Over the course of 24 hours, the streaming service made an about-face. Yesterday, concerned cord-cutters expressed dismay about a new channel Roku allowed on its service: Infowars. This, of course, is the Alex Jones-controlled channel that has for years peddled conspiracy theories, such as that 9/11 was an inside job...

Photos from the Fast Company Innovation Festival show businesspeople as you’ve never seen them before. Since its inception in 1995, Fast Company has sought to portray business and businesspeople in surprising ways. Our focus on innovation–as opposed to mere scale or power–allows us to look beyond...

What does innovation look like in 2019 and beyond? The speakers at the fourth annual Fast Company Innovation Festival weigh in. At a time when lack of faith in institutions—government, corporations, and, yes, the news media—seems to be at an all-time high, business and thought leaders who took the stage...

On Tuesday, Chinese media reported that one of the cotton seeds aboard the Chang’e 4 lunar lander sprouted, marking the first time that any biological matter has ever grown on the moon. Unfortunately, the sprout died after nine days upon the beginning of the lander’s first lunar night on Sunday. That’s because...

Yup, you heard it right – Amazon has updated the remote included with Fire TV Stick. Before you throw your computer out of the window in celebration, this is actually cool. I promise. If you don’t know what Amazon‘s Fire TV Stick is, here’s a picture: And if that didn’t help, the Fire TV Stick is basically a...

Gillette, a company that sells razors, triggered a slew of right wing celebrities on social media yesterday with an advertisement featuring a new take on its old “the best a man can get” slogan. The video in question is nearly two minutes long and serves as a vehicle to call out toxic masculinity. It depicts men...

The Delaktig line of hackable furniture, developed with British design star Tom Dixon, is growing in a big way. In 2016, Ikea teamed up with the British designer Tom Dixon and design students at Parsons to develop the Delaktig “hackable” sofa–an aluminum daybed with swappable modular components...

After Alex Jones was effectively banned from the internet — or at least his major distribution channels — last August, it appeared that we’d be rid of his half-baked conspiracy theories once and for all. Or, that’s what we thought, anyway. Following multiple “strikes” for content that violated its terms of...

Google just discontinued one of its best and most underrated products, the Chromecast Audio. On the plus side, the company is offering a great deal as it gets rid of inventory: you can now buy the $35 dongle for just $15 on Google’s website. Launched in 2015, Chromecast Audio was an easy way to add casting abilities...

The race to likability starts on Instagram. Even a year ago, it would have been (almost) unimaginable that a rising political star would live-stream his dental cleaning as a potential stepping stone to the White House. But that’s the reality we live in today, shaped and suffused and reconstructed by social...

When people compare themselves to Facebook friends they see as “better off,” they report worse physical health symptoms, says a new study. Facebook can have a serious impact on mental health: Studies show that spending time on the social network, which encourages endless scrolling and endless comparison...

The Information reports that Amazon is putting together a game streaming service that will beam titles from the cloud right to your devices, so you can play without installing them, or even owning a powerful machine to run them. The service will see Amazon compete with Google – which is currently testing its Project...

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. It’s very easy to misread and overestimate achievements in artificial intelligence. And nowhere is this more evident than in the domain of human language, where appearances can falsely hint at...

Matt Cox knew he would be criticized when he forced his 10-year-old daughter to walk 5 miles to school in 36-degree weather as her punishment for being suspended from the school bus twice for bullying. “I know a lot of you parents are not going to agree with this, but that is alright, because I’m doing what I feel...

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and connected services. Google’s Chrome is arguably the world’s most popular desktop browser. If you’re anything like me, you might have a huge number of tabs open all the time. So,...

The “Doodle For Google” contest is open for submissions from US children in grades K-12 again, this year with more than $80K in prizes for the national winner. The annual contest kicked off earlier this week with a performance by everyone’s favorite muppet… and a felt frog. If you’re a kid, this happened way...

