Journal

The ride-hailing app is rewarding Lyft drivers with affordable car rental rates, cheaper gas, and speedy cash transfers.

Lyft, the perennial Avis to Uber’s Hertz, is introducing a number of perks for its team of drivers. On Thursday, the ride-sharing service announced a set of new partnerships with Hertz and Shell’s Fuel Rewards program, along with expedited payments to drivers. Lyft’s new “Express Pay” feature offers instant payment to drivers who reach certain benchmarks. According to Lyft, drivers who earn $50 will be able to receive instant account deposits via payments company Stripe.

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Finding someone to help you navigate your career path is crucial to success, but make sure to avoid these mistakes.

Now, don’t get me wrong—mentorship is one of the biggest keys to success. But believe it or not, there is a right and a wrong way to seek out a mentor and build a mutually beneficial relationship. In many cases, the best mentoring happens without the formal label “mentoring.” Nobody asked anybody to go steady, nobody sent a note saying, “Would you be my mentor?” followed by yes, no, and maybe boxes to check. Questions were asked, thoughts were shared, and advice was given. Voilà, an effortless mentor relationship is born.

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If you have the right conversations now, you can raise your rates and keep your best clients, too.

If you’re one of the 53 million freelance workers in the U.S., no one’s going to decide to give you a raise. If you want to earn more, you’ll need to negotiate with your clients for a rate increase.

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Sometimes you just have to make everyone uncomfortable in order to achieve your goals.

Andrea Cutright thinks it’s important to be a jerk at work—at least sometimes. She believes that it’s a skill you can and should develop as you get further along in your career, in the same way you would hone negotiation and team building.

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Snooze your messages, get to know your contacts better, cut down on junk mail, and more.

Ah, email. They said social media would kill it off, but still it remains. It’s arguably the sturdiest nerd of the tech world.

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Maybe you should reconsider that new iPhone.

The Fairphone is a modular handset designed with repairability and ethical sourcing of its materials as headline features. It sold 60,000 units. Amazingly, for what sounds like a nerd-phone, almost half of those buyers had never owned a smartphone before.

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Do re mi fa so qw er ty.

Last year, we covered Jono Brandel and Lullatone‘s addictive site Patatap, which turns keyboard strokes into sounds and animations. Now they’re are back at it with Typatone, an app that turns text into a lovely little xylophone melody.

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What happened this week? Here’s our quiz for October 9, 2015.

Did you follow the news this week? Research says that one of the best ways to solidify new information is to be tested on it. Here’s a chance to bolster your knowledge of current events—and earn a special emoji badge.

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Six months after introducing Square Marketing, the company has data that shows its digital coupons increase sales.

If you pay attention to news coming from Square, you know that it’s been a long time since all it did was process credit-card payments using its itty-bitty swiper. The expansion of its small-business services began in earnest back in 2012, with an app that transformed an iPad into a cash register. In May 2014, it turned receipts into miniature customer surveys and started fronting money to small businesses that they could repay a little bit at a time from their Square transactions. In April of this year, it launched Square Marketing, a service that lets businesses send digital offers such as discounts to their customers. And in August, it started to help businesses schedule appointments.

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In an interview, Tesla CEO Musk called Apple the “Tesla graveyard.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk had some fighting words for Apple in an interview published last month: Speaking to German newspaper Handelsblatt, Musk said he wasn’t threatened by Apple’s play for the electric car market. He also addressed rumors that Apple is hiring away prominent Tesla engineers, arguing instead that those employees were let go by Tesla.

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