Fast Company

Fast Company is the world’s leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, world changing ideas, and design. Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company i

Fast Company2 min read
Search and Destroy
I LOVE MY JOB, BUT IT COMES WITH AN UNSETTLING OCCUpational hazard: editing stories about technologies that threaten my own professional existence. Such was the experience of working on senior editor Mark Sullivan’s story on Perplexity, one of the bu
Fast Company6 min read
1 podcasting
JEFF BEZOS IS A BUSY man. But in December, he found the time—two hours and 11 minutes, to be exact—to talk with Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and host of the Lex Fridman Podcast. Fridman’s podcast is the most popular in the technology category, a
Fast Company2 min read
3 work Life
ADVERTISING VETERAN NANCY REYES HAS SPENT THE PAST 25 years helping some of the world’s biggest companies, including Google, H&M, and Frito-Lay, connect with consumers. Reyes has long championed inclusivity, founding Circle of Women, which gives lead
Fast Company2 min readSmall Business & Entrepreneurs
A Big Bank Thinks Small And Fast
Large institutions are hardly known for nimble strategies, large financial institution even less so. But as digital technologies and customer expectations rapidly evolve, the smart players in the financial services industry are getting a handle on th
Fast Company2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
AI "Cabin Crew" Marks An Aviation First
Dealing with travel agents (remember them?) is a bittersweet memory. You enjoyed the convenience of someone handling your travel’s boring and mundane parts—flight connections, seat select ion, and even meet and greet. The trusted air travel advisor w
Fast Company2 min read
A Proactive Approach To Talent Development
Manufacturers of electric vehicles (EV) and semiconductors should have every reason to be optimistic. Their products are in demand, and the industries have benefitted from favorable tax breaks and billions of dollars in federal spending. But they are
Fast Company8 min readCrime & Violence
5 culture Wars
• NO STARTUP FOUNDER likes to learn they’re being sued. But when Elizabeth Gore received an email this past summer letting her know that her company was being targeted, it was who was suing her that really made her blanch: Stephen Miller. Miller made
Fast Company2 min readChemistry
An Automated Approach To Saving Lives
For patients with serious ailments—ranging from cancerto autoimmune diseases—access to cell therapies can mean the difference between life and death. But since cell therapies are created for each patient individually, they’re incredibly difficult to
Fast Company2 min read
Keeping The Public Safe In The Digital Age
Since its founding in 1936, Consumer Reports has been a tireless advocate for the American public. And it is a healthy spirit of innovation that now drives the Yonkers, New York–based nonprofit to continue with its scrupulous product testing, dogged
Fast Company2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Improving Access To The Law
Last year, a New York City–based law firm, after having pored over thousands of documents in a complex employment discrimination case, turned to Casetext—a San Francisco–based tech startup now part of Thomson Reuters—and its remarkable AI-powered leg
Fast Company10 min read
6 media
“AS A NEWS ORGANIZATION,” SAID CESAR Conde, who oversees NBC News, “the biggest currency that we have is trust.” Trust is earned over time, of course, and a visitor traversing the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza can viscerally feel its accrual. The Mid
Fast Company2 min read
Stopping Bleeding Instantly
Severe blood loss, whether the result of an accident or a complication during surgery, can result in death within minutes. An easy-to-use technology that can instantly stop severe bleeding would have the potential to save countless lives. The Brookly
Fast Company6 min read
4 branding
TWO MONTHS AFTER THE SUPREME COURT overturned Roe v. Wade, Julie Schott launched emergency-contraception brand Julie. The timing was fortuitous. Though morning-after pills have been widely available since 1977, the renewed focus on reproductive right
Fast Company2 min read
What A Drugmaker Can Learn From Patients
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a form of dementia that affects the parts of the brain governing memory, thought, and language. It afflicts an estimated 6.7 million Americans—and is incredibly difficult to treat. The failure rate for clinical trials for
Fast Company2 min read
Growing Vegetables, Cultivating Minds
