GoKawiil
Tech News
At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, a panel of experts discussed how parents can guide children through today's AI-driven technology landscape. The discussion framed current challenges as an evolution of earlier debates over children's screen and TV time.
A new commentary challenges the widespread assumption that innovation is the domain of startups and disruption comes only from smaller, nimbler players. It argues that large organizations can actually use their scale as an asset to strengthen their capacity for innovation rather than being held back by size.
Singapore-based startup Nexstrom, incubated by Xora Innovation, has built a system called North Star designed to grow transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) directly onto standard 300mm chip wafers used in commercial foundries. These ultra-thin materials, just a few atomic layers deep, are seen as a potential alternative to silicon as transistors shrink toward physical limits. The company's approach draws on research from co-founder and chief scientist Lance Li.
Aurora Innovation is running fully autonomous semi trucks without safety drivers on two of the busiest freight corridors in Texas, I-45 between Houston and Dallas and I-20 between Fort Worth and El Paso. The company currently operates 20 driverless trucks and plans to expand to 200 by the end of the year, betting on a pay-per-mile 'driver as a service' model for freight customers.
Despite widespread claims that business and technology are moving faster than ever, the underlying economic evidence does not support this. Productivity growth, a key measure of technological progress translating into real-world gains, has remained stagnant or even slowed in recent decades, echoing an earlier 'productivity paradox' from the computer era.
Fast Company's Impact Council published a reflection tied to the America 250 celebration, examining how the country's founding spirit of risk-taking has driven technological breakthroughs from aviation to computing. The piece argues that sustaining this innovative edge for another quarter millennium requires deliberate policy and industry choices rather than assuming continuity.
At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, three CEOs who are also mothers discussed the systemic barriers working mothers face in the workplace. They highlighted the lack of affordable childcare and paid maternity leave as major obstacles that persist despite women's growing presence in the workforce and leadership positions.
Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York, Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden explained that removing executives and managers who habitually blocked new ideas was central to reviving the company after a difficult stretch. He framed this cultural shift in leadership as the main driver behind Adidas's recent recovery.
At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, design executives from Spotify, Block, and Brooks discussed how generative AI has sped up the process of turning ideas into products. During the New Rules of Great Design panel, Spotify's Emily Galloway argued that speed and volume alone don't equal quality, emphasizing that human judgment remains essential to deciding what actually gets built.
At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, OnlyFans CEO Kelly Blair described plans to broaden the platform's offerings well beyond the adult content it is best known for, including moves into streaming and financial services for creators. She noted that OnlyFans has paid out $30 billion to creators over the past decade, and pointed to a shifting mix of who is earning on the platform.
The SEC issued an order Thursday creating an immediate regulatory pathway allowing certain trading venues to offer tokenized versions of publicly traded U.S. stocks. The five-year exemption requires token holders to retain the same rights as traditional shareholders and lets companies object to having their securities tokenized. The move follows the Senate's failure to advance the Clarity Act, a crypto market structure bill, two days earlier.
Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, RuPaul's Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen described how comfort with improvisation and imperfection has shaped her approach to entrepreneurship. She shared a lesson tied to 'Top Gun: Maverick,' a film she admitted she has never seen, to illustrate how confidence can outweigh flawless preparation.