Fast Company

The startup’s service for investors is mobile and free—and now it’s in more places.

Robinhood grabbed our attention for years while it was still on the drawing board. The company succeeded in rocking the financial boat when it launched in Dec 2014 as the first mobile-first, fee-free brokerage, allowing users to trade stocks without commissions or account fees right from your smartphone. Today, the company is announcing partnerships that will let users of financial services StockTwits ( one of Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies in Finance in 2012), Openfolio, and Quantopian trade directly using Robinhood’s platform. (Educational finance company Rubicoin will also integrate Robinhood services when it launches in December.)

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The $99 headset will be followed by the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR. But the ecosystem needs much more content to blossom.

Fast Company knows you’re curious about VR, but probably still have a lot of questions. That’s why we are launching a new column where our own Daniel Terdiman will answer all of your questions about the new technology. So start sending your burning VR questions to Daniel now at dterdiman@fastcompany.com

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In a nondescript building in L.A., Fox’s “three amigos” are helping to define Hollywood’s VR future.

Fast Company knows you’re curious about VR, but probably still have a lot of questions. That’s why we are launching a new column where our own Daniel Terdiman will answer all of your questions about the new technology. So start sending your burning VR questions to Daniel now at dterdiman@fastcompany.com

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Produce your own power, from the comfort of home.

An abandoned farm in rural Spain, a mile from the nearest tiny village, is the unlikely site of cutting-edge energy technology. The new farmhouse under construction on the property will eventually be powered partly by the owners’ poop.

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The 10-year-old private company will be profitable starting in the first quarter of 2016. Here’s how CEO Kara Goldin did it.

When Kara Goldin founded Hint Water in 2005, it wasn’t because of a lifelong mission to start a sugarless beverage company.

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“Once” is for the young, footloose, fancy free . . . and environmentally bankrupt.

If you watch enough advertising aimed at anyone aged 14 to 30, certain patterns of tone, image, and style emerge. Young people, just livin’ the good life, embracing the moment, seizing the day and all that. To draw attention to the huge amount of waste created by single-use plastic water bottles, reusable bottle brand Bobble has tapped all these well-tread commercial cliches to reach the exact same audience.

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Skiiing behind a horse? Sure, why not.

At first it seems like one of those made up XTREME!!! sports born out the mid-’90s, especially for the X-Games. Like skysurfing or street luge. But skijoring has quite a long tradition. The name comes from the Norwegian term for ski driving, and the sport itself was a demonstration sport in the 1928 Winter Olympics. Here, Canon and director Marcus Söderlund give it the epic journey treatment for the band’s ongoing “Come and See” series.

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An early champion of user-friendly design, Fiskars tackles your toolshed.

“We have a saying here that even the simplest things can be made better or smarter,” says Steve Stokes, a design engineer at Fiskars. The Finnish company, which dates from 1649, was a pioneer of user-friendly design and is best known for its ergonomic scissors and small tools. Its latest products take that high-performance approach to two unexpected products: gardening blades and hammers.

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Cruise over the water as you hang between two skyscrapers, 200 feet in the air.

Much of Copenhagen’s bike- and pedestrian-centric infrastructure seems wild to us folks on the outside, but the new Copenhagen Gate is wild no matter where you see it from. It’s a pedestrian bridge spanning the entrance to a berth in the city’s harbor, running between two skyscrapers and suspended 213 feet above the waters below.

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Design heads at 3M, Intuit, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Philips, and REI highlight 7 areas for future design leaders to consider.

The importance of corporate design leadership is growing fast, which makes me curious: what does the future of design leadership look like? Will this upward momentum continue, and if so, what are the skills needed for future design leaders? To find out, I asked the heads of design at 3M, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Philips, and REI individually and as a panel at the Industrial Designers Society of America national conference. Like a design project, I then looked for patterns and synthesized findings.

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