Donald Trump Jr. recently likened his father’s proposed border wall with Mexico to that of a zoo fence meant to contain animals. “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo?” the now-deleted Instagram post asks? “Because walls work. At face value, the comment is insensitive. But given the administration’s...

You’ll want to add these six shows to your playlist. Google Podcasts and PRX kicked off a podcast creator program back in October, and thousands of would-be podcasters from over 100 countries answered the call. Now, Google has announced the first round of shows selected to take part in the podcast boot camp run...

Could Punkt’s high-design, low-tech “dumbphone,” the MP02, really help me digitally detox? I decided to find out. Did your 2019 New Year’s resolutions include spending less time with your smartphone? You could activate Apple’s “Screen Time” functionality on your iPhone...

Could Punkt’s high-design, low-tech “dumbphone,” the MP02, really help me digitally detox? I decided to find out. Did your 2019 New Year’s resolutions include spending less time with your smartphone? You could activate Apple’s “Screen Time” functionality on your iPhone...

SCL pleaded guilty to U.K. data laws. And we may soon learn a whole lot more about all the data it collected. The Cambridge Analytica saga has been going on now for more than a year. The long and the short of what we’ve learned thus far is that the company tried to hoover up as much user data as it possibly...

A top court adviser argued that the “right to be forgotten” doesn’t need to be applied globally. Google just got a huge European legal boost. Maciej Szpunar, an adviser to the European Union’s top court, argued that search companies like Google should not have to enforce the “right...

Older Americans are more likely to share fake news on Facebook, researchers say. A study of American Facebook users has found that older Americans are more likely to share fake news on the social network than its younger users. The study was conducted by researchers at Princeton University and New York University and...

TechCrunch reports that Instagram has introduced a handy new feature in its iOS app that lets you share the same post from multiple accounts that you run. That should make it easy for content creators looking to promote their work on their personal and brand accounts, as well as businesses with multiple profiles for...

An investigative report shows that the personal data economy is alive and kicking. Facebook and Google grab headlines for their roles in the massively profitable “personal data economy.” You know, the business of buying and selling your personal browsing habits to advertisers, pollsters, and other...

Square, the payments app founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is making it easier for app developers to charge customers within their mobile experiences. Today, the company launched its new Square In-App Payments Software Development Kit (SDK), which is available for iOS, Android, and Google’s Flutter...

Jean Case’s new book looks at how successful entrepreneurs have made their breakthroughs. Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, learned to openly encourage failure because it provides concrete direction when building things like self-driving cars. Neil Blumenthal, the cofounder and...

Sandy Parakilas warned Facebook execs that the company’s data-sharing policies could have potentially damaging consequences–but his warnings were downplayed. The iPhone maker has hired Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook employee who testified before the United Kingdom’s Parliament as to how...

Every year since 2009, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced his New Year resolutions; for 2019, he intends to “host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society — the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties.” Zuckerberg noted in his Facebook post...

Early this morning, Bloomberg reported that Samsung doesn’t let users uninstall the Facebook app from some of its phones. The story states that Facebook app comes pre-installed in select Samsung devices and users can only disable it, but can’t delete it from their phones. However, that’s not the whole picture....

In its CES announcements, Google revealed a bunch of useful updates to Google Assistant including navigation, travel, and translation features. Here are the most notable changes that’ll help you in your daily interaction with Google Assistant. Use Assistant with maps Now, Google Maps users on iOS and Android will be...

For pedophiles, a single hashtag opened the door to one of Instagram’s seediest corners, one where images of sexually exploited children were openly traded as if they were collectibles. For anyone willing to engage, finding images of child sexual abuse was about as simple searching for a laptop on Craigslist. The...

Last year, Twitter touted a handful of features meant to spur conversation on the platform. Or, “increase the health of public conversation,” as CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress last year. At CES today, company representatives confirmed to Engadget that the features would roll out to certain users in the coming weeks...

