Journal

Everyone wants to learn online, but startups are trying to figure out how to get users to pay the bills.

A few years ago, MOOCs—massive open online courses—were all the rage. Publications, Fast Company among them, wrote about new startups like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity that offered the promise of free learning and professional development to anyone in the world who wanted them. However, in 2015, many of these companies and their compatriots in the edutech space as a whole discovered an unfortunate truth: It’s damn hard to make money from MOOCs.

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Popular crowdsourcing platform Quirky is cutting its losses and giving up ownership of Wink.

Quirky, the popular crowdsourced invention platform, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and selling Wink, its subsidiary specializing in connected home products. According to a Wink blog post, the electronics manufacturing firm Flextronics is likely its new corporate parent. Although Wink did not disclose any numbers, Flextronics is allegedly offering $15 million to acquire the company.

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More than 75% of Instagram’s users come from outside the United States.

Instagram just released its latest user numbers, and there’s big news for the global market: 75% of users of the Facebook-owned social network come from outside the United States. According to the company, more than half of the last 100 million users to sign up for the service come from Europe and Asia. Instagram added that Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia are among the countries that added the most users to the service.

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Remember when you used your phone to talk to people? Could a text-only communication habit be hurting how others view you?

With everything we use our smartphones for, it can be easy to forget that the devices were once used for actually talking to other human beings. With our voices. Many of us have become accustomed to communicating with coworkers and clients almost exclusively using email and instant messages. But if you work in an office where people still talk to each other, could this habit hurt you professionally?

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Sweden’s latest experiment with a six-hour workday is going well, but could reduced hours ever fly in our workaholic culture?

Fringe ideas are fringe ideas until they aren’t. When reformers started to push for child-labor laws around a century ago, it looked like an outside shot. So did a $15 minimum wage, before Vice President Joe Biden and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took up the cause a few weeks ago. (It still does—and some say it’s a bad idea in the first place—but it’s come a long way in a short time.) Not to be outdone, Berkeley, California, is now pressing to require a $19 hourly wage, and one CEO promised employees a $70,000 minimum salary earlier this year.

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The higher you climb in your career, the less you understand the next generation of employees, which is why reverse mentoring is important.

Good leaders connect with employees, but the longer you’re at a company, the harder it can be to relate to a new generation of hires. Sri Shivananda, vice president of global platform and infrastructure at PayPal and former vice president of global platform and infrastructure at eBay, has resolved the issue through reverse mentoring—learning from his junior employees.

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Alex Lidow, scion of an engineering dynasty, thinks the essential material at the heart of the tech industry needs to change.

In 1977, when he was 22 years old, inventor Alex Lidow had the sort of eureka moment most techies would kill for. While in graduate school at Stanford, Lidow co-invented, along with Thomas Herman, a type of device called the HEXFET power MOSFET that would make his family’s old company, International Rectifier, more than $930 million in royalties. And it turned Lidow’s grandfather, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, and his father, who fled Berlin in 1937, into important players in the hardware industry.

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Looking for a raise? No surprise that people in tech jobs saw their salaries increase this year, but so did baristas, cooks, and cashiers.

Even though the annual review has come under attack for its inability to affect positive change, the yearly sit-down is often accompanied by a salary increase at most companies, if the employee merits a pay bump.

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As Empire, Fox’s high-octane smash, returns for its second season, creator and executive producer Lee Daniels explains why the show resonates with viewers and what’s happening below the surface.

Fast Company: Empire‘s first-season finale in March was the highest-rated for a new series in the past 10 years. How do you approach writing a show that has connected with so many people?

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Storehouse, a mobile publishing network by an ex-Apple designer, has decided that followers create pandering, and pandering ruins everything.

When the iPad app Storehouse launched in early 2014—designed as a way to publish brief, uniquely laid out, photo-driven stories with the world—it operated with all of the flourish you’d expect an app led by an ex-Apple designer to have. The company was founded by Mark Kawano, who had worked on iPhoto and served as Apple’s user experience evangelist before founding his company, and it showed.

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