Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023/2024 i Fast Company

HONEST COMPANY CEO CARLA VERNÓN saw her first diaper “cake” at a friend's baby shower in 2017. The Instagram-worthy centerpiece featured tiered stacks of Honest's flagship eco-friendly diapers and infant-care products, such as wipes and baby wash, all wrapped up with a bow. At the time, Vernón was managing brands like Annie's, Cheerios, and Larabar for General Mills. “I think of myself as a very nerdy consumer products brand builder,” says Vernón, who looks the part, wearing limegreen glasses, when we speak via Zoom in late September. The pride of place given to Honest's diaper cake made it clear to her that something about the brand was resonating. She made a mental note: “This generation is picking a different diaper than my parenting generation picked.” In the years since, interest…

AN ODD NEW EPISODE OF South Park began floating around Twitter last summer. The characters and setting looked familiar, and the voices were almost right, but something was slightly off. In the episode, Eric Cartman is disappointed that Hollywood actors have gone on strike. He creates a deepfake app that can put any actor's likeness into any movie and, with a friend, pitches it to Marc Andreessen. They also attempt to recruit Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, only to discover the actors are heading to Mars with Elon Musk. The mini-episode was not made by the South Park creators but by a company called Fable Simulation, which lifted assets from the longrunning animated series to showcase its new generative AI tool. Called Showrunner AI, it can write, direct, edit,…

EXCELLENCE IN INNOVATION THE “INTERNET OF THINGS” MAY NO longer be the term du jour, in part because the idea failed to meet its original promise of connecting billions of dumb objects to the cloud in service of mitigating all manner of potential supply-chain disruptions. But IoT technology remains a key to confronting some of our biggest business and environmental challenges. Wiliot makes an inexpensive Bluetooth beacon tag that can be attached to everything from food to drugs to apparel, enabling real-time tracking of location and condition. The stamp-size tag—powered by radio waves in the environment—contains an Arm processor and a radio, and it continually sends signal data collected from its various sensors to the Wiliot cloud for analysis. The results can be viewed via an app. In one use…

KATHY THRELFALL AND HER HUSBAND MOVED 42 years ago to a 240-acre ranch in Solano County, California, that was originally owned by her great-grandparents. Now 75, she still lives in the 150-year-old house on the property. She stayed after her husband died, even after she retired from farming a few years ago. Her daughter got married at the ranch, under an arch that Threlfall's grandmother added in the 1930s; her son, who lives in Los Angeles, comes to visit for weeks at a time. “I have a grandson who is 5 years old, and this is his favorite place in the world,” Threlfall says. On the ranch, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco and nestled in a county that's less than a thousand square miles, she says she feels a…

MARQUES BROWNLEE USHERS ME INTO HIS ROBOT ROOM, WHERE I STAND FACE-TO-FACE WITH COLOSSUS. AN IMPOSING YET GRACEFUL CONTRAPTION, THE APTLY NAMED $250,000 MECHANICAL ARM TOWERS OVER MY 6-FOOT-3 HOST, WHO IS GIVING ME A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH HIS STUDIO IN KEARNY, NEW JERSEY, ON A LATE-AUGUST MORNING. Brownlee is YouTube's preeminent maker of videos about newly released technology, and he acquired the rig to perform swoopy camera pans with more balletic precision than any human cinematographer could muster. The resulting shots have become a signature element of his gadget reviews. “So we built a dedicated set for it,” he explains matter-of-factly. Located in a rehabbed shipyard that's also home to a helicopter-tour service and numerous logistics companies, Brownlee's 7,000-square-foot facility is filled with high-end production gear. Some of the…

EXCELLENCE IN INNOVATION QUANTUM COMPUTERS PROMISE TO upend whole industries and our understanding of the world, but despite billions in investment and some scientific feats, they still can't do much. By carefully manipulating tiny physical building blocks known as qubits, the machines aim to exploit the weird behavior of the subatomic world and process vast amounts of data more quickly than classical computers can. To date, the effectiveness of quantum computers has been limited by the challenges involved in increasing the number of qubits from a few hundred to many thousands. U.K.-based Phasecraft is building algorithms to help nudge these noisy, finicky machines to quantum advantage sooner. “The more we can do on the algorithm side, the less we have to wait for the hardware to improve,” says cofounder Toby…

“ARE WE BOYCOTTING CHICK-FIL-A OVER THIS?” A PODcaster named Joey Mannarino asked his followers on Twitter last May, accusing the fried-chicken chain of pushing what he saw as an offensive political agenda. Of the more than 110,000 people who responded to the poll he'd attached, almost half clicked “Yes, boycott.” Being shunned is familiar territory for Chick-fil-A. The company has found itself in this spot repeatedly since 2012, when then-CEO Dan Cathy, a vocal Southern Baptist and son of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy, stepped into the heat of the gay marriage debate—on the “against” side. LGBTQ activists called for a boycott. When news spread that Cathy and his family had donated millions to anti-LGBTQ Christian groups, protesters dug in further. Last May, though, things were different. Mannarino is a…

