Kate's Recommendations?

Before Paris Hilton was photographed gabbing on her new Pebl at Sundance this year, before a batch of Pebls was in the works for Oscar nominees, before the TV ad debuted during...

It's a mantra of the age of globalization that place doesn't matter. Technology has leveled the global playing field--the world is flat. "When the world is...

Innovators: Tokyo A handful of locales generate most innovations. The ongoing communications and transportation revolutions let ideas circulate...

The three-year-old California Institute for Regenerative Medicine may be the world's richest stem-cell-research effort, with $3 billion in bond funding. But it has also...

In this useful, engaging resource, the authors, who are also Fast Company columnists, deconstruct how to make proposals and stories memorable, resonant, and...

Google's green energy czar provides some insight into the search company's unexpected move into renewable energy. [Background: Previously CTO of Akamai Technologies; senior...

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...

For the past two decades, the history of the video game industry has been as predictable as most of its products: More advanced technology creates more powerful consoles, which run more realistic...

Publishing isn't dead, it's just sleeping -- with a vampire. Harlequin, one of the world's largest publishers of romance fiction, has reached well beyond the supermarket checkout line by using...

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...

As corporations swell and business moves Web-ward, it can be argued that traditional sales practices -- done over a handshake or a phone call -- are going the way of the telegraph. New York-based...

Five years ago this month, the SEC banned Internet-bubble-blower Henry Blodget from the securities industry for life. Today, he's back in the investing game as a writer....

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...

"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...

Iceland is an anomalous place. First, thanks to the Gulf Stream, it isn't all that icy. That would be Greenland, named by Erik the Red, the inventor...

Park bench or Barcalounger? For a while, it seemed as if that would soon be the biggest question for urban dwellers wanting a little Wi-Fi. Just a year ago,...

Chipotle Mexican Grill is the Bono of the fast-food business. Hardheaded financial analysts love it; do-gooders do too. "Chipotle has done a wonderful job of...

Contrary to what your parents and teachers told you, reading does not necessarily make you smarter. Sometimes it doesn't even require you to think. I would...

Beneath the east garage is the Strike Zone: a 15,000-square-foot children's area with a PlayStation Pavilion (proceeds benefit the Nationals'...

Exotic-animal trainers need a great poker face. Let's say you're a trainer, and one day, a beluga whale spits a mouthful of cold water at you. Your first...

September 2003 "AOL" is scratched from the AOL Time...

Truveo This video search engine looks beyond video-embedded data to the surrounding content, resulting in greater accuracy. Its...

Tim Gunn's right eyebrow is shooting toward the sky like a boomerang. It's the signature gaze, filtered through a pair of rimless glasses perched on...

The Engineer David Warren Lee Chairman, Project Director, and Systems Engineer Society For Sustainable Mobility Malibu,...

We knew our ranking of the world's 50 most innovative companies would be controversial. For an unassailable list, we would have used some dull quantitative metric, like number of new patents....

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...

In our Fast 50 issue, we praised Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner for its lightweight construction and streamlined design--features that contribute to the aircraft's remarkable fuel efficiency. The...

Last night the 2008 Dyson Product Design Awards were handed out in New York City. (Yes, that’s Dyson as in Sir James Dyson, TV’s most pretentious vacuum peddler.) These prizes...

The Connector Maria Mandel Executive Director of Digital Innovation OgilvyInteractive New York, New York Maria...

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...

It's the weekend before Valentine's Day and the dozen or so shoppers at the American Greetings store in midtown Manhattan are wandering through a sea of Mylar...

On a starry night in Los Angeles, there's no shortage of conversation inside a dimly lit Sunset Boulevard restaurant called Eat. On Sunset. Just a few hours ago,...

More than a billion people were watching late last year when the first commercial airliner ever built by a Chinese firm rolled off the assembly line in Shanghai. China's state...

Henri Scars Struck is holed...

As far as e-commerce has come, it still remains in its infancy. A glance in any spam folder is proof positive that online retailers haven't yet refined their...

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...

The nomination application for Fast 50 Reader Favorites has returned, and we have extended the deadline for nomination to May 31. Please use the button below to nominate a...

According to indie rocker Jill Sobule, there's only one thing record labels are still good for and that’s financing albums. Everyone is preoccupied over which music-distribution model will win out,...

Cold Stone Creamery may have the highest unit volume in the ice cream category, but its aggressive expansion plan has hit the skids over the past two years. In May, the Scottsdale-based chain, known...

The Cool Cat Stephen Byrd Producer Front Row Productions New York, New...

In the bottom of the ninth inning of the 2005 World Series, as the long-suffering Chicago White Sox were about to win their first championship in 88 years,...

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;...

It's shockingly expensive. The roads are jammed with traffic. The subway system's hopeless, and the buses no better. There's a surveillance camera on every...

Behind the covers with Fast Company senior editor Jeff Chu on the process of creating Fast Cities 2008. Here we learn what makes a city fast -- and what fast means...

Peter Shapiro Executive Producer Green Apple Festival New York, New York The...

