Fast Company Features - on Pinterest, Windows 8, Uniqlo and Coursera

After not reading Fast Company for a few months, I went through three issues recently and found several features that stood out.

The Aug issue had "Cheap, Chic, And Made For All: How Uniqlo Plans To Take Over Casual Fashion" with Jeff Chu writing on the fast-growing Japan-based casual apparel retailer. Very interesting company that recently opened it's first West Coast store in San Francisco and next week is launching it's US online store.

The Sept edition of FC had a piece on a topic of interest in "How Coursera, A Free Online Education Service, Will School Us All." Written by Anya Kamenetz, it's an excellent look at the company teaching hundreds of thousands online, for free. Fascinating topic that I've previously linked to pieces about under the tag online education.

The Oct issue focused on Design and included "Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest Into The World’s Greatest Shopfront?" by Max Chafkin and "Windows 8: The Boldest, Biggest Redesign In Microsoft’s History" from Austin Carr. Interesting pieces both on a new company and an established coporation doing something different.

Fast Company Mar 2012 "50 Most Innovative Companies" Issue

There was a bunch of interesting content from the March edition of Fast Company Magazine. It was the annual "50 Most Innovative Companies" issue and below are the businesses and associated writing that stood out (doesn't discount the companies on the full list not noted here, just that I didn't read anything on them that was terribly new to me)...

#5 - Square: There was a fairly lengthy profile of founder Jack Dorsey done by Ellen McGirt. It's well written and interesting content on a fascinating guy (Dorsey also co-founded Twitter) and company doing incredibly well in the fortified barriers to entry financial services industry.

#12 - Southern New Hampshire University: Excellent feature piece done by Anya Kamenetz about online education offerings from the traditional not for profit university.

#13 - Jawbone: Interesting profile from Farhad Manjoo on the consumer electronics maker noted as "one of the hottest private companies in the world."

#19 - Airbnb: Another long piece, this one by Austin Carr, on the successful vacation (but, not exclusively) rental facilitation company. That description sure leaves something to be desired so fortunately the Carr story details well Airbnb and its design-centric focus.

#24 - Starbucks: Featured was an excellent look by Jon Gertner at the company and how its returned to success by focusing less on simple replication expansion and more on performance and innovation. Also of interest from the piece was mention of future growth into the area of health and wellness.

#29 - Red Bull Media House: Red Bull an interesting company in the unconventional way its grown in part through extreme sports affiliation and Teressa Iezzi details in this profile its extension of sports sponsorship to a content division.

#34 - Chipotle: Interesting profile by Danielle Sacks on the fast food company with detail beyond what I've seen about efforts around an organic, sustainable and humane food supply. Mention also made of a Chipotle YouTube video with now 6M views.

#41 - Kickstarter: Probably the shortest piece of those I've highlighted, but still an interesting one by Rachel Arndt on the platform being more and more heavily used for funding creative ventures (noted in the piece that 17 Sundance films used Kickstarter).

Fast Company Feb issue: Changing Business & Careers

Couple of really good features in the latest issue of Fast Company.




First two pieces that stood out both relate to the cover verbiage and and get into how business as well as career management differs from their past iterations. Starting things off, magazine editor Robert Safian wrote the long (and long titled) This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business. Really interesting content that looks at change in business and how people are navigating careers from the standpoint of a toolbox of skills to take anywhere rather than simply hitching early to a corporation and hanging on.

Closely related to this career management path was the companion piece of The Four-Year Career by Anya Kamenetz. Solid stuff about how jobs and people's employment in them is going to change over time and workers should expect, be ready for and use to their advantage this change.

Not really connected to the first two stories, but also interesting was MakerBot's 3-D Printers Let Consumers Dream Up Prototypes Of Pretty Much Anything. But Do We Need More Plastic? by Rob Walker. The creation of actual objects at home based on the specs... an entirely new concept that could well become common in the future.

Fast Company Dec/Jan Issue: Toms Shoes, Louis C.K., General Assembly, Bluefin Labs, Nest

Several short pieces of interest from the Dec '11 / Jan '12 issue of Fast Company magazine.

In the Now section of the magazine was Toms Founder Blake Mycoskie's Fashion-Forward Childhood. Nothing terribly new in the short piece, but Toms Shoes an interesting company given it's practice of giving away a pair of shoes for each sold.

Also notable for the subject was Louis C.K.: The Next Steve Jobs Will Be A Chick. As this CNN story details, C.K. has been selling online for $5 a self-produced standup special and after a few weeks is now at $1M in revenue. Very interesting approach taken by C.K. and also cool given the $280K+ in charitable donations he's already dispersed from the proceeds.

Two longer, but not feature length pieces from this issue were on augmented education and utilization of Twitter for business intelligence...

Anya Kamenetz penned General Assembly Provides Entrepreneurial Skills To A Chosen Few about the New York-based startup which offers classes and education programs in the fields of "technology, design, and entrepreneurship". Seems a solid concept for a business as education certainly can't stop with the traditional receipt of a college diploma.

