim sought to have the evidence suppressed because the agents had no warrant or even probable cause to go trolling through his hard drive. Judge Jackson properly recognized that this was not a routine border check but rather an effort to use the border-check exception to facilitate “a fishing expedition to discover what Kim might have been up to.” She granted Kim’s motion to suppress the evidence.

3.) Abolish qualified immunity

The federal law that allows citizens to sue public officials for constitutional violations, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, unambiguously states that every person acting under color of law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” (Emphasis added.) But in Pierson v. Ray (1967), the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense and thereby escape being held personally liable for damages, even if they actually violated a person’s constitutional rights. This judge-made doctrine has metastasized over time, with the result that police misconduct enjoys not only immunity from liability but, all too often, meaningful judicial scrutiny as well.

Although the Supreme Court has reconsidered its interpretations of Section 1983 in the past, it has not shown any interest in revisiting qualified immunity. But it should–our constitutional order cannot tolerate rights without remedies. At the very least, the Court should revisit its holding that municipalities are not vicariously liable for their employees’ misconduct the way other employers are. Getting rid of this glaring double standard would encourage municipalities to be more proactive in discouraging police misconduct while making the costs of that conduct more visible to the public.

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