Recently, I canceled my subscription to Disney+, the streaming service, a little less than four weeks after signing up. This was not a rash decision, but a calculated one. I only joined to watch one thing (the much-hyped Beatles documentary Get Back) and knew I would quit before getting billed for a second month. Moreover, I already knew I wasn’t so into the basics of the Disney+ catalog—because I did this same join-and-quit exercise 18 months ago, to watch Hamilton. It turns
The vivid blue color of a new brand of Dutch soda doesn’t come from food coloring: The startup making the product, called Ful, makes the drink with spirulina, a blue-green algae that gives the soda more of a nutritional punch than the standard carbonated beverage. The company wants to use the product to make algae a more popular ingredient in order to help shrink the carbon footprint of the food system. The founders, who met as students at the Singapore campus of the business school INSEA
YouTube is officially getting into the NFT game. YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan announced in a blog post on Thursday that the platform will be introducing new tools to help creators make more money from their content, including monetization features for YouTube Shorts—the platform’s short-form videos, an e-commerce function for YouTube videos, and tools that would let YouTubers sell content as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. In the post, Mohan said the NFT tools wo
Over the past 40 years, networks such as HSN and QVC have made live commerce a familiar concept: presenters gushing over the features and hard-to-beat prices of goods on live TV for consumers to buy. However, live e-commerce is still a nascent enterprise in the United States, in particular, especially when you compare any efforts in the space to the powerhouse industry that’s been created in China. Live e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024—not ba
The metaverse is not only finding its way into everyday exchanges across the web, pop culture, and mainstream news media discourse, but also into closed-door corporate discussions as industries ruminate on if—and how—to be an early adopter of this modality. This understanding it represents a seismic shift that will challenge technological and cultural paradigms. While the global industry at large is still in the learning, planning, and development stage of the metavers
Apple’s augmented reality work is getting more real. The company has kept its work on augmented reality glasses fairly well hidden, but the media and analyst reports of the existence of the new wearable device are getting more frequent. The current thinking is that Apple is working on an AR headset product (than may also support VR) for release next year. It’s also working on a more svelte pair of AR glasses to be released sometime after that. On Tuesday the first mention of the (p
Online speciality health care company Thirty Madison is merging with Nurx, a telehealth platform most known for providing affordable birth control. The merger is an all stock deal that is light on specifics. “We saw women’s health as a really ripe area for our model, we saw it as a place where we can improve access and drive an outcome,” says Thirty Madison president Michelle Carnahan, who has previously held executive roles at both Sanofi and Eli Lilly. Carnahan will remain
Amid Samsung’s new lineup of flagship tablets for 2022, the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra stands out for an obvious reason. With a 14.6-inch screen, it’s Samsung’s largest Android tablet to date and one that dwarfs even Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro. (Both are 7.7 inches tall in landscape mode, but the Tab S8 Ultra is 2.6 inches wider.) For all Apple’s talk of tablets replacing laptops, Samsung’s is actually large enough to stand in for a mid-sized notebook. (The lar
The Fast Company Dear Founder column grew out of my book Dear Founder, published in 2018. While the book went to print, capping the letters of advice I wrote to founders to a limited number, the questions kept coming. How do I find a cofounder? What are the going rates for startup pay? Is 40 years old too old to succeed? I’m grateful that Fast Company gave me a platform to continue these conversations and an opportunity to share my advice—hard earned over 40 years in tech 
In the early 21st century, the internet—and the social internet, in particular—has enabled a more connected world. But it’s also enabled and amplified some of humanity’s worst behaviors. Fringy, toxic opinions and outright disinformation proliferate. Antisocial behavior is normalized. Facts—when they can be recognized—are used to bolster preexisting opinions, not to challenge assumptions. Kids (and adults) measure their self-worth by their Instagram comm