Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2015 i Fast Company

Carrie Brownstein MCP 201 2 Then Writer, actor, Portlandia Now Writer, actor, multiple projects; guitar and vocals, Sleater-Kinney When we highlighted Carrie Brownstein in 2012, she was pretty busy. The Portland, Oregon–based musician and actor had created critically lauded TV show Portlandia with Saturday Night Live vet Fred Armisen and was a member of indie-rock supergroup Wild Flag, among other things. Turns out that was nothing. These days, Brownstein is creating at a blistering pace. First of all, she, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss have re-formed their beloved band Sleater-Kinney, which had broken up in 2005. “I’m very wary of nostalgia as a motivating creative force,” says Brownstein. “So I said I would be happy to do the band if the way we approached it was to be in dialogue…

Public Radio Refugees Sarah Koenig Her true-crime narrative Serial captivated the Golden Age of TV crowd with edge-of-yourseat storytelling. Alex Blumberg StartUp, Blumberg’s series about launching a podcast network, offers an irresistibly frank look at entrepreneurship. Pop-Culture Whizzes W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery The hosts of Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period discuss one film each week—with salient asides. Kid Fury and Crissle The Read features two young, black, gay friends offering biting, hilarious takes on topics such as Beyoncé and Ferguson, Missouri. Multimedia YouTubers Tyler Oakley Psychobabble with Oakley and cohost Korey Kuhl gives Oakley’s YouTube fans longer-form pop dish. Grace Helbig Not Too Deep showcases silly interviews with her friends—a preview of her forthcoming E! late-night show? Celebrity Early Adopters Aisha Tyler Girl…

Susan Lyne President, BBG Ventures at AOL Tell us about BBG’s mission and how it fits with AOL. • Seven percent of venture funding goes to women-led startups. If 93% of the funding is going to 50% of the population, there’s an opportunity to focus on the other half. The other inspiration was #builtbygirls, AOL’s initiative to encourage young women to view technology as their friend. AOL had a millennial [entertainment news] brand called Cambio. We partnered with Girls Who Code and made them a proposition: Create the site that you and your friends would come to every day. They reworked the editorial policy and built new features, including a platform allowing girls to contribute content. In October, we relaunched Cambio as a site for girls, #builtbygirls—that’s the BBG in…

TECHNOVORE “I LIKE THOSE SHOES.” Thats Medium CEO Evan WilliamsÕs icebreaker as we sit down to chat at my Roadmap conference last November. “Thanks. You like this sole?” My blue tasseled slip-ons have purple ones. “A sole nobody sees ...” Williams completes my thought: “But you know its there.” Williams has spent more than 15 years creating Internet communications toolsÑBlogger, then Twitter, and now MediumÑand this is what has made him so successful: He notices the easily overlooked elements which often make everything else possible. Medium has become the talk of the tech, media, and design communities, in part because it’s Ev and also because a lot of people love debating whether Medium is a platform or a publisher (it’s both). But the unappreciated reason Medium is so compelling is…

2 billion Approximate number of stickers that Line users send each other daily. 40,000 Number of stickers available for Line users to choose from. 11,000+ Number of stickers submitted during a contest in the U.S. to create stickers for Line. 1 Line’s rank for top-grossing apps in the Apple and Google app stores worldwide, October 2014, according to analytics firm AppAnnie. $30 million Gross revenue from Line’s Creators Market in its first seven months. $2.49 Cost for a sheet of physical stickers featuring Line’s Brown the bear.…

During the autumn harvest season of 2013, a white-haired cotton farmer named Jerry Hamill received a gift in the mail: a hooded sweatshirt. Normally, he wouldn’t have thought much of that— sweat clothes aren’t an important part of his wardrobe—but this looked like a different class of garment. It was a rich navy blue and made of heavy cotton, with a sturdy metal zipper running up the front, and made by a company called American Giant. Hamill hadn’t heard of it; he isn’t the kind of guy who looks at labels, and so wouldn’t know that Slate had dubbed the product he was holding “the greatest hoodie ever made.” But he sure liked the way it looked when he tried it on. “Most sweatshirts, there ain’t much to ’em,” Hamill…

45 Anki When Anki Drive debuted during an Apple press conference in 2013, its iPhone-controlled race cars looked like a solid entry in the long but mostly disappointing legacy of toy robots. This past year, Anki transcended its hype: Players have since put 323,000 miles on the little racers. The toys function like a dystopian vision of Google’s autonomous cars, steering themselves around a flat vinyl track that players lay out on a floor. Onboard sensors scan the track 500 times per second, and algorithms determine how aggressive and competent each vehicle is. From an app (now both iOS and Android), users fire virtual weapons in a sort of tiny death match, battling each other or computer-driven cars. But Anki is thriving because, unlike a Tonka truck, its cars evolve.…

