Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company Amazon acquired in 2020, says she’s been informally meeting with other Amazon leaders in anticipation of potential collaborations, but she characterized her conversations as “discovery, nothing official.” Speaking at Fast Company‘s Agenda 2022: Rethink, Reimagine, Reinvent event on Wednesday, Evans says the Zoox team is singularly focused on creating its “robotaxi,” a driverless car designed for ri
Like many people, Peggy Johnson was dazzled by Magic Leap’s technology when she visited the company’s Florida headquarters. Seeing the way its AR headset fused the real world and digital imagery into a single experience, she was “blown away by the technology—I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. And then, when she learned in the spring of 2020 that founder Rony Abovitz was stepping down as CEO, she acted on her long-held ambition to run a company an
Chef Amanda Shulman is chattering away as she expertly whacks a pile of charred beets with a knife and tosses them into a bowl. “I just want them to be roughly chopped,” she says. “I like when things are recognizable. You should be able to take a bite [of a dish], and it should be full of all these things, not, like, minced.” Shulman is prepping a course—leek and Gruyere fritelle—for dinner that night at her Philadelphia pop-up restaurant, Her Plac
When Goldbelly CEO Joe Ariel launched his artisanal food marketplace in 2013—shipping gumbo right from New Orleans’s famed Commander’s Palace or noodles from New York’s Ivan Ramen to foodies throughout the United States—he approached the Food Network with an idea. “I thought the Food Network or some old food media brands would be great partners,” he recalls. “They could showcase food that viewers could then order through Goldbelly and consu
For better or worse, You.com isn’t like any other search engine you’ve used before. Instead of arranging results in a vertical list, you.com presents users with rows of horizontal panels—the company calls them “apps”—grouped by source. There’s an app for Yelp, an app for Reddit, an app for Twitter, and an app for standard Bing results, among others. Users can then promote or demote these panels as they browse the results, creating a search engine
In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore’s seminal documentary on the climate crisis. We went around the table for everyone’s reaction to the film’s urgent message. When it came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: “I’m scared, and I’m angry.” Then she added, “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” The conversation s
The default Chrome browser on Android gives any site you visit access to data from your phone’s motion sensor, a security researcher found, prompting some in the media to urge users to delete Chrome immediately. Security researcher Tommy Mysk tweeted on October 29 that “the Chrome browser on Android gives any website you visit access to your phone’s accelerometer data.” Smartphone accelerometers, which detect movement, are very sensitive. Researchers have found that u
Most of the students that Mindy Bissett teaches in schools around Little Rock, Arkansas live along the poverty line in a limited world that often stops at the banks of the Arkansas River. So, the idea of becoming a NASA engineer can feel like science fiction. Yet, three times a week, Bissett guides third and fourth-grade students through lessons in rudimentary robotics, engineering design, and space science that has them attempting spacecraft models with Lego build kits featuring modest electron
At first, the horse that greeted press attendees at an Oct. 20 event at Mount Vernon looked decidedly analog. But as a Virginia Tech professor turned Mikey around, an unusual bit of technology came into view: a small box attached to a wrap around his tail. The use case involved poop. “We’re in the middle of the data revolution,” said Robin White, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s Department of Animal and Poultry Sciences and its Center for Advanced Innovation
From its centered task bar to its revamped Start and Quick Settings menus, the recently released Windows 11 includes some of the most obvious changes to the venerable operating system since Windows 8 launched nearly a decade ago. A response to the iPad, 2012’s Windows 8 sported Microsoft’s “Metro” user interface, with a Start screen of large, blinking Live Tiles and apps designed around touch-friendly controls and swipe gestures. These elements were grafted on top of