Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i Fast Company

Six years ago, Fast Company’s editorial team had an insight: that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were increasingly expanding into contiguous businesses. Their competition, we believed, was pushing all of them to be even more ambitious— and pushing everyone else to innovate at a faster rate. We called this “The Great Tech War of 2012” in a cover story that set the framework for how a new wave of business activity would unfold. Today, we are seeing a similar shift under way around artificial intelligence. As senior writer Harry McCracken reports in what we’re calling “The Great AI War of 2018” (page 64), the investment in and motivation behind AI is setting in motion yet another wave of change— one that spans all industries and again features Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and…

Amazon Milestones After ac quiring Whole Foods, the e-commerce giant moved quickly to drop prices on products like eggs at the notoriously expensive organic grocery store. Challenges Amazon’s in troduction of slightly lower prices is a start to reinvigorating a struggling Whole Foods, but it may not be enough to attract consumers away from cheaper options. Buzz ← → Casper Milestones Casper has introduced its second mattress style, called the Wave, which has an extra layer that provides targeted support for the hips, shoulders, and back. The new mattress is tailored to the European market, which prefers firmer beds. Challenges The premium mattress costs about twice as much as the original model, which could be a hindrance as more budgetfriendly Casper knockoffs enter the space. Buzz ↑ NBC Milestones After…

FACE OFF DISNEY VS. NETFLIX The Streaming Wars In August, Disney sent a missile into the media stratosphere when it abruptly announced that it was creating a pair of digital streaming services: one built around ESPN sports programming that will launch in 2018, and one devoted to Disney entertainment, to debut in 2019. This alone wasn’t shocking—Disney has long discussed creating its own streaming apps. But then CEO Bob Iger dropped another crucial detail: Disney will end its lucrative licensing deal with Netflix in 2019 and transfer Disney Animation and Pixar films, as well as TV shows from the Disney library, to its own service. Suddenly, the target became clear. Disney was going to war with Netflix. Five days later, Netflix retaliated by announcing a multiyear production deal with Shonda…

1. Threading the needle After the team created the Jacquard thread, they had to figure out what it would look like on the Commuter jacket. First, Google made the threads white so that users would be able to see and activate them. But Levi’s didn’t like the aesthetic. Google then made a version that blended entirely with the fabric. Too invisible. Levi’s suggested a weaving technique called a “missed pick,” which creates a slightly bumpy surface. “We’re deploying a characteristic of the weaving process itself to mark the activated space,” Dillinger says. 2. Well armed To incorporate the thread on the jacket, the Project Jacquard team needed a place that’s not associated with any common social cues or prone to accidental patting. They landed on the sleeve since it’s both…

If you haven’t heard of Toca Boca, you’re probably not hanging out much with the 6- to 9-year-old set. Since its 2010 founding, the Swedish game developer has created 39 app games for children, resulting in more than 200 million downloads and a dominating share of the paid kids’- apps market. Toca Boca’s mission, according to head of consumer products Mathilda Engman, is to facilitate and encourage openended play through games that don’t have to be “won.” In the colorful, quirky Toca universe, children become kitchen savants, hairstylists, and surgeons-in-training. Now Toca Boca is focusing on a new way to reach its audience: an apparel and accessories offshoot that launched at Target in July. Here’s how Engman and her team are expanding the way kids (and their parents) engage with…

THE PROBLEM Most contact lens users are rulebreakers, guilty of wearing their lenses too long, which can lead to infections and inflammations. Daily disposable lenses are seen by optometrists as a healthier option than weeklies or monthlies, but their higher cost— upwards of $50 each month—means that a majority of people opt out. THE EPIPHANY In 2015, Benjamin Cogan, a researcher at shaving startup Harry’s, grew frustrated with the price of his lenses and began looking at the industry with a friend and former colleague, investment analyst Jesse Horwitz. They learned that four lens manufacturers controlled about 95% of the U.S. market. Cogan and Horwitz decided to steal a page from other direct-to-consumer companies like Warby Parker and Casper by cutting out middlemen and offering daily lenses at a more…