50 L’Oréal The $30.5 billion cosmetics giant L’Oréal is smartly investing in a future where makeup isn’t sold predominantly amid the hawking din of department store cosmetics counters. Last June, L’Oréal USA’s tech lab launched its first product, an app called Makeup Genius, which uses a phone’s front-facing camera to host the digital equivalent of a counter- side makeover. It recruited the firm behind many jaw-dropping visuals in the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to create startlingly realistic effects when users move and pucker. “Seeing is believing,” says Guive Balooch, VP of L’Oréal’s Connected Beauty Incubator. (Consumers downloaded the app more than 1.4 million times.) It’s just one of the ways L’Oréal stays au courant. To appeal directly to You-Tubers, L’Oréal gave video star Michelle Phan her own…

SHAKA SENGHOR SPENT 19 years in prison for murder. Since his release in 2010, he’s become a teacher at the University of Michigan, a published author, a sought-after speaker (his 2014 TED talk is a must-see), and an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, which is how he and I met. Senghor paid his debt, and he’s a one-person testimonial to the value that exists in everyone. And he doesn’t want to be the only one. There are currently two separate, parallel debates taking place in Silicon Valley about the future of its workforce. One is about how the technology industry can be more diverse. Much of the effort to that end has focused on encouraging girls and people of color to embrace tech at a young age. The other conversation…

“ Bruer makes a killer cup of cold-brew coffee. It’s functional and beautiful.” Kenny Ma Cofounder and CTO, LearnUp “ 10,000 Emerald Pools is the first single from the band Børns. It’s magical, a beautiful mix of folk and electronic that’s both modern and nostalgic of happy ’80s music. I’m excited to see what else they create and how they continue to innovate.” Azhar Hashem CMO, Sproutling Lucy Wallace Eustice Cofounder, MZ Wallace ” Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda is a fantastic read, and also enlightening about how little things in that region have changed.” Monica Zwirner Cofounder, MZ Wallace ” Purely Perfect is a new shampoo-andconditioner created by the man (Michael Gordon) who started Bumble and Bumble. I love it and recommend…

MASTER CLASS Rebecca and Uri Minkoff When accessories and apparel designer Rebecca Minkoff opened her eponymous company’s first store in Manhattan in November, she and her brother Uri, the business’s cofounder and CEO, wanted to create a wired environment where the tech was virtually invisible. “We hadn’t seen a lot of innovation in retail since the Apple stores,” says Uri. “What if you took the best from a mobile experience and brought it into the store? We started coming up with names like Retail 3.0 or immersive commerce.” In early 2014, the brother-sister team began collaborating with eBay’s retail innovation group to build a new kind of in-store experience (see sidebar, below). When shoppers walk in the store, they are greeted by a huge screen that lets them finger-swipe through…

WANTED London-based designer Yuri Suzuki has always been obsessed with music, but his dyslexia made playing it a struggle. “I used to play trombone,” he says. “But I got fired from the band because I couldn’t read any music. It’s sad, but great in that it drove me to do a project based on that experience.” That project is Ototo, a DIY kit that transforms any conductive object into a musical instrument. Ototo comes with a blackand-white circuit board that’s pre programmed with 50 sets of sounds (piano, barking dogs, etc.) and 12 colorful alligator clips that connect to objects, turning them into fanciful, playable keyboard keys. Additional sensors react to light, pressure, and breath, adding extra dimensions of sound. Since its debut on Kickstarter last February, Ototo has been…

17 Tesla Motors: For pushing the limits of affordable battery power Tesla’s Model S, its first mass-market luxury sedan, can travel up to 265 miles per charge. And the company encouraged the competition to join the electric revolution— by making its patents available to all. A luxury Tesla SUV is slated for later this year. TESLA 1. Model Supgrade Tech like sign-reading cameras make it the most advanced semiautonomous car on the road. 2. Factory boom Tesla is building a $5 billion factory that can make lithium-ion battery packs for 500,000 cars annually. . . 3. Affordable future . . . reducing battery prices 30% and moving Tesla toward its goal: a $35,000 electric car by 2017. 18 Toyota: For leading the way in fuel-cell technology Later this year, Toyota…

31 Made in Kigali “In Rwanda, everyone wears a very classic and conservative style,” says Scorpio Ramazani Khoury. “The younger generation is out there trying to be stylish, but there is no establishment that sets trends.” So this 26-year-old, a mineral trader by profession, is trying to lead the way—and in the process, boost Rwanda’s reputation as a global exporter (of textiles, of course, but also minerals). Her fashion house, Made in Kigali, expanded in a year to employ nearly 50 tailors, and is currently working with the minister of trade on a large-scale training center in Kigali that could handle 3,000 tailors. “We need to grow the industry so that by the time the tailors are ready, two or three years from now, the market will be waiting for…

