Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

On an unremarkable vacant lot in Atlanta’s West End, a proposed rowhouse construction project could soon become a milestone of modern design. The building itself is not particularly special; its 17 units have attractive geometrical facades, large picture windows, and will be affordably priced. More notable than the design of the project itself is how it was designed. To an uncommon degree, artificial intelligence was used extensively throughout the design process, from market analysis and conceptual design to regulatory compliance and material selection. The building, which is going up for zoning approvals this week, could be one of the first projects designed largely t…

Zoom made a name for itself during the pandemic, becoming synonymous with video conference calls. But the company recently changed its name from “Zoom Video Communications Inc.” to simply “Zoom Communications Inc.,” a sign that it’s pushing beyond video. Other Zoom offerings include a Team Chat product comparable to Slack, a collaborative document platform that integrates with Zoom meetings, business phone features, and an AI companion. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan spoke to Fast Company about the company’s offerings and ambitions beyond video, his vision for the future of AI-powered work, and what the return to the office has meant for how people use Zoom. This interview has b…

A little over a decade ago, Netflix decided to take streaming into its own hands: Instead of relying on commercial content delivery services, the streamer built its own servers from scratch, and gave them away to internet service providers. Since then, Netflix has distributed over 18,000 of these servers, now installed in 6,000 locations spread across 175 countries, forming the company’s Open Connect content delivery network. Now, Netflix is ready to take this tech beyond movies and TV shows: The company has begun to develop its own cloud gaming infrastructure, with servers that could eventually allow any Netflix member to play complex games on their smart TVs without…

The war in Gaza has come with an awful cost. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, and thousands more are missing. And while a temporary ceasefire has allowed for increased aid delivery, easing the plight of those facing disease and hunger, experts predict malnutrition and health issues to persist for months or even years. Much of the territory’s infrastructure—its schools, hospitals and homes—has been damaged or destroyed. And yet, the tremendous human and societal loss has been augmented by a lesser reported but potentially catastrophic, consequence: environmental devastation. In June 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme conducte…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. As the number of internet of things (IoT) devices is projected to reach 40 billion by 2030, IoT integration into our daily lives is undeniable. From smart homes to industrial systems, IoT devices offer unprecedented convenience and efficiency. Netgear’s 2024 IoT Security Landscape report found that IoT devices, including TV sets, smart plugs, routers, and more face frequent atta…

How is it that no matter how much you intend to get to bed earlier, you never do? And morning mercilessly comes at the same time no matter how little sleep you’ve gotten. If you struggle with the evening slide where you stay up too late to get things done, or to have some “me” time, you’re not alone. It’s a common issue that I see with my time management coaching clients. Here are three of the strategies that I’ve found most effective to stop the evening slide, get to bed on time, and still get everything done. Keep the Dominos Up Getting to bed late is often the final block in a chain effect that began much earlier in the day. So to beat the evening slide,…

Trader Joe’s and other grocers are limiting the number of eggs customers can buy across the U.S., citing limited supply caused by the ongoing bird flu outbreak. Trader Joe’s is capping purchases to one carton per customer each day, the Monrovia, California-based chain confirmed. That limit applies to all of Trader Joe’s locations across the country. “We hope these limits will help to ensure that as many of our customers who need eggs are able to purchase them when they visit Trader Joe’s,” the company said in a statement sent to The Associated Press Tuesday. Photos of in-store notices about eggs purchase limits at retailers nationwide have swirled around onlin…

The Coca-Cola Co. just announced its newest limited-time soda, and it’s a combination of Sprite and tea that was initially floated by a team of interns six years ago. Sprite + Tea just hit shelves earlier across the U.S. and Canada, and is expected to remain on the market through October. The soda is available in both regular and zero-sugar varieties, and, according to a press release, it “blends the crisp, lemon-lime refreshment of Sprite with the classically refreshing flavor of tea.” The new product arrives just a month after Coca-Cola announced better-than-anticipated first-quarter 2025 financial results, logging a 2% year-over-year revenue decline but maintaining…

