Allegra's Recommendations?

Mike Rowe has drawn a crowd. Again. This time it's on a chilly December night in Florence, South Carolina, at a local joint called J. Michael's Grill...

Long before Apple created boutique computer stores that make customers drool, Whole Foods Market was opening grocery stores that made food shopping a mouth-watering adventure. Part of...

GE has been on the cutting edge of innovation since their founder Thomas Edison flipped the switch for his electric light bulb more than 125 years ago. From hybrid locomotives that reduce...

The streak is still going strong. In 2007, for the fifteenth consecutive year, IBM racked up more U.S. patents than any other company on the planet -- 3,125 in all. That's a whopping 60 patents...

It's too good to be true. That's what Andy Rubin was thinking back in 2005. He'd worked for more than a decade at various tech outfits, including a...

#1 Google The faces and voices of the world's most...

Is it possible to run a billion-dollar publicly traded company and save the world at the same time? When Fast Company posed such a question of Timberland's third-generation CEO Jeffrey Swartz...

What can you buy with a quarter? Maybe a few drops of gas or a Jolly Rancher -- unless you're a former music exec named Tony Fernandes. Seven years ago, Fernandes paid 25 cents for a near-defunct...

In the annals of advertising history, 2007 will be remembered as the year of the digital acquisition frenzy. Ad holding companies Publicis and WPP, along with tech companies like Microsoft, spent...

The standard by which all other design firms are measured, Palo Alto-based IDEO had a great year, even against its own high bar. Unlike past years, where design firm innovation was often about a...

Toshiba threw in the towel today in the next-generation DVD format war, retiring its HD-DVD combatant against the now victorious Blu-ray format from Sony. What's interesting about this news...

Target's strategy of rolling out capsule collections by well-known designers -- Loeffler Randall shoes and handbags, Erin Fetherston sweaters, Alice Temperley sportswear, Jovovich Hawk dresses --...

The list of indignities we suffer online every day is significant. Our bank hits us up for a high-yield checking account ... while we're in our high-yield checking account. We have to navigate...

While most of us have been busy rebuilding our music collection yet again -- at 99 cents a download -- RealNetworks has been putting together the building blocks of the next revolution in music....

In the March issue of Fast Company--careful, it's hot off the press--we unveil the new and improved Fast 50, aka the Fast Company 50. This year's list is our first-ever ...

Dubai, like Las Vegas, is a city of excess in the middle of a desert. But with the ungodly height of the 159-story (and growing) Burj Dubai, the unnatural symmetry of The Palm Jumeirah islands and...

Google, which earned the top spot in this year's Fast 50, is like no other company I’ve visited in ten years at Fast Company,...

Is Chipotle a one-trick pony? Is dependable Safeway actually more innovative than trendy Whole Foods? Should we have jettisoned AirAsia to make room for Virgin Galactic? Innovation expert Dev...

Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld were psyched. On December 20, their startup, GiveWell, scored a media hat trick, appearing in The New York Times...

NBC's Heroes racked up the network's top-selling DVD for 2007 by cultivating die-hard fans with extensions of the show's fantasy world across every form of media (while selling...

The No. 2 killer in Africa by parasite, after malaria, is an organism called Entamoeba histolytica -- or "Eh" for short. It was discovered...

In a 4x4 vehicle arranged by a local group that monitors Mozambique's forests, I travel to Maganja da Costa in the once-heavily-wooded Zambezia province, the country's...

A simple stroll down the streets of Kinshasa reveals how precarious life has become in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This city of ugly half-finished buildings radiates...

That the West is losing the sub-Sahara does not come as news in Africa itself. One leader after another has been explicit on this point, from Senegal's president ("Today,...

When my plane smacks down in Equatorial Guinea -- where if the captain misses the runway, you could end up in Cameroon -- I become the first American journalist to visit this...

I ask Xiao Ye, an Africa statistical researcher for the World Bank, whether a clear chart or table exists laying out the full extent of China's economic involvement in Africa....

1. Ideo Eyes Open The innovation-and-design firm brings its fresh eye to a travel book ($22.95) with 50 photo-saturated, offbeat experiences in a...

This weekend, I turned on my cable box to find that I was now receiving about 20 more high definition channels than in the past. I could now watch wonderful shows like Rescue Me or ...

In last year's Fast 50, we showcased Payless--the former "dusty dungeon of...

When D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee got a shout-out from Barack Obama in the third...

It began with the shock of recognition that every woman dreads: A lump, found while showering. Wrote artist Vicki Behm, "the first image that popped into my head was Mr. Clean. What will I...