UPDATES: Catching up with previous MICs Xiaomi Milestones: Became the number-one smartphone seller in China; doubled 2013 revenue. Challenges: Inadequate data encryption led to privacy scares; faced temporary bans in India over patent infringements. Buzz: GoldieBlox “ IF YOU’RE TOO NERVOUS OR AFRAID TO PUT SOMETHING OUT THERE FOR FEAR IT WON’T BE PERFECT, YOU CAN’T MOVE FORWARD. JUST KEEP IMPROVING IT.” —GoldieBlox CEO Debbie Sterling Milestones: Unveiled three new toys; received the Toy Industry Association’s People’s Choice Toy of the Year award. Challenges: Some negative reviews cited lowquality components and disinterested kids. Buzz: Airbnb Milestones: In July, closed a $475 million round of funding, giving it a valuation of $10 billion; opened a 16,000-square-foot “customer experience center” in Portland, Oregon. Challenges: Still fighting major regulatory battles in cities like…

Let’s start with a simple fact: More people have downloaded Serial than have watched Girls, Mad Men, or Louie. But enough about Serial: the podcasting world will produce bigger hits in the years ahead. What’s most interesting about the series is that it is but the most prominent example of an experiment that could reshape business models throughout the entertainment industry. “We’re at the very beginning of how [podcasting] is enabling innovation,” says Alex Blumberg, a This American Life veteran who struck out on his own in 2014 with a venture-backed startup podcast network, called Gimlet Media. Adds Jake Shapiro, CEO of PRX, which distributes popular podcasts such as the design show 99% Invisible and Criminal (a nonserialized true-crime program): “Content production, marketing, the technical distribution, the audience experience, and…

Swipe for options As they enter the store, shoppers encounter a huge interactive screen that shows off Minkoff’s wares and allows customers to digitally choose items to try on. An iPad-armed salesperson then brings the requested clothes to a fitting room. A smart mirror helps out Inside the dressing room, RFID chips attached to the clothing’s tags trigger an interactive mirror to digitally display the items. Using the mirror’s touch screen, customers can ask a clerk to bring different sizes or styles and can customize their lighting. Save picks for later Users who have the Rebecca Minkoff mobile app and PayPal can check out right in the dressing room. And if they decide not to buy anything, they can text themselves a digital record of the exact pieces and sizes…

500,000 People with hepatitis C who die each year 117,000 Patients, as of September 30, 2014, who have been treated with Sovaldi, which has been shown to be 90% effective in curing hepatits C. $11 billion Amount Gilead paid to acquire Pharmasset (maker of an early-stage Sovaldi). $8.55 billion Revenue generated by Sovaldi in its first nine months on the market. 10 Months between Sovaldi’s commercial release and FDA approval for Harvoni, Sovaldi’s sequel, which creates a oncedaily pill that’s even more effective than the original. 28 Other drugs in Gilead’s pipeline.…

2014 was the year that drones went from creepy military gear to consumerfriendly video tool, and it’s almost entirely due to DJI, one of the world’s fastestgrowing drone manufacturers. The Shenzhen, China–based company makes the ubiquitous Phantom line, a relatively inexpensive ($1,300 for its best) remote-control camera quadcopter. In the past three years, sales grew by a factor of 125. The small and light drones—which dominate YouTube and made cameos on South Park and The Big Bang Theory—can fly up to 35 mph and soar more than 900 feet in the air. They have GPS and stabilizing sensors, can hold their position in the air, and return to where they launched if they lose contact with the remote. All that, says DJI director of aerial imaging Eric Cheng, has made…

37 AnyPerk Some companies have free on-site haircuts and nap pods. For everyone else, there’s AnyPerk. The startup is essentially an outsourced HR benefit program: For $10 per employee per month (or less, depending on the scale), AnyPerk connects com panies with goodies its workers want. In only three years, AnyPerk has scored more than 2,500 clients—including Pinterest and Cushman & Wakefield. Revenue grew five times between 2013 and 2014. CEO Taro Fukuyama launched AnyPerk after talking to startup founders who wanted to hire people away from lavish places like Facebook and Google. “I asked them what perks they had, and they didn’t have anything,” he says. At the same time, he discovered that larger companies had trouble negotiating for and managing their employee perks. Fukuyama created a software platform…

INTERNATIONAL A closer look at key businesses from four of our global lists Architecture 1. Houzz 2. Bjarke Ingels Group 3. The Living 4. Perkins + Will 5. C.F. Møller Architects 6. NBBJ 7. Svigals + Partners 8. MMA Architects 9. Rockwell Group 10. Heatherwick Studio Banking 1. InVenture 2. Stripe 3. BehavioSec 4. Ripple 5. Expensify 6. Apple 7. Braintree 8. Nice Systems 9. Premise 10. BlueVine Big Data 1. Catapult 2. Next Big Sound 3. Mark43 4. Netflix 5. Poshly 6. Ayasdi 7. IBM 8. Frost Data Capital 9. Splunk 10. SumAll China 1. Alibaba 2. Apricot Forest 3. Wandoujia 4. Baidu 5. Wanda 6. Tencent 7. Xiaomi 8. S.F. Express/STO Express/Zhongtong Courier/Shanghai Yunda Express 9. Microsoft 10. Scoutbots ADVERTISING/MARKETING 1. 7 2andSunny For reflecting our modern culture…