Most weekday mornings, around 40 people file into St. Paul’s House, a homeless-services center in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, to receive free breakfast. Until recently, the 16-by-34-foot basement room where they ate was functional—but far from comfortable. There were no tables for the staff to use as they organized meals. A tiny bathroom sat at the front of the room; its door opened straight onto the dining area. In community spaces like St. Paul’s, which has been serving low-income New Yorkers since 1945, interior design is often an afterthought. The Fashion Institute of Technology’s Integrated Service-Learning Project, led by associate professor Carmita Sanchez-Fong, is trying to change that. The program gives places like St. Paul’s a quick upgrade—at no cost to the beneficiary. “We have to see interior design as…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $109 billion MARKET CAP* $650 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI The company acknowledged in 1999 that it was using AI to improve its flagship Search product’s results. PHILOSOPHY Make machines intelligent, improve people’s lives. REVEALING QUOTE “Technology is now on the cusp of taking us into a magical age,” Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in January, “in which machine learning can prevent blindness, translate any language with expert skill, or even save endangered species from extinction.” KEY ACQUISITION DeepMind ($500 million, 2014). The company is best known for its software defeating the worldbest Go player, but its focus is advancing what’s possible in AI and applying it to Google products from health to shopping. NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT Alphabet-owned YouTube turned to Google Brain (another of the company’s R&D…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $39.2 billion MARKET CAP* $500 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI Facebook introduced Photo Tag Suggest in 2010, which employs facial recognition to identify the people in users’ uploaded images. PHILOSOPHY The better it can replicate—and exceed—human senses such as vision and hearing, the better itcan understand and serve users. REVEALING QUOTE “Now you can put a creative message out there, and AI can help you figure out who will be most interested,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his July earnings call. “A lot of the time you don’t even need to target now because AI can do it more precisely and better than we can manually.” KEY ACQUISITION Natural language processing startup Ozlo, earlier this year. Its tech is expected to bolster Face-book Messenger and its chatbots.…

Eric Schmidt Alphabet executive chairman, ex-CEO of Google At State, Cohen invited Schmidt on a “techdel,” and the two bonded. Schmidt later convinced Cohen to help found Google Ideas, the think tank that became Jigsaw. Condoleezza Rice Former secretary of state Impressed by his Rhodes research on Iran, Rice hired Cohen to join her policyplanning staff. At 24, he was its youngest member. George W. Bush 43rd president of the United States Bush’s endorsement of Cohen’s intel lent credibility to more tech-centric research for the State Department. Arianna Huffington Cofounder of The Huffington Post Both consummate networkers, Huffington and Cohen bonded over interests ranging from cyberterrorism to childcare. Jack Dorsey Cofounder and CEO of Twitter Cohen reached out to Dorsey seeking help to prevent Twitter from interrupting its service during…

NAVEEN JAIN Founder and CEO, Viome Until recently, serial entrepreneur Naveen Jain’s most ambitious project was Moon Express, a literal moonshot that aims to land a rocket on our cratered neighbor and use its resources to make other planets livable for humans. His newest mission feels just as profound: create a world without chronic disease. To accomplish it, he founded Viome, a bacteria-analysis company that examines the microorganisms in users’ guts and counsels them on how to keep harmful bacteria at bay. In September, the Bellevue, Washington–based company began selling its kits in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, India, and the Middle East. Harnessing technology developed at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, Viome employs artificial intelligence to analyze the digestive tract and its effects on the body’s…

If you want to understand how MTV sees its audience in 2017, you could do worse than YouTubing some highlights from August’s iteration of the network’s flagship broadcast, MTV Video Music Awards. Although the show nodded to the network’s most news-making moment of the past decade—Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 awards—by debuting Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” video (the latest reverberation in the stars’ feud), the rest of the live broadcast was drama free. The categories, to begin with, eschewed gender—just as the MTV Movie & TV Awards had three months earlier—so that Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars competed on level ground with Lorde and Ariana Grande for Artist of the Year (Sheeran won). The Moonman statuette itself, an homage to the iconic flag-planting astronaut…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $173.8 billion MARKET CAP* $470 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI Amazon’s recommendation system, introduced in 1998, suggested additional items for purchase based on the observedactions of similar users. PHILOSOPHY Any business task or consumer experience that can be auto-mated should be automated. REVEALING QUOTE “Much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface … quietly but meaningfully improving core operations,” CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2017 share-holder letter. KEY ACQUISITION Yap (2011), a cloud-based start- up that’s expert at converting speech to text, which reportedly helped lead to Alexa NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT Last April, Amazon released the technology powering Alexa as a stand-alone service so that any company can develop its own intelligent voice applications. WHY IT IS AHEAD Amazon has been the first…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $77.8 billion MARKET CAP* $135 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI Pioneering IBM engineer Arthur Samuel coined the phrase machine learning and in 1959 developed a first-of-its-kind pro-gram that could play checkers and learn from its experience. PHILOSOPHY Help businesspeople be better at their jobs, whether they’re doc-tors or tax preparers. REVEALING QUOTE “We are the ones that woke up the AI world here again,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told the CNBC per-sonality Jim Cramer in June. KEY ACQUISITION The Weather Company (around $2 billion, 2016) gave IBM access to approximately 2.2 billion fore-cast points worldwide, all trans-mitting data that Watson churns through to fuel multiple client services. NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT In September, IBM and MIT announced a 10-year partnership in an AI lab; one research goal is developing…

