Quantifying holiday cheer: 673,000 Beatles playlists, one box of Stove Top stuffing, and a 20-fold search increase for “return policy.”
Christmas is over and that means it’s time for online businesses to celebrate, or at least crow a little bit.
Theranos’s Alleged Tampering With Data Is Almost Unheard Of In Biotech, Say Experts
Legal experts say this is a serious allegation, if true.
The breakthrough of biotech startup Theranos—making it possible to get a blood test from the prick of a finger rather than a needle injected into a vein—increasingly appears to be too good to be true.
What Amazon’s Holiday Report Reveals About Our Weird Shopping Habits
We sure do love Gummi Bears, and Cards Against Humanity is an urgent purchase.
It wouldn’t be the holiday season without revealing year-end press releases from major corporations, especially retailers. The king of online retail, Amazon, just issued a 3,000-word report of holiday shopping, watching, and listening stats that says a lot about us. Much of the data comes from users of Amazon Prime, the $99-per-year subscription service that provides free and discounted deliveries, plus access to Amazon’s video and music collections. Amazon picked up more than 3 million Prime members in the third week of December alone. (An estimate from June already had Prime at about 40 million subscribers.)
Data on 191 Million U.S. Voters Was Leaked Online, Says Security Researcher
The same researcher has reported more than two dozen data leaks this year, from insurance and security records to a list of Hello Kitty fans.
A security researcher with a knack for uncovering data breaches says he’s discovered a trove of information including names, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth for more than 191 million U.S. voters on a publicly available server.
The First Look At The Second Google Glass
Pictures on the FCC website show Glass for Work’s foldable hinge. Reports suggest hundreds of companies are already testing it.
It might surprise you to know that after the widespread derision aimed at the first version of Google Glass, the tech giant is readying a second iteration, and now we know what it will look like.
Hard To Believe, But FedEx Actually Did Better This Holiday Season
Delivery tracking firm ShipMatrix says on-time performance at FedEx was up this holiday season, though UPS had an off year.
Despite widespread criticism, FedEx appears to have had better on-time performance this holiday season than in either of the past two years, according to delivery tracking firm ShipMatrix.
Geek Out On This Neat Collection Of Apple Products In Prague’s Unofficial Apple Museum
The collection boasts 472 private exhibits spanning Apple, Pixar, and NeXT.
Though you can’t yet visit an official brick-and-mortar Apple Store in Prague, you can go to the next best thing: an Apple Museum.
Your Must-Listen Podcast Playlist For 2016
Serial was just the beginning: here’s what you should listen to next—helpfully arranged by what you already like.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center revealed that less than half of Americans have ever heard of podcasts, and of those, 17 percent only listen to one show. That’s a shame, because in the wake of the success of creative standard-bearers like Serial and WTF With Marc Maron, there has been an explosion in the number of podcasts. Now, some of the best, brightest, funniest, and most fascinating voices around can only be heard on podcasts.
Why Adversity Can Be The Best Thing For Your Career
For many an entrepreneur, wholly unglamorous stuff—poverty, chores, embarrassing losses—has been the key to later success.
We speak of looking up to people we admire. And so often, when we look up to successful people in our line of work, it seems like they must have always been at the top. But the reality is so often the very opposite. As Fast Company has learned by interviewing a variety of creative and successful people over the past year, failure often contains the seeds of success. Indeed, some of the most successful people started out at the very, very bottom—in a slum or tiny village, even—and still treasure the lessons they learned from those years.
So if you’ve been stuck at the bottom in some sense in 2015, try looking at it as a blessing in disguise. Here are six ways to embrace and learn from adversity.
The Year In Photos: FastCompany.com’s Most Compelling Images From 2015
Our staff photogs’ top picks.
Fast Company’s photo team hit the streets this year in search of fresh, compelling stories about creative inspiration and business as a force for positive change.