Last year, we saw a bunch of brands launch smart speakers with touchscreens, including a revamped Echo Show from Amazon and several devices powered by Google Assistant. Lenovo was one of the first out of the gate in 2018, and it brought a fun new smart display to show off at CES – the Smart Clock. It’s a compact...

Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet provider, is temporarily disabling some of its privacy-related features following a request from Google. The company, founded in 2015 by privacy activists, said in a blog post that it would be disabling three key features (Stealth Mode, Remote SMS and SIM Switch Defense) “due to...

In an attempt to build up its ad business, Amazon is reportedly letting brands send customers samples of their products. It’s a known and perhaps depressing fact that Amazon knows a lot about us. The company’s many tentacles have become a ubiquitous part of our lives. And the Jeff Bezos-founded company...

Nope, your old Android phone isn’t suddenly a 5G phone on AT&T’s network. Yesterday AT&T rolled out a software update to its Android phones that changed the 4G logo to a 5G logo, claiming its current service is now “5G.” However, those phones on AT&T’s network...

Once one-of-a-kind, the fabled 931 bag can now be yours… for a price. In 1963, the industrial design legend Dieter Rams was just beginning his three-decade run as Braun’s chief designer. He wanted to surprise his wife Ingeborg with a gift. So in what certainly sounds like a slight abuse of power, he...

“Now that we realize our brains can be hacked, we need an antivirus for the brain.” Those were the words of Yuval Noah Harari, famous historian and outspoken critic of Silicon Valley. The sentence, which was part of a recent interview by Wired’s Nick Thompson with Harari and former Google design ethicist...

At CES, hardware companies are inviting us to bury our heads in the sand–deep. This year, Amazon accidentally shared our private conversations with random people. Facebook purposely gave away our data–including our messenger logs–to other corporations. Google had its social network...

If you want to see how platforms can save humanity, don’t look at Facebook. Look at pizza. On a recent Hawaiian vacation, Don stayed at a truly luxurious resort. It wasn’t his style. He couldn’t help but notice the contrast with the poorer sections of the island where locals lived and tourists...

A Japanese billionaire is giving away 100 million yen to 100 lucky Twitter users who retweet him. The Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, who tweets under the handle @YouSuck2020, has broken the record for the most retweeted tweet. On January 5th, Maezawa tweeted to his followers that he’ll...

You will never believe how J.K. Rowling believes wizards dispose of their droppings. Or maybe you will? Both sides are represented–and confused–on Friday Afternoon Twitter. The sheer breadth of world literature is mind-boggling. Centuries of sprawling stories, both acclaimed and overlooked. You could...

Many in the tech community have resigned themselves to new federal privacy regulation, but there’s no guarantee Congress can get it done during the Trump era. After all the privacy scandals (starring Facebook, Google, and others) in 2016 and 2017—and after more than a decade in which a sprawling and...

McDonald’s embraces the hangover, Wealthsimple targets today, Apple gets colorful, and Equinox gets arty. There’s a reason not a lot of people Google “cheapest child car seat.” Obviously price is always a consideration, but there are just some things that you don’t really want to...

Ah, portrait mode. Ever since Huawei pioneered the depth-sensing tech and Apple ran with it, it seems every other Instagram photo has that faux-DSLR look. Unfortunately, our smartphones aren’t exactly perfect at imitating the shallow depth of field of a real large-sensor camera, so it’s important to help the tiny...

So much for a happy 2019. China’s biggest smartphone maker, which is already embroiled in several geopolitical rows, so far isn’t doing itself any favors when it comes to optics in the new year. Just before midnight on December 31, 2018, two Huawei employees sent a tweet from the company’s...

Traffic drones, AI-powered airports, grocery-delivering robots: Design and technology are quietly reshaping how people and goods move around the world. Mobility is at the center of an exciting Venn diagram. The work of designing the present and near future of how we get around—on the ground, in the air, and...