Fast Company

Eight years ago, we featured the 22-year-old creator of a site with 19 million users. 1.5 billion members later, the adventure continues.

In early 2007, Fast Company senior writer Ellen McGirt got a rush assignment from the magazine’s editor, Bob Safian. Both were newcomers to the publication, having recently decamped from Fortune. Safian, who had decided to kill the planned cover story for the May issue, asked McGirt to fly to Silicon Valley and do a piece on Facebook and its 22-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

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Elon Musk is venturing headfirst into the battery business. Here’s why it might be his boldest bet yet.

Elon Musk walks briskly onto the stage as hard rock blasts in the background. The guitar riff, which sounds like entrance music suitable for a professional wrestler or a minor-league cleanup hitter, fades out, and Musk surveys the crowd, nodding his head a few times and then sticking his hands in his pockets. “What I’m going to talk about tonight,” he says, “is a fundamental transformation of how the world works.”

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Pandora is buying key technology and talent from streaming music service Rdio, which will be shutting down.

Another week, another shake-up in the digital music world. Pandora, the company that pioneered personalized Internet radio, is eyeing a leap into the on-demand music space dominated by Spotify, Apple Music and, until today, Rdio.

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Amazon’s selection, prices, and features differ greatly among countries.

A new study shines a light on how Amazon positions itself differently in different countries. According to Forrester Research, which just released a report on Amazon’s Global Appeal, the e-commerce giant’s customer service techniques have gained praise worldwide, but the Amazon shopping experience can vary wildly depending on the country you’re in.

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Congress is debating asteroid mining and the oversight of private space exploration.

A new law expected to pass presidential approval this week would give the private spaceflight sector exemption from a wide range of government oversight. H.R. 2262, which is receiving final approval from the House of Representatives today, would exempt private space travel from federal regulation for the next eight years. The bill would primarily benefit companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin that fear that close oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or another government agency could seriously slow innovation.

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Mixpanel’s new predictive analytics product Predict claims to be able to get your business more engagement within 30 seconds.

The small field of “predictive analytics” wants to turn all the data mined by businesses into a type of “Magic 8-ball” that can be used to predict and solve problems before they start. Today, analytics firm Mixpanel is releasing Predict, a predictive analytics product that claims to figure out how to get your business more engagement in 30 seconds.

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Twitter’s core users didn’t take kindly to the switch from star-shaped “favorites” to heart-shaped “likes.” Would emoji options help?

Earlier this month, Twitter stirred the pot by trading its star-shaped “favorite” button for a more au courant heart icon, which now denotes a “like.” The move was meant to simplify Twitter’s interface and more closely align it with social networks like Instagram—but it’s possible you’ve since been more frugal about dispensing likes on Twitter. Tweaking the terminology is one thing, but a heart? It feels a lot weightier to “heart” something than to “star” it, and much like the like button on Facebook, a heart isn’t quite an appropriate response to negative posts.

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The minimalism of Chrome OS finds hardware to match, with mixed results.

A few years ago, Google shocked the laptop market with a $250 Chromebook.

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Four principles for designing Apple TV interfaces

Apple TV is not an iPhone. You may think this is obvious now, but you’d be surprised how many expectations you subconsciously carry from one context to the next. Take a look at the state of the platform, and you’ll see that most of the tvOS App Store consists of poorly transplanted iOS apps that have no idea what to do on the big screen. I would argue that most developers have not yet learned that Apple TV is not, in fact, an iPhone.

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Tim Tully, Yahoo’s VP of engineering, talks about lessons learned on the mountain.

Tim Tully, 37, is Yahoo’s vice president of engineering and leads Flurry, which he describes as “the world’s largest app analytics company.” He joined Yahoo 12 years ago and has been working on big data since before the term existed; he’s also an extremely active snowboarder—an avocation he says has helped him challenge himself at work as well.

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