Fast Company Feature | 8 recommendations
Fast Company is about to shake things up again.
Back in 1995, in our first issue, we announced on our cover: "Computing is Social." It became a Fast Company mantra and helped open the eyes of a generation of entrepreneurs to the possibilities of the Internet.
In November of 1997, before social networking on the Web was called social networking, FastCompany.com started the "Company of Friends," dubbed the "Fast Company Readers' Network."
Fast Company Feature | 5 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
The way we work is undergoing the biggest shift since Microsoft Office launched in 1989--and it's poised to make editing documents on your desktop as quaint as correcting mistakes with Liquid Paper. Collaborative work applications, collectively known as "office 2.0," now let you work remotely with other people in whole new ways.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
The faces and voices of the world's most innovative company.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
As you alight from the elevator, you see, at the end of a long, paneled corridor, a huge Wilson Hurley painting of a Mars sunset bleeding from rust to black; in one corner soars NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft "on its way to oblivion," according to the caption.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Some guy in Japan just bought the farm by working too hard. You heard right. He was 45, the lead engineer for a Toyota hybrid car division. While he was helping us reduce our dependence on oil, the poor guy ran out of gas. And he didn't even live as long as some of our aging rock stars. You know the economy is in bad shape when an auto worker doesn't last as long as Keith Richards. Prior to his death this dedicated worker had been averaging over 80 hours of overtime per month. Which I guess should now be referred to as "six feet undertime."
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Flashy and innovative, concepts offer auto designers the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild. From beginning to end, designers can spend anywhere from six months to two years bringing a concept to market. Some have already gone into production; others we can only cross our fingers about.
BMW GINA Light Visionary Concept
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Second Life, the virtual reality site, is reaching out to a new audience: businesses. SL is seeing an uptick in traffic for business meetings, conference calls and classes -- and that's welcome news for a site that has long struggled to retain users.
How much of your traffic is business and education users?
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Two years ago, Yves Béhar stood before 300 Coca-Cola bigwigs at the company's Atlanta headquarters and asked an impertinent question: "If Raymond Loewy were alive today, would you still hire him?"
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
“Come play!”
Shana Fisher emails this challenge from her eighth-floor perch at IAC headquarters, a sleek, white Frank Gehry jewel on Manhattan’s west side. Her office is immaculate, with four white leather chairs, a pink door, and a magnificent view of the Hudson River. Not that she notices on this Friday afternoon. She’s trying to navigate a blue marble across a virtual obstacle course without getting bumped off into the clouds.
“No mercy,” warns one of her opponents, a hard-core gamer in Eugene, Oregon.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Clifford Kurz and Susan West Kurz are romantic zealots. Passion has ruled their 21-year relationship, as well as the tetchy perfectionism with which they ran Dr. Hauschka Skin Care, the exclusive distributor of German-made holistic skin-care remedies, from a converted barn in Hatfield, Massachusetts. It's that fervor that let the Kurzes ignore the advances of sugar-daddy suitors that would have paid them tens of millions of dollars, bucking the trend of onetime fellow die-hards selling out to major beauty companies.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Most public speakers are wildly overpaid, and I am no exception. I used to think I could justify my ridiculous fee by putting a lot of careful thought into each appearance, so I called my first presentation "Egalitarianism in the Modern-Day Workplace," and talked at length about "the changing face of the contemporary proletariat vis-à-vis the digital divide."
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Oil prices are soaring. Returns on energy stocks have been fat. The 30 largest oil companies account for some 6% of the entire global equities market. In building wealth to pay for your kids' college or your own retirement, ignoring energy stocks can be costly. If you're a mutual-fund investor, you probably already own a chunk of Big Oil, even if you don't realize it.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Facebook can be a lousy date. Nearly a month after Microsoft slipped Mark Zuckerberg's "social graph" $240 million for a pocket-sized 1.6% stake, the network unleashed an advertising platform that spread users' personal information like a loose-lipped lover. As newly four-year-old Facebook moves into its next stage in development, it awkwardly navigates its status as a third wheel with a penchant for tittle-tattle.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
A straw that kills germs, an ink jet technology to re grow tissue and bone, hologram images of a cancer patient's anatomy, and a cap that reads the brain waves of paralyzed people. These are just some of the finalists of this year's World Changing Ideas Awards -- an international competition held biennially by Saatchi & Saatchi.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
"Please say who you are, what you do, and how the Web is screwed up." How's that for an icebreaker? That was the way Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, grabbed his audience at the company's annual developers event this year, throwing open a discussion about what we don't like about the Web and what we'd like to see fixed.
Fast Company Feature | 2 recommendations
Here's something you probably don't know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.
