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 | 8 recommendations
"Whatever you do, don't hurt Barack!" It was the afternoon of Super Tuesday, and the Chicago sky threatened snow. Senator Barack Obama had just returned to his hometown as voters in 22 states were making history by choosing between a black man and a white woman to be the Democratic nominee for president. The road-weary candidate put off calling fund-raisers or leading one last rally. Instead, he headed over to a downtown gym to play basketball with his nephew, his brother-in-law, and a few buddies.
Fast Company Feature | 5 recommendations
Three years after Katrina, the nation's most expensive hurricane, which cost insurers an estimated $44 billion, came Gustav. As if New Orleans needed its rebuilding project to get any harder. And yet, there’s hope.
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
This promises to be a joyous holiday season for Steve Jobs and the incandescent Apple. Over the past year, the company's numbers have been stunning: Sales are up 24%, earnings up 75%, margins topping 30%, stock price up 146%. The popularity of the iPod and its snazzy young cousin, the iPhone, has lifted other Apple products, helping boost market share in personal computers in the United States from 2% a few years ago to 8% this past quarter, with Apple leapfrogging Gateway to take third place behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
In May 2007, nearly six months after he was hired, AOL chief executive Randy Falco gathered his employees together for an "all hands" meeting at the company's Dulles, Virginia, headquarters. Until then, Falco had remained a mystery to much of his team, often holed up at the New York offices of Time Warner, AOL's parent. He had spent 31 years at NBC, rising to the top as the network was sinking to fourth place. Many in Virginia wondered why the board had chosen this old-media type. There were rumors he barely used email.
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
Buffalo Bills season tickets, Obama campaign donations, cannabis indica, a "mom" tattoo, lottery tickets, two leather-bound bibles, Terminator collectibles, wedding expenses, and a divorce attorney -- all purchases people have posted on the website HowISpentMyStimulus.com, exposing what Rudy Adler calls the "idiosyncratic spending habits of the American public."
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
Chris Reed isn't your typical CEO. He's a tie-dye aficionado who sports a ponytail, eats vegetarian, and enthuses ceaselessly about the benefits of yoga, Ayurveda, and meditation. He comes off more like a freewheeling Californian—maybe a wave chaser or an amateur home grower—than a kid from Queens who runs a multi-million-dollar business.
Fast Company Feature | 4 recommendations
When it comes to privacy and security issues on social networks, "The sites most likely to suffer from issues are the most popular ones," Graham Cluley, Chief Technology Officer at UK tech security firm Sophos says. But security issues and privacy issues are entirely two different beasts. A security issue occurs when a hacker gains unauthorized access to a site's protected coding or written language. Privacy issues, those involving the unwarranted access of private information, don't necessarily have to involve security breaches.
Fast Company Feature | 3 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 | 3 recommendations
Imagine you're a consultant to the New Year's Resolution industry. Your clients are a deeply dysfunctional bunch. Every January, they proudly announce their resolutions. Two weeks later, most have already veered off plan, and by mid-spring, they may not even remember having a resolution at all. To find another set of clients who blow their goals so consistently, you'd have to start serving defense contractors.
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
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
Each December, the sun sets over northern Norway and doesn't reemerge until late January. But this past winter, a fiery vista of reds and oranges pierced the darkness. It wasn't the northern lights, at least not the natural ones. It was the flare-off from the Snøhvit gas field, the first major Arctic fossil-fuel facility outside of Alaska.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
They gave the world guns and butter -- specifically, the AK-47 and margarine. They sent Charles Lindbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris and Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne almost 70 miles above the earth -- twice.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
The No. 2 killer in Africa by parasite, after malaria, is an organism called Entamoeba histolytica -- or "Eh" for short. It was discovered in 1873, the year it took the life of missionary-explorer David Livingstone, that great champion of British imperialism on what his countrymen called the Dark Continent. I know this because, when I returned home from reporting in the sub-Sahara, the same pathogen was drilling through the walls of my gut.
Fast Company Feature | 3 recommendations
- 17 Contestants ate 576.5 hot dogs and buns at last year's Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest.
- 66 Hot Dogs were eaten in 12 minutes by 2007 winner Joey Chestnut, who won $10,000 and set a new world record.
- $39 million -- estimated media value of the TV coverage for the contest's sponsor, Nathan's.
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
