I am sitting in a conference room with a bevy of laptops in front of me—so many that they’re blocking my view of the monitor where I’m about to videoconference with some of the people who created them. With a variety of case stylings, colors, materials, and approaches to fundamental design decisions, they are not exactly a matched set. But they’re all iterations of a specific computer: Dell’s XPS 13. The disparate models represent a decade’s worth of evo
For the past five years, the video-editing app LumaFusion has been a poster child for iPad productivity. While the iPad has always been usable for more than just content consumption, video editing is exactly the kind of creative task that Apple loves to champion. LumaFusion, which was created by former product developers from Avid and Pinnacle, two of the longest-established names in video editing, shows that the iPad can rival a laptop or desktop computer in handling complex editing jobs. It wa
I have a weird relationship with apps I need to use for work. If I don’t like using them, I put very little effort into learning how to use them well. If I do like using them, then I get overly excited about squeezing every last drop of productivity out of them. Microsoft Teams is slowly but surely growing on me. I wouldn’t quite call it true love yet, but let’s just say I’ve sunk some meaningful time into exploring its delightful, not-so-obvious time-savers. Here
When the U.S. raced to lock down the country in the face of a quickly spreading novel disease, telehealth provided a lifeline. Using technology such as video calls, healthcare organizations were able to screen individuals for COVID-19 before there was any testing infrastructure. But now in this later stage of the pandemic, Americans are coming out of their homes and going back to the doctor’s office. Stocks for big telehealth companies are down. While telehealth remains an important tool
With all the public outrage from viral news stories on the dangers of artificial intelligence, it’s no small secret that governments have been gearing up to set the ground rules on AI for some time now. For those of us involved in these efforts, every other week of 2021 felt like it brought about a new official body publishing guidance, standards, or a Request for Information (RFI), signaling a new and major transformation that’s right around the corner. It may be true that 2021 w
If 2021 was the year when ESG (short for Environmental, Social, and Governance) went mainstream, 2022 will be the year that innovations and innovators propel it forward, say members of the Fast Company Impact Council—an invitation-only collective of leaders from a range of industries. Members say a number of business, regulatory, and cultural factors will motivate companies to keep advancing an agenda that places sustainability, social good, and inclusion on equal footing with profitabili
Companies are swimming data. Members of the Fast Company Impact Council—an invitation-only collective of leaders from a range of industries—urged business leaders to protect customer and employee information, even as they extoled the virtues of exploiting data to make companies faster and smarter. Edited excerpts follow: Frank T. Young, president, vertical market software solutions, Global Payments “The one big trend I want [raise] is the importance of privacy and infor
On December 21, just days before a deluge of Americans walked out to their driveways, suitcases bulging, primed for holiday travel, President Joe Biden delivered a message: “I know some Americans are wondering whether you can safely celebrate the holidays with your family and friends,” he said. “The answer is, yes you can: If you and those you celebrate with are vaccinated—particularly if you’ve gotten boosted.” It feels like there are two realities now,
Sometimes the best advancements in technology are the ones that don’t try to change everything. Instead, they come in the form of simple improvements to the products we already use. They’re the ideas that seem so smart, you suddenly wish every company would copy them. At a time when the tech world is swinging for the fences with metaverses, blockchains, augmented reality, and AI, let’s take a step back and celebrate some smaller innovations that you can take advantage of tod
Terms such as NFT (short for non-fungible token), blockchain, and metaverse became part of the mainstream vernacular in 2021. Lionel Ohayon, founder and CEO of ICRAVE, an innovation and design studio, predicts that 2022 will be the year businesses start to incorporate all three digital trends in their strategies—if they haven’t already done so. As part of a series of year-end articles featuring insights from members of the Fast Company Impact Council—an invitation-only coll