WE NOW KNOW WHAT MANY EMPLOYEES HAD LONG SUSPECTED: The office isn't always necessary to do our jobs. Just four years ago, 75% of workers were fully on-site, according to Gallup, with only 4% of employees regularly working remotely. During the height of the pandemic, office attendance plummeted by as much as 90% in major cities; this year, with return-to-office mandates in full swing around the country and across almost all work sectors, those levels have only rebounded to about half of pre-pandemic occupancy. As a result, businesses of all stripes are reevaluating their approach to office design, looking for ways to persuade employees to show up in person. Fast Company turned to five architecture and design firms, each of which is grappling with the challenge both for clients and…

BEFORE Master of Business Administration Paragon of Harmonic Enterprise ASKED TO FRESHEN UP THE MBA, NAMING AGENCY VESPERTINE RETIRED THE outdated “master of business administration” title and replaced it with an ostentatiously named successor: the Paragon of Harmonic Enterprise. Agency founder Jason Hall says the grandiose name is designed to evoke a sense of weight and pomp in line with the effort required to earn a higher degree. While it may not tumble effortlessly off the tongue, Hall notes that many now-familiar names (e.g., the iPad) were dismissed early on. “Once the name is placed into context, it just starts to work.” The PHE invites people to think more holistically, weighing a company's output and ethos together—an approach that actually informed the birth of Harvard Business School and the first…

These days, our screens are our lives. From laptops and tablets to smar tphones and T Vs, we spend hours and hours daily star ing at pixels. Yet whether we're scrolling through memes or reading thought-provoking journalism, all that screen time is taking its toll. Research shows that frequent exposure to the blue light emitted by screens can damage retinal cells and cause vision problems. Consumer electronics company TCL is working to find ways to mitigate the dangers of screen time. The company's innovat ive NXTPAPER display technology helped earn the company a spot on Fast Company's list of the Next Big Things in Tech. Here, TCL's director of product planning Chris Saunders discusses how the company ‘s technology was developed with vision health in mind. 1 How does the…

SHE ROSE TO FAME PLAYING FRAN FINE, THE “FLASHY GIRL from Flushing,” on the CBS sitcom The Nanny, which she cocreated and produced. But it's Fran Drescher's latest role, as president of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, that has put her in the headlines. This year, she led members through a strike, campaigning for cost-ofliving increases and guardrails around the use of AI in entertainment. As of press time, negotiations between the labor union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are ongoing. What's your best habit, and what's your worst one? My best habit is being a person of word and deed. My worst one is that I get very emphatic, and people think I am angry [when] I'm really just being…

AI AND DATA ADA With help from GPT4, Ada is automating customer service for the likes of Meta, Verizon, and Shopify. GITHUB Copilot, GitHub's AI-powered coding assistant, is expanding into more parts of the coding process and integrating with popular development tools such as Visual Studio. NVIDIA As the chipmaker at the center of the AI boom, Nvidia has come up with its own image-creation models, optimized for its GPUs. RUNWAY This startup is looking beyond AI images to create entire videos from text and image prompts at increasingly higher quality and longer durations. SONY Sony's Aitrios platform uses power-efficient sensors to process computer-vision data locally before feeding it into AI models, so there's less dependence on the cloud. SOURCEGRAPH Some of the largest tech companies are training Sourcegraph's AI…

YEARS BEFORE THE RISE OF CHATGPT and Midjourney, Adobe knew that AI would be both a solution and a problem. In late 2019, the company introduced the Content Authenticity Initiative, in collaboration with The New York Times and Twitter, as a “nutrition label” for digital content, allowing users to see, for instance, if an image had been doctored in Photoshop. That's led to the launch of open-source tools for developers and technical standards for the industry. Adobe envisions a system in which users can click on an online image to reveal details about its origins. It has debuted a “content credentials” symbol that can be inserted through apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Bing Image Creator. The company has also demoed a website for comparing an image to its original…

What if there was a BETTER WAY TO MAKE AND DELIVER PIZZA TO YOU?” ASKED CNBC'S JIM CRAMER-SHIRT SLEEVES ROLLED UP, WAGGING HIS FINGER AT THE CAMERAAS HE PASSIONATELY SET UP A SEGMENT OF HIS POPULAR MAD MONEY SHOW IN JUNE 2018. “TURNS OUT, THERE IS, WHICH BRINGS ME TO ZUME, INC., A SILICON VALLEYBASED STARTUP TRYING TO BRING THIS INDUSTRY TO THE MODERN ERA.” CRAMER, ON LOCATION IN MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA, AND STANDING IN FRONT OF A SHINY RED FOOD TRUCK, OUICKLY INTRODUCED ZUME'S ROBOTS, CUING UP FOOTAGE OF A ROBOTIC ARM BALLETICALLY MOVING PIZZAS IN AND OUT OF OVENS INSIDE A WAREHOUSE. THIS, HE INTONED, WAS A REVOLUTION. “WE AUTOMATE EVERYTHING ELSE, WHY NOT PIZZA?” When Zume cofounder Alex Garden stepped into the frame, the frenetic energy spiked…