A significant proportion of the U.S. workforce is pushing back against Artificial Intelligence adoption at their jobs. According to a new study by generative AI platform Writer, 31% of employees—including 41% of Gen Z workers—admit to “sabotaging” their company’s AI strategy by refusing to adopt AI tools and applications. As a result, roughly two-third of executives say Generative AI adoption has led to tension and division within their organization, with 42% suggesting it’s “tearing their company apart.” “There’s active resistance where it’s like, ‘I really don’t believe in this strategy whatsoever, and I’m either going to completely ignore it, or do my own thing…

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit said last week hackers had stolen digital tokens worth around $1.5 billion, in what researchers called the biggest crypto heist of all time. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said the crypto was taken from a “cold wallet” – a digital wallet usually stored offline and so supposedly more secure – that was used for ether tokens. Blockchain research firm Elliptic said the hack was more than double the last-biggest crypto heist and “is almost certainly the single largest known theft of any kind in all time.” The crypto industry has suffered a series of thefts, prompting questions about the security of customer funds, with hacking hauls totalling more…

Many things remain uncertain about AI’s future impact on our lives. One that isn’t in doubt is that more and more of the world’s software will be written, at least in part, by software. Already, 25% of Google’s code is generated by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai said last October. By 2028, projects research firm Gartner, 75% of enterprise developers will use AI tools in their work. This trend is reflected in programmers’ embrace of products such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which let them call on generative AI to fill in some of the specific code as they tackle a project—essentially a fancy form of autocomplete for software engineering. The next step beyond that is AI coding …

For transgender students involved in a very special project at a culinary school in Pakistan, there is more to a class than just learning the art of cooking. Neha Malik used to dance at parties and weddings for a living and was, occasionally, a sex worker. Since January, she has been enrolled in a new course for the trans community at the Culinary & Hotel Institute of Pakistan. The free six-month program in the city of Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital, welcomed its first group of 25 trans students in January; the second group of 25 began training on February 1. Now, Malik, 31, dreams of working as a chef in Dubai, the futuristic, skyscraper-studded city in the U…

At a time when book bans are raging and the federal government is pushing back against DEI initiatives, there’s one place where diversity is thriving: children’s literature. Picture books—which cater to those under the age of 10—are often children’s first introduction to poetry and art. And this year, there are many newly-published picture books that celebrate aspects of Black life in nuanced ways, portraying history, culture, and joy. Here are five of our favorites. ‘City Summer, Country Summer’ [Art: Courtesy of Kokila/Penguin Random House] By Kiese Laymon, illustrated by Alexis Franklin. (Kokila/Penguin Young Readers, ages 5-9.) Author Kiese Laymon is…

Steven Heine is a professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Cultural Psychology, the top-selling book in the field. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, and New Scientist, among other publications. What’s the big idea? A lot of people right now feel lost, anxious, and despaired. During these dark times, preserving a sense of meaning in our lives is vital. Fortunately, meaning can be cultivated and ground us when life feels turbulent. The emerging field of existential psychology is refining practices for tuning in to the worth, purpose, and importance o…

Americans across all political stripes were understandably concerned when news broke that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment systems. These payment systems are responsible for trillions of dollars in federal payments, including things like Social Security benefits and tax refunds. DOGE has felt fishy from the start, a blatant branding stunt that blurs the line between private investment and public interest by advertising Musk’s investment in Dogecoin. Knowing that Musk and his crew of DOGEbags are pursuing deep access to the Treasury Department and its …

