Fast company - tech

45 years ago, the Walkman changed how we listen to music

Back in 1979, Sony cofounder Masaru Ibuka was looking for a way to listen to classical music on long-haul flights. In response, his company’s engineers dreamed up the Walkman, ordering 30,000 units for an initial production run. Forty-five years later, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmans and incited a revolution in music technology. 

While there are still Walkmans for sale, most use iPhones and Androids to tune in nowadays. Sony Walkman sound engineer Sato Hiroaki, who joined t

The greatest keyboard never sold

Even as the latest phones and wearables tout speech recognition with unprecedented accuracy and spatial computing products flirt with replacing tablets and laptops, physical keyboards remain beloved for their efficiency. Earlier this year, for example, sci-fi novelist Robert J. Sawyer created a comprehensive archive of files that enables modern PCs to run WordStar 7, the DOS program’s final version. He favors the once-dominant word processo

The 25 best new apps of 2024

One of the most pleasant surprises about this year’s best new apps have nothing to do with AI.

While AI tools are a frothy area for big tech companies and venture capitalists, there’s plenty of app innovation happening outside of that arena, in categories such as productivity, social media, and streaming music.

As in previous

The future belongs to systems of action

The world of enterprise tech is built on sturdy foundations. For decades, systems of record—the databases, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms we’re all intimately familiar with—have served as reliable pillars underpinning every major business. Vendors selling them have become household names and the technology is a core component of how enterprises operate, scale, and report. They’ve embedded themselves, seemingly immovably, into how the

Bluesky users report AI bots, disinformation, and copycat accounts

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given

Banning Chinese-made drones could hurt some Americans

Russell Hedrick, a North Carolina farmer, flies drones to spray fertilizers on his corn, soybean and wheat fields at a fraction of what it would cost him to use a conventional ground spreader.

As a volunteer rescuer, Hedrick uses thermal drones to search for people trapped by mudslides and cargo drones to send water and baby formula to those who are stranded — something he did after 

Fake AI-generated reviews are all over the internet, research shows

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence tools that allow people to efficiently produce novel and detailed online reviews with almost no work has put merchants, service providers and consumers in uncharted territory, watchdog groups and researchers say.

How digital transformation is reshaping energy systems

A balanced planet requires more energy with less carbon. The energy transition to a lower carbon future is arguably the largest and most significant challenge ever contemplated or attempted in the history of our planet. Achieving a balanced planet means our current energy mix must evolve to include more lower- and zero-carbon forms of energy, such as geothermal and hydrogen. Hydrocarbons, however, will still play a critical role for decades to support a secure energy mix, so it is imperative

Looking for small drones? Listen for the right radio signals

The recent spate of unidentified drone sightings in the U.S., including some near sensitive locations such as airports and military installations, has

Hallucinations to agents: Here’s how AI language models evolved in 2024

I research the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and human reasoning as the director of the Advancing Human and Machine Reasoning lab at the University of South Florida. I am also commercializing this research in an AI star


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