Children in marginalized communities often lack access to healthy foods, especially fresh fruits, and vegetables. Poor nutrition, in turn, has significant negative impacts on a child’s health and ability to focus in school. Learning and academic achi
Fast Company6 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
7 creator Economy
IT’S 1 A.M., AND MY FANFIX INBOX HAS LIT up with a notification from one of the influencers I follow. “hey babe, are you busy? do you have time for me? we can chit chat:).” The sender, @kaylavoid—a 19-year-old TikTok influencer and YouTuber who speci
Fast Company2 min read
Expanding Access To Healthcare
Navigating the healthcare system can be an overwhelming experience. Whether it’s finding a trusted doctor, tracking down medical records and test results, or making sense of bewildering insurance forms, taking care of your health too often means jump
Fast Company14 min read
Nike's olympic trial
IT’S GRAY SEASON IN BEAVERTON, OREGON. WET AND DANK, JUST WARM ENOUGH NOT TO BE SNOWING, THE MOMENT IN MARCH WHEN EVERYONE WEARILY AGREES THAT WINTER IS SUPPOSED TO BE OVER. SERENA’S TENNIS COURT SITS EMPTY, SPECKLED WITH A FEW DOZEN FLUORESCENT BALL
Fast Company2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Using AI To Help Reduce Airline Emissions
GOOGLE THE THIN CLOUDS THAT STREAK BEHIND AIRPLANES, called contrails, are a sizable source of global warming, responsible for more than a third of aviation’s climate impact. But slightly changing a plane’s flight path can help avoid the phenomenon,
Fast Company2 min read
Keeping Medicines Cool During Shipping
EMBER LIFESCIENCES ••• HEALTH PRODUCTS EVERY YEAR, THE PHARMACEUTIcal industry loses $35 billion because of failures in the cold chain: the process by which medicines, vaccines, and other temperaturesensitive materials are shipped. Often this involve
Fast Company2 min read
Decontaminating Seeds To Reduce Crop Losses
CLEAN CROP TECHNOLOGIES ••• AGRICULTURE STARTING IN 1995, FARMERS IN CALIFORNIA’S SALInas and Pajaro Valleys began losing thousands of acres of their lettuce crops each year. The culprit? Contamination among spinach seeds that spread to other crops.
Fast Company2 min readPoverty & Homelessness
Raising Women Out Of Poverty
MADE FOR A WOMAN ••• EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, A ND AFRICA IN MADAGASCAR, ONE OF THE poorest countries in the world, those on the margins of society struggle to break out of poverty. But fashion startup Made for a Woman opened a workshop in the capital, A
Fast Company2 min read
New Buildings From 100% Recycled Concrete
HOLCIM ••• GENERAL EXCELLENCE WHEN A GROUP OF AGING APARTment buildings from the 1960s were recently torn down outside Paris, the demolition waste wasn’t thrown out. Instead, it was reused for two of the seven buildings in a new 220-unit housing comp
Fast Company2 min read
Transforming Pavement Into A Park
MIKYOUNG KIM DESIGN ••• URBAN DESIGN A FEW MILES SOUTH OF DOWNTOWN HOUSTON, ON the site of what once was a Texas-size massive parking lot, a transformative urban development is taking shape. Helix Park is a 37-acre life-sciences campus that’s being b
Fast Company2 min read
A 3d Scanned And Printed Shoe
VIVOBAREFOOT ••• CONSUMER PRODUCTS EVERY FOOT IS DIFFERENT, BUT THE modern shoe is a mass-produced object, full of assumptions about optimal fit. And so every piece of footwear is something of a compromise, a best guess rendered in cloth and foam abo
Fast Company2 min readSmall Business & Entrepreneurs
A Platform For Growth
Silvio Kutić, cofounder and CEO of full-stack communications platform Infobip, is familiar with failure. He can quickly rattle off a list of his early business ventures that flamed out—some ofthem spectacularly. But he doesn’t regard these entreprene
Fast Company2 min read
A Novel Ocean Conservation Initiative
CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL AND NIUE OCEAN WIDE ••• NATURE SPONSORING AN ENDANGERED animal has long been a way for people to contribute to the conservation of at-risk species, such as tigers and pandas. Now, a program is encouraging the public to spon
Fast Company2 min readChemistry
A Personal Approach To Detecting Cancer
It’s the sobering—and all-too regular—experience for any cancer survivor: waiting for their doctorto revealthe testresults that show if the disease has returned. “These are themomentswhere everybody in the family takes a deep breath,” says ChrisHall,
Fast Company2 min readForeign Language Studies
Inventing A New Alphabet
MICROSOFT AND MCCANN WORLDGROUP ••• ADVERTISING THERE ARE ABOUT 7,000 SPOKEN languages in the world today, and at least 40% of them exist without a written alphabet. French may be an official language across much of Central and Western Africa, but th
Fast Company2 min read
