While 2021 has been a weird year overall, it’s felt like a return to normalcy on the app front. The endless attempts to reinvent video chat have quieted down. And while remote work tools remain in vast abundance, some of this year’s best apps have nothing to do with being productive. As in previous years, this list focuses on apps that either launched in 2021 or saw substantial updates that warrant fresh consideration. It also tries to avoid obvious choices from major tech players
The quest for health equity—when every person has access to quality care and wellness resources—will be a key theme in 2022, according to health executives and experts on the Fast Company Impact Council—an invitation-only collective of leaders from a range of industries. Members shared their insights on the imperative for the healthcare industry to become more inclusive—and how employers would need to think more expansively about the kinds of care it offers
Depending on the breaks, 2022 could be a very eventful year for new tech products and even whole new tech categories. From gaming to electric vehicles to mixed reality wearables, next year’s releases could even begin a shift in the way we view tech’s role in personal and business life. I’ve taken my best shot at rounding up the most significant and anticipated of those releases. It’s admittedly a mixed bag. Some products have already been announced, and—barring
There’s never been a more pronounced focus on the creator economy. Monetizing digital content is nothing new, but the pandemic turbocharged the sector as people turned to social and subscription platforms to supplement their income during stay-at-home measures—or out of boredom like many TikTok stars who joined the growing platform as something to do and found a full-time career. That momentum from 2020 has only increased this past year. More than 50 million people globally conside
Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one. The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-f
“Big things have small beginnings.” That line from Lawrence of Arabia may be a good way of characterizing the coming year in tech. Tech that will be very important to the future will begin graduating from R&D labs and enter the marketplace. More self-driving automobiles will traverse the roadways. Augmented reality glasses may even start showing up in public. The U.S. government is likely to begin regulating Big Tech in such areas as antitrust and privacy. The industry will continu
Not everyone can explain what an NFT is, but few would argue that non-fungible tokens—whether in the form of NBA Top Shot clips or members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club—became the defining cultural medium of 2021. Artists such as Beeple and Pak made headlines and set records at auction houses. Membership in the aforementioned BAYC set a new bar for social cred. Mark Zuckerberg ripped the term “metaverse” out of the Geek Bible (aka, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi n
The streaming wars raged on in 2021. The giant players—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus—created more high-profile events to cement the viewing habits formed in the pandemic, and late entrants (welcome, Paramount Plus!) tried to make a dent in people’s streaming budget. All of the services benefited from the shift away from seeing movies in theaters, but viewers also began migrating off of couches and heading back into IRL social gatherings as well as returning to
From content recommendations on your Netflix dashboard to interactions with Amazon voice assistants to AirBnB, Uber, and Google—all couldn’t do what they are doing without AI. But these are some of the world’s most successful companies. What about the rest? This might be the intelligence era, but the vast majority of companies have yet to tap into its potential. And it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. Big tech companies were data-first from the start. S
Most people try their voice assistant for a few simple tasks—asking Siri the weather, or Google a random factoid—but don’t dive much deeper. Maybe it seems too complicated, you’re worried about privacy, or you just feel weird talking to yourself. This is where I was a few years ago. But during the pandemic, with more time at home, I started to use voice for more tasks. I found it helpful ergonomically—voice gave my eyes, fingers, back, and neck a break from str