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Issue 130

November 2008

This $2 Billion Comic Genius Is No Joke

  • Seth MacFarlane

    Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has built an empire of staggering proportions that nabbed him a record $100 million deal with Fox. And, with an innovative new series of animated shorts distributed by Google -- "Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy" -- he’s even teaching the search giant new ways to exploit the Web. Could this crude frat-boy cartoonist really be a model for business in the postmodern age?

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Features

  • The Bristol Bay area in southwest Alaska Anglo American’s Bristol Bay Controversy: Wildlife vs. Mineral Riches

    The first woman CEO of one of the world's biggest mining companies is pushing a wildly controversial project. At stake: a half-trillion dollars' worth of minerals, millions of wild salmon, and a new corporate strategy for a tarnished industry.

  • Microsoft’s Leader in Web Apps: Meet Dr. Flakenstein

    Strange things are going on in the lab of Gary Flake. Flake started Microsoft's Live Labs, a rapid-development Web team that exists outside of any specific product group in the company. His team is looking to bring innovative Web applications to the public (you can thank him for Photosynth). Can he make Microsoft come alive?

  • Steve Ballmer’s Cloud Computing Ambitions for Microsoft
  • Costco Store CEO Interview: Costco's Jim Sinegal

    As Costco marks its 25th year, straight-talking CEO Jim Sinegal shares his two cents on sustainability, the economy, universal health care, and what our next president should do.

  • Sam Ewen Meet America’s Top Guerilla Marketer

    He's sent cavemen into the subway, posted lifeguards on Manhattan's sidewalks, and strung laundry across Times Square. Now Sam Ewen says the next big thing in advertising is honesty. Honestly.

  • McDonough at his Charlottesville, Virginia, offices Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough

    William McDonough, the godfather of green design, has been hailed by everyone from Hollywood to Silicon Valley to the Chinese government as the environmental savior. His radical "cradle to cradle" idea -- in which every product, building, and city is designed in an infinite loop with zero waste -- has earned him the Presidential Design Award for Sustainable Development.

Now

Next

  • RecycleBank's Ron Gonen Attack of the Green Tech Geeks

    Jetsons-style applications, from companies like RecycleBank and Agilewaves, that measure just what we're consuming have become the hottest trend in sustainable business. Such systems give people information that rivals what Wal-Mart has of its supply chain. But can the energy savings trump the privacy hit?

  • New Ways to Measure Energy Use
  • High-Tech Ways to Go Green at Home
  • Lojack for Laptops

    Companies lose billions of dollars a year in hardware and data. Here's how the good guys try to get the stuff back.

  • How the Aeron Chair Inspired Burton

    How the design of the iconic office chair inspired a breakthough snowboard binding from Burton Snowboards.

  • MTV Plants Its Flag in the Digital World

    The network famously missed its chance to buy MySpace. Lesson learned. Now its president, Van Toffler, is investing in dozens of digital media projects. Its 2006 acquisition of Harmonix Music Systems, the maker of the video game Rock Band, could soon develop into a billion-dollar business. And more digital developments seem to surface almost daily, including the launch earlier in the week of MTVmusic.com, MTV's first serious attempt at a full-fledged music-video site; and today's announcement of a deal that will bring the Beatles' music to the Rock Band format.

  • MTV’s New Digital Forays
  • Director of Homeland Happiness

    At Rudy Karsan's company, people grin at one another all day long. He's the founder and CEO of Kenexa, the leading human-resources-services company in America. Sixty percent of the Fortune 100, including Caterpillar, General Motors, Time Warner's, and Wachovia, hire Kenexa to help get inside the minds of their employees and build worker loyalty. Karsan's firm has pioneered new ways to blend psychology and technology. But his real secret is much more simple: A conviction that employees just want to have fun.

  • Can Design Solve Social Problems?

    Can design save the world? Hilary Cottam thinks so. Her design team, Participle, includes anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social scientists, and a military-logistics expert. But it is driven by design techniques and headed by Cottam, who has used such strategies to tackle societal issues -- starting with addressing the shortcomings of Britain's school and health systems.

  • Three More Who Design for Society
  • Peter Gabriel’s YouTube for Human Rights: The Hub

    Peter Gabriel's human-rights group Witness embraces social media, creating a YouTube for unseen atrocities. With camera-equipped cell phones, ordinary people suddenly have the means to document their lives and share evidence of rights violations. The Hub allows anyone around the world to submit such clips to a central site where its target audience of activists can connect and take action.

  • Peter Gabriel: Digital Entrepreneur
  • Intercell’s Needle-Free Vaccines
  • BMW Gina: Shape-Shifting Car

Columns

Fast Talk

  • Business Travel Gets an Upgrade at the Airport
    Travel has never been worse -- US Airways now charges two bucks for a can of soda?! Meet the highfliers working to make the terminal experience bliss: from the woman that lead the team behind JetBlue's new terminal in New York's JFK Airport, to the VP the brought Best Buy's Express kiosks selling earphones, videogames and other gadgets to airports nationwide.
  • Business Travel Gets an Upgrade at the Airport

    Travel has never been worse -- US Airways now charges two bucks for a can of soda?! Meet the highfliers working to make the terminal experience bliss.

From the Editor

  • Editor's Letter: Comedy & Tragedy

    Two years ago, while an editor at another business magazine, I worked with a writer on a major feature about the then-thriving Lehman Brothers. He was enamored of CEO Dick Fuld and his purported mastery of bond-market risk. "Fuld's magic," the writer asserted, "has in part been to ignore doomsday predictions."

  • Updates

    Updates on people featured in past issues of Fast Company.