A 3d Printed Living Seawall
KIND DESIGNS ••• ON THE RISE: 0–4 YEARS IN BUSINESS MIAMI’S COASTLINES ARE UNIQUELY beautiful, but they’re similar to those of major cities around the world in one worrisome way: They’re at existential risk from sea level rise. Yet the standard appro
Fast Company2 min readFinance & Money Management
Helping The "Credit Invisible"
ESUSU ••• FINANCE MORE THAN 26 MILLION ADULTS in the United States are considered “credit invisible”—they have no credit history. Many are immigrants, people of color, and members of low-income households. Many are renters. The cofounders of fintech
Fast Company2 min read
Filtering Lithium From Underground Lakes
EVOVE ••• WATER ELECTRIC-CAR DEMAND IS CAUSING AN ALMOST insatiable hunger for lithium batteries, but lithium (aka white gold) takes a lot of land and time to extract. The most common method today involves pumping it from underground brine deposits i
Fast Company4 min read
Winners
GOOGLE A suite of projects that use AI to tackle climate change, from flood alerts to redesigned traffic lights HOLCIM A 220-unit housing complex in Paris that’s the first of its kind to use 100% recycled concrete MICROSOFT AND MCCANN WORLDGROUP A de
Fast Company2 min readChemistry
Enhancing Skin Health Through Science
Shopping for skincare and antiaging products—a booming billion-dollar industr y—can be a bewildering experience: consumers are flooded with dubious “before and after” images, breathless marketing claims, and endorsements from peripheral celebrities.
Fast Company2 min read
Virtual Reality, Real-life Connections
Virtual-reality experiences tend to be solitary and isolating. Even the gear—which requires, at the very least, the wearing of a large headset—discourages physical interactions. Sandbox VR has changed all of that. The San Francisco–based company buil
Fast Company3 min read
Finalists
CLIMATIZE KAYRROS REGENESIS SIEMENS Content Credentials ADOBE Retrofitted heavy-industry vehicles FIRST MODE Self-fertilizing seed PIVOT BIO A new playbook for women’s sports ALLY FINANCIAL Self-fertilizing seed PIVOT BIO Using UV light to improve ri
Fast Company2 min read
Building Smarter Warehouses
Forward-thinking companies —facing the challenges of supply-chain disruptions and rising consumer demand for ever-faster deliveries—are paying more attention to the business of moving goods from place to place. Symbotic, a warehouse automation compan
Fast Company2 min read
Taking Advertising To The Next Level
Thousands of deaf and hardof-hearing (DHH) athletes play football in games with only a few modified rules. In addition to the obvious obstacles they face, these players have to contend with the lightning pace of today’s game and the prevalence of hea
Fast Company9 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
How's This for A cliffhanger?
The hammer is made of foam, wrapped in duct tape, and technically it’s stuck to his head with Scotch tape, not in his head, but still. Tough break. His masked killer, dressed head to toe in black, ninja-style, yanks the hammer out of (off of ) his sk
Fast Company1 min read
The Bold And The Fire-retardant
Stunt performer and former motorcycle racer Logan Holladay, a second-generation stuntman, executes a “cannon roll,” the term for when a car flips over, sometimes multiple times, propelled by a hydraulic mechanism placed strategically under the vehicl
Fast Company4 min read
Where the Design Jobs Are
The shifting winds of the U.S. economy in the past year have left designers disoriented. OFFICIALLY, THE LABOR MARKET is still on fire, with job-growth data from the Department of Labor continuing to surprise economists, adding more than 600,000 jobs
Fast Company2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Unlocking Critical Information
Ar tificial intelligence, for all its reputed might, is only as good as the data on which it trains. And an alarming amount of the data—up to 80%—that businesses generate on a daily basis is locked inside widely used file formats (including PDF, PPTX
Fast Company9 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The Perplexity Effect
Perplexity’s answer engine harnesses advanced natural language processing capabilities to parse through the user’s query, analyzing its context and subtle nuances to extract its real meaning and intent. The engine locates the most relevant web pages
Fast Company8 min readAmerican Government
2 politics
WITH DEMOCRACY ON THE LINE YET AGAIN in November, millions of progressive voters will do what they’ve been conditioned to do: They’ll open their digital wallets to try to save it. A practice that initially took off among anti–Iraq War protesters in t

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