Fast Company’s fourth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list promises to be more comprehensive than ever, offering half a dozen brand-new categories. Here are six reasons why you should apply.
- Brand exposure Every company selected as a finalist will be featured in the September issue of the magazine and on fastcompany.com (more than 12 million monthly unique visitors and more than 40 million page views).
- Talent retention Public recognition as a Best Workplace for Innovator
This year for his birthday, Carmen Draper, 58, got some unwelcome news: His 31-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer. “It had already moved to her lymph nodes,” he explains. That was in late October, and by Thanksgiving she was in her second week of chemotherapy. During five weeks of treatment that included both chemotherapy and radiation she became extremely dehydrated and worn down. “They have to almost kill you to save your life,” Draper
When Apple got into the smart-speaker business with the HomePod four years ago with a sharp focus on music, it seemed to be miles behind Amazon and Google. Those companies had spent years tacking on new features to their Alexa and Google Assistant speakers, and they had a long head start on integrating smart home devices. They’d even enlisted developers to create third-party voice skills so that users could order a Domino’s pizza or call for an Uber without lifting a finger. I admi
It’s a term on the tip of everyone’s tongue and yet still a concept that lacks a clear definition. It’s an idea that is capturing the brightest minds at the biggest technology companies—Apple, Meta nee Facebook, Microsoft—and yet no one really knows what it will be. It’s the metaverse. While questions remain, what we do know is that it’s coming. Arguably, it already exists. We know it will integrate today’s internet with virtual reali
Ever since they were introduced at the turn of the 20th century, England’s iconic double-decker buses have moved billions of people. Now, some of these buses are being converted to serve the country’s most vulnerable population. Over the past 18 months, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.K. has almost doubled, with more than 130,000 households made homeless because of COVID-19. For them, somewhere to sleep is vital, but so is access to services like employment
I first experienced the power of bold risk-taking when working for Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early 2000s, while he was not only inventing the gold standard of e-commerce but also literally building rocket ships. However, it wasn’t until I worked at Google that I truly caught the vision for the moonshot process: I saw it while sitting with the Google X team a day a week for over a decade and watching them invent the technologies that will power our future lives. Google X, now renamed sim
Today, it’s almost impossible to open your phone without scrolling across a mention of the ever-looming metaverse. This convergence of digital worlds—a new realm that grants infinite access to every XR experience imaginable—feels suddenly closer than we ever thought possible. That’s because, in the past, we tried to build these worlds with a heavy focus on AR and VR technology, but we were missing the underlying digital economies that would help make users stick. To s
If you’re a fan of getting stuff done with keyboard shortcuts, check out Omni, a new Chrome and Firefox extension for quickly navigating by keyboard. (The Chrome version also works with other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Brave.) Once installed, press Ctrl+Shift+K (or Cmd+Shift+K on a Mac) to bring up Omni’s action bar, then start typing to search through all your open browser tabs. Selecting a tab from the list will take you straight to it.
But Omni doesn&#x
Can you believe Makayla was dropped from Bama Rush? Do you think Couch Guy was cheating? Did you see Gabby Petito’s last post before she went missing? If you don’t spend much time online, you may not recognize these names. But on TikTok, their stories became sensationalized, memeified, hashtagged and rehashed. The most recent is “#WestElmCaleb.” Women took to TikTok to share their experiences of being peppered with affection, strung along and ultimately ghosted by a N
It’s been a dramatic and trying week for the crypto faithful. During the past week, Bitcoin abruptly fell to half of its November value. The cryptocurrency, which had cost more than $67,000 per coin in November, dove from $42,369 on January 18 down to $33,113 on January 24. Etherium hit $3,263 on the 21st, then dropped to $2,159 on the 24th. The crypto sell-off may have been triggered by rumors that the U.S. government will soon regulate digital currency. The market may also have been rea