| Good afternoon! If you look closely at today's newsletter, you'll notice that a few things look a little different. (A good different.) We've made this e-mail easier to read and quicker to load on your phone, and there's more good stuff to come. But the best parts have stayed the same. You'll still find the day's biggest business stories mixed with a healthy dose of surprising reports to talk about at dinner, like motorcycle touchscreens and why you shouldn't necessarily sit next to the funniest person at work. |
| Here are today's top stories... | | Where you sit matters. The perfect office floor plan involves sitting almost on top of other productive workers, according to new research from Harvard Business School. Sitting within 25 feet of "toxic" workers can lead to poor results, which researchers call the "spillover effect"—people at nearby desks rub off on each other. This might be the very reason many people are against open office plans. To optimize efficiency, companies should seat employees according to the type of worker they are, the research found, like grouping people with similar productivity levels. You should still grab a pair of headphones, though, because the open floor plan isn't going away anytime soon. | | Travis Kalanick waves the white flag. Uber's fierce rival in Asia, Didi Chuxing, Didi, is buying the company's China operations, bringing an end to a bruising battle between the two companies for leadership in the country's fast-growing ride-hailing market. Didi's valuation after the deal will be $35 billion, said people familiar with the matter, asking not to be named because the details aren't public. In the end, Didi proved too resourceful—and too well-connected—for the ride-sharing giant to dethrone. | | Tesla's SolarCity deal faces a bumpy road ahead. The company's $2.6 billion offer for SolarCity is wiping out stock awards given to the cousins of Elon Musk, the largest individual shareholder in SolarCity. Lyndon and Peter Rive, the chief executive and chief technology officer of SolarCity, were granted combined stock options of about $128 million in the solar company in September. But that's not the only thing on Musk's mind today. The CEO may have more work to do to convince his own shareholders to go along with the $2.6 billion proposed merger. Shares in both companies slumped after he announced that Tesla had agreed to pay about $300 million less for the company than initially proposed. The revised terms come after criticism from Tesla investors and on the same day SolarCity lowered its forecast for 2016. | | Most Americans want free college, but not higher taxes. More than 60 percent of Americans support debt-free university tuition, but 48 percent say they would not be willing to pay more in federal taxes to support free college, according to a July survey of 1,000 American adults conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for consumer financial company Bankrate Inc. Given that millennials face a staggering amount of student loan debt, it's unsurprising that 79 percent of them said they would support free college; only 49 percent of baby boomers surveyed felt the same way. The split over the issue also extended to political lines, with an overwhelming number of Democrats supporting it compared to only 33 percent of Republicans. | | Brace yourself: Motorcycles are getting touchscreens. This week, Polaris unveiled a new 7-inch touchscreen system called "Ride Command" that will come with Indian Motorcycle's new Chieftain and Roadmaster bikes. The touchscreen will provide directions, sync with your smartphone and tell you where the nearest gas station is when the tank is low. Similar software already exists, but to many, the idea seems flawed: Motorcycle riders are already 26 times more likely to die in a crash than someone in a car. | |
| | #Blessed | | | The social media companies are doing something that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago: dangling advertising revenue to lure away popular Internet personalities like Ricky Dillon from YouTube. They want to balance the most-watched videos with inoffensive ads that will make money for everyone, including themselves—and they're going to great lengths to accomplish that goal. | |
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