Consider your favorite T-shirt. Maybe it’s soft and worn, or fitted and new, or a recent pickup from a Kanye West or Taylor Swift tour. Whatever the style, chances are good the shirt contains polyester—a significant environmental pollutant that takes 200 years to degrade.If you don’t want the shirt to spend those years in a landfill, you could try passing it on for seven generations; maybe in two it would be fashionably retro. Even then, as you wash Kanye and Taylor (though never together), they will be shedding synthetic microfibers into the oceans. Now think about all the people in the world doing the same thing—humans consume 80 billion pieces of clothing a year, as reported in the 2015 documentary The True Cost—and you get a sense of how the…

RUGGISH PLAY RUGS $199 ruggishco.com “As a new mom, I’m always hunting for stylish baby goods so my apartment won’t look like a romper room. I was so excited to stumble upon these play mats— they have beautiful patterns on one side and fun maps on the other.” Danielle Dorn Creative director, Under the Canopy ELECTRA STRAIGHT 8 BIKE $1,050 electrabike.com “I love people watching and slow rolling on my bike. This Electra is one of my favorite possessions—a perfect mix of technology, style, and design.” Rob Martens Futurist and VP of strategy and partnerships, Schlage SWATCH WATCHES From $110 for watches pictured swatch.com “I grew up in Switzerland, the land of watches, and my parents bought me a new Swatch each birthday. The brand is iconic and timeless—pun intended!”…

Aside from a couple of visual tells—subtle patches of raised stitches and a plastic button on its cuff—the Levi’s Commuter Trucker looks exactly like what you’d expect from the 144-year-old brand: a timeless jean jacket that keeps you warm while looking cool. But appearances deceive. The jacket is actually an interface between you and your phone. Brush, tap, or cover the right spot and you can answer or ignore calls, switch up your music, or get travel-time updates, all without looking at a screen. The jacket is the first consumer product to emerge from Project Jacquard, an experimental initiative from Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group—an incubator that has worked on modular mobile phones, radar sensors, 360-degree films, and, now, textiles. Founded in 2014, Project Jacquard represents the coming…

As one of the world’s largest energy providers, it’s no surprise that Shell is investing heavily to future-proof for changing and rising energy demands. In fact, the company intends to invest up to $1 billion a year in new solutions by 2020 in three main areas: new fuels for transport, renewable power, and ways to connect customers with new business models for mobility and energy services. What’s surprising is that its approach is entrepreneurial, including collaborating with startups to unlock innovation. Some of these partnerships can be seen in the award-winning #makethefuture campaign, which supports six “bright energy” inventors whose creations are impacting communities around the world, such as taking safe, clean lights to Kenya. Last year, the inventions went viral in a music video featuring Jennifer Hudson. This year,…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $227.7 billion MARKET CAP* $850 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI In 1984, Apple hired legendary Xerox PARC computer scientist Alan Kay to research potential projects in the field. PHILOSOPHY Tech should serve humanity, not the other way around. REVEALING QUOTE “Siri isn’t just a voice assistant,” said Craig Federighi, SVP of soft-ware engineering, during Apple’s June developer event. “With Siri intelligence, it understands con-text. It understands your inter-ests. It understands how you use your device. It understands what you want next.” KEY ACQUISITION Emotient, a facial-recognition software startup, for around $100 million, in 2016 NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT The new chip in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, the A11 Bionic, incorpo-rates machine-learning technol-ogy that allows developers to build AI functions into their apps and have them processed on…

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE $96.2 billion MARKET CAP* $569.5 billion EARLY INTEREST IN AI In 1993, the company hired Car-negie Mellon computer scientist Xuedong Huang to lead its speech-recognition efforts; in 2016, Huang and his team’s algorithms exceeded humans’ transcription capabilities. PHILOSOPHY Machines will work with humans, not against them. REVEALING QUOTE “AI is at the intersection of our ambitions,” CEO Satya Nadella told an audience of Microsoft partners in September 2016, suggesting that it will let the company “reasonover large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence.” KEY ACQUISITION LinkedIn ($26.2 billion, 2016). The business network gives Micro-soft a deep well of company and employee data to make it smarter. NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT Microsoft debuted a real-time AI system for its enterprise cloud customers in August, which could help it…