19 of the Best Super Bowl Commercials, Plus 1 That Won't Even Air Everyone knows that if your team isn't in the Super Bowl, the biggest (perhaps only) reason to watch are the commercials. Some companies have decided to leak their own Super Bowl spots online so ad geeks have something to drool over before Sunday night. Fast Company has just about all of the currently available spots right here. Keep in mind, each of these commercials cost their companies $3 million to run.
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Fast Company featured this video yesterday, which features three enormous NFL players pirouetting and dancing with lizards.
Posted Fri Jan 30, 2009
Burger King Offers Free Whopper For Ditching Facebook Friends Would you de-friend ten of your Facebook friends in order to get a free Whopper? Burger King thinks you will. Released on Jan. 1, the Whopper Sacrifice facebook app asks users that very question. The app, from the offbeat advertising gurus at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (profiled in the June issue of Fast Company), is the most aggressive online venture that Burger King has yet undertaken.
Posted Fri Jan 9, 2009
Has Google Become "Teh Evil"? Google is losing consumer confidence. It recently dropped below the top 20 of companies that consumers feel do the best job at safeguarding personal information.
Posted Wed Dec 17, 2008
No Capitol Gains: eBay Bans Sales of Inauguration Tickets Under pressure from Congress, online auction giant eBay agreed to ban the re-selling of free tickets to the Presidential Inauguration ceremony in January. But doesn't this move stifle the free market? If people are willing to pay, why stop them?
Posted Mon Nov 24, 2008
The Six Best Sports Insider Blogs Sports blogs are among the most widely read, but most of them aren't worth reading. Here, Fast Company takes a look at the six best sports blogs written by those who actually live the sports life -- athletes, owners, managers, and front-office executives.
Posted Mon Nov 17, 2008
Mark Cuban Charged with Insider Trading Mark Cuban, occasional bad-boy owner of the Dallas Mavericks and dot-com billionaire, has been charged charges of insider trading by the SEC. Was losing money the reason behind the trade?
Posted Mon Nov 17, 2008
Robert Scoble Interviews ClearContext Founder Deva Hazarika ClearContext is a software company that makes email more useful. Here founder and CEO, Deva Hazarika, talks to Robert Scoble about why email is so hated inside corporations and how people can dramatically make it easier to deal with.
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/get-a-handle-your-email-with-clearcontext
Join in a live video chat after the show at: http://kyte.tv/workfasttv.
Posted Fri Oct 31, 2008
Sad Money: The Backlash Against Jim Cramer "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer, that chrome-domed hero of trashy TV addicts and armchair-finance junkies alike, has fallen on hard times. He appeared on “The Today Show” on October 6th, imploring viewers: "Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market. Right now." To say this statement fanned the flames of the Wall Street crisis is an understatement. A more apt analogy would be to say that Cramer dumped rocket fuel on a tire fire.
Posted Fri Oct 24, 2008
Privacy and Security Issues in Social Networking Given the rising popularity of social networks, it’s little surprise that there have been several high-profile breaches of security on sites as huge as MySpace and Facebook. With over 350 million members combined, all it takes is one single person to cause a major damage. Learn how the networks are dealing with the breaches -- and how to protect yourself.
Posted Fri Oct 3, 2008
London Calling: Why the 2012 Summer Games Must Restore Consumer Confidence in the Olympics The controversial issues surrounding the Beijing Olympics have received more coverage than Jerry Rice in the backfield. The damage is done – the falsified passports, the oppressive smog, and enough overdubbing and fake performances to make Milli Vanilli blush.
Posted Fri Aug 22, 2008
Tropic Thunder is a Lightning Rod of Controversy The storm of controversy surrounding faux-Vietnam War film, Tropic Thunder, emerged late last week when disability advocacy groups began protesting the comedy's portrayal of the intellectually disabled. But the movie's premise, about a group of actors shooting a Vietnam War film – poorly – when the director decides to drop the cast into the middle of an actual war in Southeast Asia, capturing it all on film, is not exactly what raised the ire of these advocacy groups. Instead, one of the film's subplots has caused the uproar.
Posted Thu Aug 14, 2008
New Technology Helps Police Take a Byte Out of Crime Last week, a pedestrian walking through Times Square in New York stumbled upon the monthly Critical Mass demonstration, where legions of cyclists take to the streets en masse to raise awareness about transportation alternatives. Typical of a tourist in Times Square seeing something interesting, this pedestrian whipped out their cell phone and began shooting video. However, the pedestrian did not expect to witness a police officer violently shoving a cyclist off his bike and sprawling onto the ground.
Posted Fri Aug 8, 2008
Journalism and the Great Firewall of China Can’t say I didn’t see this coming a mile away – Western journalists in China for the Olympics (gasp!) can’t access certain websites. This despite the International Olympic Committee’s claim that reporters would have unlimited access to the web merely two weeks ago: “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet,” said IOC President Jacques Rogge.
Posted Sat Aug 2, 2008
Why Steve Jobs is Apple's Most Important Product Apple sent the business world buzzing late last week by announcing that CEO and tech icon Steve Jobs had recently gone under the knife, apparently to treat whatever was causing his drastic weight loss. His gaunt appearance at an investors’ conference last month sent waves of hushed rumors throughout the tech world, with Apple-philes concerned about Jobs’ health. What was behind the weight loss? Another bout with cancer? A “common bug,” as an Apple rep so calmingly put it?
Posted Tue Jul 29, 2008
Workipedia: Office Wikis and the Collaboration Revolution Gone are the days of paper here at the offices of FastCompany.com. Virtually all in-house office communication is done electronically. E-mail is a given, as is teleconferencing. But what our office does, along with an increasing number of other streamlining-minded businesses, is employ wikis extensively.
Posted Wed Jul 23, 2008
Teleconferencing: The New Air Travel Not all business travel is essential. That’s why some companies are eschewing air travel for video-conferencing and online communication. The fuel crunch has inflicted a serious wound on the air travel industry, with American Airlines as the biggest casualty – it announced two weeks ago that it would slash 7,000 jobs by the year’s end.
Posted Wed Jul 16, 2008
Pro Cycling Gets Back In the Saddle Every headline I’ve seen about the sport in the last two years has made some mention of the vast doping problem that’s driving the sport into the ground. Case in point: last Thursday’s front page of CNN.com, which reports that mustachioed cyclist Floyd Landis lost his final arbitration hearing over testing positive for synthetic testosterone during the 2006 Tour de France.
Posted Thu Jul 10, 2008
How To Fix Olympic Spoilers I participated in an somewhat-obscure Olympic sport in college: rowing. It's only on TV during the Olympics, and during that time you can't pry me away from the TV with a 30-pound crowbar. But for most people rowing is one of those novelty Olympic sports, like team handball and ping-pong. For the average Olympic viewer, watching a crew race is like watching a David Lynch movie - you'll watch the beginning just to see how weird it is, but by the end you'd really rather be watching something else.
Posted Wed Jul 2, 2008
Finding Joy In Other People's Misery Good news for people looking to pin at least some of the blame on somebody for the subprime mortgage meltdown. With last Thursday's indictment of two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, the American Public can point their collective fingers squarely at Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who are charged with mail and wire fraud as well as conspiracy (the white-collar crime Trifecta).
Posted Mon Jun 23, 2008
