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
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