Big-box Stores Key player: PRN Screens: 200,000 Locations: More than 6,000 stores, including ...

Juergen Marester, a 24-year-old French network consultant, needed seed capital to start his own computer-security company. So he turned to his off-hours hobby...

"How do you inspire a revolution?" It's a question that obsesses Matthew Berman. A 36-year-old New York architect with short hair and a starched blue shirt, he...

Camille Rebelo talks fast, with an intimidating British accent. The Kenyan-raised daughter of an Indian father and English mother, she's back from Indonesia...

If you were to ask him yourself, that is, if you could find him in Cuba or Antigua or wherever he's fanning himself with a fistful of $100 bills, Calvin Ayre...

Reebok Kool-Aid Collection ...

- 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...

Fast Company announced that it is the recipient of a 2008 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Editor-at-Large Charles Fishman’s article ...

When I finally cleared through the crowd of technology reporters at the press preview for Digital Life ­-- the largest consumer electronics show on the East Coast -- I saw the booth causing the...

When Jonathan Papelbon, the virtually unhittable closer for the Boston Red Sox, hurls a baseball at nearly 100 mph, his right arm becomes a fantastic and...

Jeff Swartz likes to tell this story. It is a somewhat strange anecdote, with an unexpected moral -- but Swartz is nothing if not unexpected. He is sitting in...

In the hip Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, nestled between a Latino folk-medicine shop and a beauty salon, there is a loft space that could be an art...

Suze Orman, the scourge of spending, must be thrilled: This past spring, U.S. credit-card debt rose by the smallest amount in three years. Banks?...

It may have started out as a small outpatient facility, but now, a century later, the Mayo Clinic is one of the top-ranked hospitals in the nation, with annual revenues of...

Sam Wyly’s path from start-up entrepreneur to billionaire business and green-energy guru has been a long and winding one. He started University Computing Co. in 1963 after working for IBM and...

In early December, in that weird social vacuum between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there's no more glorious place to be than Miami. That's when the planet's...

At first blush, John Maeda doesn't seem all that intimidating. A slender, gentle man with a brilliant mind, quirky wit, vast wardrobe of T-shirts, and long...

Designing a microprocessor like the Atom, Intel's smallest chip ever, is like planning a city so tiny it...

There was a period not so long ago when it seemed Steven Holl couldn't get a break. Perhaps it started when that high-profile art museum he designed in...

Li Edelkoort has seen the future, and it's ... mushrooms. Their subtle, earthy colors. Their curvaceous, snuggly shapes. Their trippy, hallucinogenic side...

Lia Vollack is running late. Jonathan Palmer, a licensing executive for Columbia Records, sits in the waiting area outside her corner office on the top floor...

"When you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labor, you support drug trafficking, and you cost your city $1 billion in lost tax revenue,"...

On a sunny afternoon in Grand Rapids, a group of earnest, middle-age folks is gathered in a conference room, looking at slides of wind turbines and charts...

Audio books and eBooks make way for the…V-book? Simon and Schuster Audio is launching its newest platform—akin to an author presentation, and aimed mainly at iPod users—by partnering with...

Green building is booming even more than expected, indicates a report released today by McGraw-Hill Construction. In our...

The blogosphere is an increasingly crowded, complicated space to navigate. Everyone’s an expert, everyone has “great” content and everyone’s rabidly eager to be found. So how do you get...

Four years ago, a nasty virus infected my hard drive. Windows essentially just froze and never thawed. After a few days of trying to fix it with no success, I realized I would have to reformat my...

Say good-bye to tap-tap-tapping extensive messages into your not-so-convenient Smartphone. Swype wants to introduce you—and the 2.5 billion other cell phone users—to a whole new way...

Paper resumes are things of the past. If you want to get stand out and get ahead, you have to get online. At least that's the idea behind ...

More than 150 years after Linus Yale Jr. invented the cylinder pin-tumbler lock (you know, the combination lock keeping your bike, locker, and luggage safe?), we are still stuck trying to remember...

Centrifugal pumps consume massive amounts of energy and generate cavitation (tiny bubbles) as they work, causing vibration that makes them noisy and inefficient. The...

If you've taken the subway, been to an airport or passed by a few billboards lately, you've probably noticed Dentyne's latest ad campaign, which launched mid-August of this year. It's hard to...

Let’s face it: in these violently turbulent times, we all want to know what’s next. Kaihan Krippendorff, who currently...

The paparazzi should have been hiding in the hedges that evening. Cindy Crawford, Goldie Hawn, John Mayer, and some 50 other Hollywood and media types were...

Flat-screen TVs, wedding rings, mini-quiches, gallon jugs of mayo -- and, of course, free samples. America's fourth-largest retailer, which opened its first...

"I had this idea that there were going to be these recycling carts all over the country with chips embedded in them," says Ron Gonen, CEO and...

At the suburban Philadelphia offices of Kenexa, people grin at one another all day long. Sometimes they hug. Bright posters of the company's guiding principles...

Needlephobes, rejoice: Vaccines may soon be a lot less painful. A needle-free vaccination method is being developed by Intercell USA (which, before its...