On a company working to aggregate and make accessible some heavily fragmented information, Rachel Arndt wrote Bluefin Mines Social Media To Improve TV Analytics. Selling services to "brands, agencies and TV Networks", Bluefin Labs works in an interesting area.

Finally, this issue of Fast Company had a short piece on the company Nest and it's smart thermostat. Fascinating product designed with user experience in mind from former Apple exec Tony Faddell.

Fast Company Magazine - TED / Alex Bogusky

Two really interesting pieces in the Sept 2010 issue of Fast Company Magazine.



In "How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite" Anya Kamenetz profiles the famous (at least in the circles that most Fast Company readers run in) TED Conference and how it's extended out beyond the namesake annual event in Long Beach.

One avenue of extending reach for the non-profit enterprise is through the TEDx program of allowing virtually anyone anywhere to stage a "TEDx Conference" based on the format, content and ideals of the main conference. Even more interesting than this idea of releasing control of the events is the release of event content via TED talks online. With some 700 talks posted on the TED website (all viewable via the iPhone, thank you very much) there's plenty of content out there and an 18 minute cap on each speaker makes each ripe for easy consumption.

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Also from this issue and not in the same "opportunity to learn stuff" as TED talks, but riveting in it's own right was "Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World's Hottest Agency to Find His Soul."

It's a look at the career path of the former Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising guru and how he's "finding himself" since abruptly quitting the industry. Just the stuff about Bogusky and what he's doing now would be interesting enough, but author Danielle Sacks spends time with a good number of Bogusky's former colleagues and from this examines the question of motive behind the career change.

Sacks doesn't try to make any definitive statements, but does bring up whether Bogusky is really just steering his career in a now hot in business direction. Part of this is also consideration of whether he's a classic narcissist getting off on the idea of a grand manipulation of people and how they view him.

Just a very interesting examination of an interesting subject.

Sept 2009 Fast Company Magazine - Open Content Ed & Other Stuff

Some interesting stuff from the September 2009 issue of Fast Company... including a feature story about a fascinating topic I've been hearing frequently about of late.



FC writer Anya Kamenetz penned "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education"... a long title given for a piece about an important topic. The concept is "open content" education, basically making available online learning that previously had been held behind an (often extremely expensive) brick and mortar wall.

The leading force behind the movement seems to be BYU professor David Wiley... who is also heavily involved in both non-profit and for profit private enterprise around open-content (or open-source) education. The first I heard of the movement or concept was from a Nov 2008 Time Magazine article about Western Governors University and more recent mentions of YouTube EDU and Apple iTunes U.

Attached to the Kamenetz piece is Fast Company's "Five Startups to Watch"... with these and other companies being part of the inaugural Venture Capital in Education Summit held earlier this year. The field is growing and I'm terribly interested from both a macro and personal level.

Big picture, the concept in it's various forms and representations should make education more available to all and for myself, I'm thinking of it as a way to find resources and forums to improve my writing.

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In addition to that on open source education, there were two other pieces from this FC issue that stood out to me.

The first was "Heard of Allegiant Air? Why It's the Nation's Most Profitable Airline" about a carrier profitably serving mostly small markets (and doing it well I can say from personal experience).

The authors of "Made to Stick", Dan and Chip Heath, provide the second with "The Gripping Statistic: How to Make Your Data Matter"... about how to describe data and have it make sense. An example they give of something that could be worded better is "disposable diapers used could stretch to the moon and back 7 times". The Heath brothers point is that this doesn't tell you much, because if the trash generated was cut in half, "to the moon and back 3.5 times" still seems like a heck of a lot.

Fast Company Magazine - Jul/Aug 2009 Issue

Couple of interesting articles from the most recent Fast Company Magazine.



First and foremost is an investigative report titled "Beyond the Grid" by Anya Kamenetz. It looks in great detail at the concept of small-scale household or business power generation and it's potential. Not surprisingly, this idea of a "micro-grid" is being fought by large power utilities looking to prevent this competition by either installing and controlling it themselves or by simply making it go away. What's also very interesting in the piece is the mention of clean-energy advocates such as Al Gore trumpeting the idea of an "electric super-highway"... which is much less efficient and more costly than the micro-grid. Fascinating piece.

Also from this issue is the cover story "Amazon Taps It's Inner Apple" about the company's dominance of the online book market and impact on the larger brick and mortar based publishing industry. Closely tied into that is the speculation of how Apple might get into the fray with a larger version of it's iTouch / iPhone that could compete with the Amazon Kindle.

Another interesting piece is "Why Walgreens Is Building Its Own Universal Health-Care System" about the clinics that Walgreens operates in both it's retail stores as well as onsite at various companies. The retail-based side is interesting from it's ability to offer quick and easy (read: affordable) health care to the uninsured, but the corporate located side even more interesting in it's goal of keeping a company's employees healthy and productive.

Last story to note is titled "Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden". As someone who doesn't find appetizing the idea of eating at Olive Garden, I was interested in this story not so much from being about the food, but rather about the corporation and how it's run.