Monday, June 01, 2009

Fast Company Magazine - June 2009 Issue

Lots of interesting stuff from the June issue of Fast Company Magazine.



The cover story is "The 100 Most Creative People in Business" and I've listed below some of the ones that struck me as particularly interesting (omitting some that I find interesting, but already know about). The Fast Company link on each person has both the write-up from the magazine and further information about said person's activities:

#4: Reed Hastings - CEO of Netflix. Nothing terribly insightful in the piece, but I find Netflix as a company interesting both from the perspectives of what it does and how it manages employees (i.e. trusting them to do right).

#11: Prith Banerjee - Director of HP Labs. Having toured HP Labs in the past, I can vouch that it's a fascinating place where they work on lots of cool stuff.

#16: Dave Morin - Senior Platform Manager at Facebook. I found this to be interesting in that Morin is the responsible for Facebook Connect... an initiative to let users log on to over 8,000 different sites using their Facebook login. Seems to be a much needed and big step forward in allowing people to build and link their social network identities among multiple sites.

#17: Stephen Chau - Product Manager for Google Maps and Google Earth. Interesting in that he works on a really compelling application... particularly when you consider actual photos now being included in Google Maps.

#34: Evan Williams - CEO of Twitter. Easily the most talked about website of the last year.

#37: Shai Reshef - Founder of University of the People offering close to free open-source education.

#41: Maurice Sendak - Writer of the acclaimed children's book "Where the Wild Things Are"... which is being released this fall as an incredibly cool looking feature film.

#46: Jim Jannard - Creator of the new digital movie camera, the Red One. Interesting in it's potential as a disruptive technology... serving the role of current $150,000 cameras at a cost of $17,500 (and already being used by some major directors).

#59: Noah Brier - Head of Strategic Planning at Barbarian Group Advertising. Responsible for a very compelling website called "Brand Tags" at which consumers give their quick impressions of various brands... quite the database of information being compiled.

#78: David Wiley - BYU Professor who (similar to Shai Reshef) is a driver of cheap, open-source education online.

#80: Jane McGonigal - Director of Games at the Institute for the Future. Creator of massive multi-player online games that can have a social impact.

#98: Scott Schuman - Blogger whose website http://www.thesatorialist.com/ has launched his career as a writer and photographer.

Two other things of interest from this Fast Company issue were the letter from the editor with mention of HP Marketing guy David Roman's interview about Shaun White and the story about the web bookmarking site http://www.twine.com/ launched by Nova Spivack (whose grandfather happens to be the late management guru, Peter Drucker).