It's like something out of a sci-fi flick. This BMW prototype with a flexible textile skin reflects the carmaker's new design philosophy, GINA (geometry and functions in...

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

Sick of the presidential campaigns already? Here’s an election worth tuning in for: the Cooper Hewitt’s annual People’s...

Last fall I attended the first Finovate conference in New York City, where a bunch of innovative startup financial services companies presented...

Things may be teetering on the brink of the apocalypse in Detroit, but there’s an alternative automotive world going on in Paris, where the 2008 Motor Show is currently underway. ...

Apple Showcases New MacBooks At a special notebook-themed product event today, Apple revealed...

No matter what happens in the American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Rays, Dr. James Andrews will be on the winning side - and the losing side. That's the...

If you like your political news (and bile filled commentary) in easy to digest, 140 character long chunks, then you are living in the best of times.  ...

From Smart Design: Good Grips thinking moves from the kitchen to the home workshop with features such as a level with a magnetic bottom and a hammer with a...

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

"The way they [bankers] talk about girls — a guy will say he’s going to short a girl because, you know, ‘There’s a lot of overvalue here.'" That's just one of the absurdist...

Finger pointing and blame-gaming are traditional political fare. But last night's debate was a missed opportunity to talk about the foreclosure crisis in real detail. There is perhaps no...

In 2005, President Bush proposed zeroing out all federal support for passenger rail, and Amtrak, which has had a...

"An ability to babble nonsensically and make people believe it...Sarah Palin is perfect for the ad industry.," writes Dan Goldgeier, an Atlanta-based advertising copywriter and ...

A new design for what was once the shabbiest show on Broadway – the discount ticket booth in Times Square...

We’ve all got work-related stuff in a little pile waiting for that moment when we have time to stop, think and pay attention — the magazine articles to tackle, connections to pursue, ideas to...

With the economy tanking and world food prices skyrocketing, concerns about world food supplies, are increasingly taking center stage. The BBC today ...

We have advice for anyone planning to write a book on marketing—and there are scads out there, with pithy titles like ...

Jason Biggs, you jerk! I was hot on the trail of a lead -- chasing a truer star than you -- when I had the misfortune of running into your tired, drunken ass. Outside. The Skylight, West Side...

Check out this extraordinary video – a motion-graphical interpretation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The video was created to commemorate the 60th...

Last week, London’s tabloidy News Of the World broke the story of a handful of AIG executives...

Nine out of ten people who are employed -- both blacks and whites -- have access to a defined contribution plan such has a 401(k). Of those, 90% of each group contributes regularly. That’s...

In a world where both the bottom and top of the pyramid are reeling as markets melt down and tectonic economic shifts are shaking the planet, a conference dedicated to the theme “Scarcity and...

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...

Why one brand takes off and another tanks remains mostly a mystery, with half of new brands and 75% of individual products failing in their first year. That’s frustrating news to the folks that...

Roughly a year ago -- months and months before Michael Phelps set world records in overdrive in Beijing -- Human Performance Labs took a bet on the swimmer. The tiny...

On July 17, 2007, Phil Harrison, Sony's then head of Worldwide Studios, took the stage for what would be his last press conference on behalf of the company at the annual E3...

  David Carr, one of my favorite columnists, points out in today’s ...

It’s still surprising sometimes what surprises people. Two Sundays ago, a first-run episode of Family Guy featured a sequence in which two of the characters, Brian and Stewie, travel...

With a week to go until the election, and the markets still bouncing around like an elephant on a trampoline voters are...

Yesterday MTV launched MTVmusic.com, its first serious iteration of a full-fledged music-video site. It’s been a long time...

For purveyors of the Gutenbergian craft of typeface design, the folks at House Industries can execute new products at an impressive pace. Fast Company readers know House as the font provocateurs we...

Throwing sheep and swapping vampire bites? Not so much. But early this morning, business-networking site LinkedIn unveiled its new developer platform, loaded with apps aimed at wooing the...

Fiona Morrison, 46, leads a team that has helped develop the passenger-experience elements of T5, JetBlue’s new $743 million terminal at JFK which opened October 1....

The n00b: Internet usage in Kenya and Rwanda is far from ubiquitous, as Fast Company reported in May, but...

McDonald's, the world's best-known fast food chain, is aiming to overhaul its brand image, yanking its current packaging and implementing what Global Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon dubs the...

"Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book," recently wrote Publishers Weekly in...

Did you hear those squeals echoing across the nation last night? Thousands of diehard Twilight fans poured into theaters at midnight, eager to watch the first film adaptation of Stephenie...

The titles that follow run the gamut of what Fast Company covers: Innovation, creativity, design, sustainability, technology, advertising and marketing, global business, and...

Fourteen years, $13 million, four producers, and three studios, and all we got was this bottle of soda?  Well, that and the much-anticipated, maybe-it’s-never-coming Guns ‘N Roses release....

Yes, the layoff horror stories are piling up (...

Made from stainless steel, Pyrex and silicone, the 11-oz. teapot by Joey Roth was originally created as part of his college portfolio. The clear body enables you to watch the...