Fast Company Magazine - 100 Most Creative People in Business

In it's June 2010 issue Fast Company published it's annual list of the "100 Most Creative People in Business".



I expected to find it of interest after there being tons of good content (and people covered) in the 2009 iteration (posted about and linked to here) and found that this issue didn't disappoint. One interesting thing about the content is FC made the editorial decision to not feature anyone that has been previously profiled in the magazine (much less a prior "100 MCPiB" type person).

For reasons known only to me (nah, actually for reasons that I'll note here), below are the people and stories of those people that stood out:

#17 - Reid Hoffman - Founder and Chairman of LinkedIn. Profile features quotes from him that "people need to run their careers like real businesses" and in speaking of entrepreneurs... "I want to know that they care about people more broadly than themselves."

#21 - Josh Sapan - CEO of Rainbow Media... the umbrella company over AMC (which brought viewers "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men") and IFC. Interesting piece for it's mention of Sapan's outside interests... including being a published poet. I gotta be impressed with a corporate exec with such a creative bent.

#26 - "Shmuel "Mooly" Eden - VP/GM at Intel. Cool from the perspective of Eden's focus on consumer use of future technology.

#53 - Soraya Darabi - Product Lead for Drop.io. She got the cover of this FC issue and at 23 was responsible for social media marketing at The New York Times and now at 26 helps lead the efforts of Drop.io in the field of cloud data storage and sharing. Would be fascinating to know both how she landed the gig at the NYT and what she did to be successful there.

#60 - Fred Wilson - Venture Capitalist. Have heard of Wilson previously through his widely read blog A VC. Very cool this concept of transparency about what you're doing in business.

#68 - Caterina Fake - Past founder of Flickr and now Hunch. I find very interesting the idea behind Hunch... basically a recommendation engine that pulls from the likes and dislikes of over 1.5 million users to help guide said recommendations.

#69 - Charlene Li - Founder of Altimeter Group and social media guru type... and author of the book "Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed By Social Technologies". Yep, she definitely had me at "social media" and "author"...

#73 - Scott Belsky - Founder and CEO of Behance... a platform designed to bring together creatives and people looking for said creative talent. FC piece includes mention of the Behance "Action Method" project management product/system/way to help get stuff done.

Also from this issue, but not the 100 Most Creative list (though it seems he at least a candidate) was this short piece on Aviv Hadar... the 25 year old Portland resident behind the web design studio Think Brilliant.

All in all, lots of really interesting stuff from Fast Company this past month.

BusinessWeek Report on Startup Ventures

Interesting feature in the Nov 23 BusinessWeek issue.



Titled "World's Most Intriguing Startups", it details some of the companies that are poised for success during this downturn in business. Some of the startups contained within are Hunch... a "website that used the experiences of others to help people make decisions." The venture was started by Flickr founder Caterina Fake and is written about in the opening story from this BW report.

Another interesting startup report was "Augmenting Reality" on the Dutch startup Layar. Augmented reality is a very cool field in that it's about the overlay of digital data on a physical world... an example of which would be pointing your iPhone (via a now available free app) at something and pressing a button to then have information about that appear on the screen... example of which can be seen below:


Not part of the Startups Report, but also of interest from this issue was "Buddy, Can You E-Mail Me 100 Bucks?" about mobile to mobile phone transfers of money. Seems closely related to the topics in the blog post I did earlier this month on apps and m-commerce enabled websites.

Finally... neither part of the Startups Report nor this BW issue, "Gunning for an Elephant in Silicon Valley" was an interesting piece from the Oct 19 BusinessWeek on networking company, and Cisco rival, Arista. Founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Andreas Bechtolsheim, the venture appears to very much below in this post on hot new startups.