The Oscars don’t have a Best Poster category. (Or even a Best Title Sequence category, which they did sort of have for the very first Academy Awards in 1929 before—for shame—dropping it in 1930.) So this year, as in the past, we asked some of our favorite poster designers which Best Picture nominee should win Best Poster. Like book cover designers, key art creators are tasked with the unwieldy ask of distilling an entire universe of story into a single visual. It’s another standard of excellence in cinema—and we’d argue that there’s indeed correlation between great posters and great films. Consider: In our (admittedly wildly unscientific!) 2023 best poster poll, all …

Gerardo Valerio had been looking for a bathroom in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood for 20 minutes when he stumbled across a blue and white trailer with “FREE BATHROOM” at the top. At first, he was hesitant to enter the bathroom, which had been installed by the Washington, D.C.-based portable toilet startup Throne. To get in, he had to scan a QR code which pre-loaded a text onto his phone. After sending the text, the door would automatically slide open. “What do I text, ‘I need to pee’?” he jokes. All in all, he says, it was a positive experience: “It was pretty to look at but it definitely has a smell to it. It needs to be maintained a bit more. But overall…

An artificial intelligence watchdog is accusing OpenAI of training its default ChatGPT model on copyrighted book content without permission. In a new paper published this week, the AI Disclosures Project alleges that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model using non-public material from O’Reilly Media. The researchers used a legally obtained dataset of 34 copyrighted O’Reilly books and found that GPT-4o showed “strong recognition” of the company’s paywalled content. By contrast, GPT-3.5 Turbo appeared more familiar with publicly accessible O’Reilly book samples. “These results highlight the urgent need for increased corporate transparency regarding pre-training dat…

As renewable energy gathers steam around the world, the harms of mining its mineral components continue to grow. On the environmental front, for example, there’s the destruction of Indonesian rainforests to mine nickel and the draining of precious South American groundwater reserves to obtain lithium. There’s also the human toll, which can be seen in forced displacement and child labor exploitation in the cobalt-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as violence toward Indigenous people living on nickel-studded lands in the Philippines. The devastation raises the question: Is the world better off just sticking with the status quo? With these factors, is renewa…

Law school applications typically spike in times of financial and labor market distress, but a significant recent surge may be more driven by other factors. According to the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC)—which, among other things, administers the law school admissions test (LSAT)—application volume for the 2025 school year is up 20.5% compared to last year. “When we ask test takers and applicants ‘Why are you applying to law school?,’ the primary reason is ‘to make a difference,’” says LSAC’s interim president and CEO Susan Krinsky. As a result, she attributes the latest increase to “the world around us,” explaining “there have been a few very interesting…

In a 2014 commencement address at her alma mater Dartmouth College, TV writer and producer Shonda Rhimes told students, “Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath- and storytime at home.” Her comments are true reflections of what work-life balance is, says Janna Koretz, clinical psychologist and founder of Azimuth, a Boston-based provider of therapy services. “When people think about balance, they think about it feeling good and being the right amount of everything,” she says. “I think—especially m…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. As someone who gets to see “the future” unfold in research and development labs around the world, I’ve grown comfortable with our global food landscape constantly evolving. Part of the fun! Anticipating the trends that shape this evolution isn’t just important—it’s essential. First, there are macro trends that continue each year and can’t be ignored. By 2030, our global popu…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Doom-and-gloom narratives about artificial intelligence going rogue to the detriment of humans are a staple of popular culture. For some people, just say “AI,” and visions of Skynet from the Terminator movies taking over the world will instantly pop into their heads. Skepticism about AI isn’t just in the realm of science fiction, of course. As AI becomes more mainstream, legitimate concern…

In news outlets, business publications, and scholarly journals, there is a crescendo of commentary about the combined power of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Without question, that convergence is already yielding exciting discoveries in many fields. Yet a third, equally crucial, kind of intelligence is being left out of the discussion: nature’s intelligence. The idea that nature itself displays the hallmarks of what we understand as intelligence—the ability to learn, to encode those learnings in new, more effective models, and to continually adapt—is not altogether new. Leonardo da Vinci understood this well. Nature was his teacher and his inspira…