Hasta La Gadget!

Uber has been the subject of a lot of bad press recently and it appears that the company is trying to divert attention from that by revealing some big numbers that show how its business performed last year as far as the financials are concerned. It has taken the rather unusual step of releasing financial figures to highlight just how much its business grew in 2016.

Financial figures provided to Bloomberg reveal that Uber saw its gross bookings for 2016 cross $20 billion, more than doubling when compared to the previous year.

The company’s net revenues for the year, which is the total revenue after drivers have been given their cut, came out to be $6.5 billion for 2016. The company also burned through $2.8 billion in 2016 which excludes the China business that it sold last year.

Uber CEO previously said that the company was losing $1 billion per year in China before it sold the China business to local rival Didi Chuxing in August. If you look at its growth on a quarterly basis, losses were kept constant in the second half of the year as its business continued to grow at a healthy pace.

“We’re fortunate to have a healthy and growing business, giving us the room to make the changes we know are needed on management and accountability, our culture and organization, and our relationship with drivers,” said Rachel Holt, Uber’s regional general manager for U.S. and Canada.

Uber Burned Through $2.8 Billion Last Year , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

If you happen to own an iPad 4 and it’s damaged, taking it to an Apple Store for servicing might land you an iPad Air 2 as a replacement. That’s the news going around this weekend, thanks to the discovery of a company memo which states that an iPad Air 2 may be given as a substitute replacement due to … Continue reading

When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success—IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
• Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
• Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional Intelligence, IQ, and Personality Are Different

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply can’t predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren’t born with it.

Personality is the final piece of the puzzle. It’s the stable “style” that defines each of us. Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can’t be used to predict emotional intelligence. Also like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn’t change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.

Emotional Intelligence Predicts Performance

How much of an impact does emotional intelligence have on your professional success? The short answer is: a lot! It’s a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous result. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58 percent of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts most everything you do and say each day.

Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90 percent of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20 percent of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.

Naturally, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence make more money—an average of $29,000 more per year than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence. The link between emotional intelligence and earnings is so direct that every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven’t yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren’t tied closely to emotional intelligence.

You Can Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

The communication between your emotional and rational “brains” is the physical source of emotional intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However, first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

Plasticity is the term neurologists use to describe the brain’s ability to change. As you discover and practice new emotional intelligence skills, the billions of microscopic neurons lining the road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain branch off small “arms” (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures it’s easier to kick a new behavior into action in the future.

As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, your brain builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it. And just as your brain reinforces the use of new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors will die off as you learn to limit your use of them.

Want to learn more about emotional intelligence? Check out my book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

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Eight months after a 27-year-old jogger was brutally assaulted and killed near her mother’s Massachusetts home, authorities say they have arrested her suspected killer.

DNA taken from Vanessa Marcotte’s hands after her Aug. 7 attack in Princeton was found to match that of a Worcester man who was placed under arrest on Friday, prosecutors announced this weekend.

Angelo Colon-Ortiz, 31, was eyed as a suspect in Marcotte’s death by pure chance after a trooper saw him driving a vehicle matching the descriptions of a man witnesses saw, Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early, Jr. said at a Saturday press conference.

The trooper jotted the vehicle’s license plate number down on his hand. He then looked up the plate’s address and visited the driver at his home. Colon-Ortiz then voluntarily submitted a DNA swab when requested. Without that swab, authorities said that Colon-Ortiz’s DNA was not in their criminal database.

“We’re very confident that we have Vanessa Marcotte’s killer,” Early said of the test results.

“Over the last eight-plus months, seasons changed, holidays came and passed, and Ms. Marcotte’s family waited and waited and hoped,” State Police Col. Richard D. McKeon said at the press conference.

“As the months passed, the DA’s office and Princeton Police and state troopers never stopped working. No one ever stopped thinking about Ms. Marcotte and how we could solve this case. We never lost faith that this day would come.”

Colon-Ortiz, who is scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday, was arrested on charges of aggravated assault and battery and assault with attempt to rape, though more charges, including murder, are expected. He is being held on $10 million bail, Early said.

Marcotte was working for Google in New York City when she went to visit her mother. Her family, in a statement obtained by the Boston Globe, called working for Google “her dream job.”

“After eight long months, we’re able to take the first step toward justice for Vanessa,” they said, responding to news of a suspect’s arrest. “She was a beautiful, intelligent, and generous young woman whose passion for giving back to the community will always be remembered.”

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By Séamus Bellamy

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