Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

While smartwatches have spent the last decade fighting for our attention with buzzing notifications and glowing screens, a quieter revolution has been moving down to our fingers. Yes, the smart ring market has matured from a niche experimental category into a legitimate hardware battleground where the stakes involve more than just step counts. For anyone looking to track their health without (or while) strapping a small computer to their arm, the landscape is now crowded with options that balance high-end aesthetics with serious sensor arrays. Here are some to check out. Oura Ring 4 ($349 + $6/month) The Oura Ring 4 remains the undisputed heavyweight ch…

Google recently announced its partnership with Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey—backed by a $750 million fund—to speed up enterprise adoption of its tech stack. I believe that rather than accelerating the successful adoption of AI, this partnership will kneecap it—and break down trust in the wider consultancy industry in the process. Why? Because the success of both of these things is premised on trust. Enterprises, having come through a rough period of hype-driven spending on artificial intelligence, are now looking for AI investments they can trust to deliver results. In that search, they’re turning to their trusted consulting partners to support them through t…

The Onion is developing a documentary for America’s 250th anniversary, called Birth of a Nation, a project CEO Ben Collins says reflects the company’s growing focus beyond satire articles and headlines. “For the 250th anniversary of America, we’re making a documentary called ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which is great,” Collins said onstage at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, in a conversation with Jill Bernstein. The documentary is one of several projects underway at The Onion, following its acquisition by Collins and a group of investors in 2024. Before buying the publication, Collins spent years at NBC News covering extremism and misinformation on…

The U.S. currently sources a large portion of its critical minerals supply from foreign entities— a dependency that puts national security, economic competitiveness, and energy transition at risk. To build a stronger, more resilient domestic battery industry, we must understand what’s driving demand for critical minerals, how to diversify supply chains, the role of policy, and how innovation is reshaping the landscape. To put this into perspective, for 19 out of 20 strategic critical minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of approximately 70%. Demand for critical minerals doesn’t start in the ground; it starts with consumer trends that ar…

Harry Styles, the British pop singer known for his eclectic style and boy band roots, is finally back on stage after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. But eager fans who scored tickets for his return are finding that, despite the elevated price tag, the tour is not “As It Was.” Night one of the 67-date “Together, Together” tour kicked off in Amsterdam before a crowd of 50,000 fans, bringing his new album Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally to life. While critics called the evening a “triumphant comeback,” some fans in attendance were less than impressed, raising concerns over a short setlist, underwhelming production, and an obstructive stage design. “Harry, ple…

Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Facebook page is full of AI slop. There are generated images of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks. And in between those are posts that admonish AI data centers. “It’s not worth giving up an inch of this for a data center,” reads one image, in which the words look carved into a field of crops. “Not a single square inch of California is worth giving up for an AI Data Center,” reads another posted the very next day, the text floating above a generated image of the California coast, the state flag in the foreground. A third post shows that…

We are at an inflection point for AI. The question is no longer whether your organization is adopting it. It’s whether your people are actually capable of using it. Most aren’t. This isn’t a technology failure. The tools work. The problem is simpler, yet harder to fix now. Companies deployed AI before they built the people capable of using it. At Docebo, we help enterprises build workforces that can actually use AI. We surveyed 2,000 people to find out where adoption breaks down, and the bottleneck shows up in an unexpected place. The challenge with AI adoption isn’t one problem. It’s a compounding series of them, each one making the next harder to solve. The …

Raishelle Everett was thrilled when she became pregnant with her first child after undergoing IVF in 2022. The first thing she and her husband did was get on the wait list for Siemens Child Development Center (CDC), the popular and highly regarded on-site childcare center on the sprawling 53-acre Oregon campus of Siemens. The center, which serves as on-site childcare for Siemens employees as well the local community, cares for about 70 children from infant to pre-K and was built in 1992 to serve employees of Mentor Graphics (which was acquired by Siemens in 2017). The high curriculum standards and low student-to-teacher ratio meant that even though Everett’s husband …

Work is the closest thing most adults have to a full-time identity. Strip away sleep, and roughly half of our waking lives are spent working. If you take a conservative estimate—40 to 50 hours a week, across four to five decades—you end up with well over 80,000 hours on the job. And yet, the most salient feature of work is not how many hours we devote to it, but rather how we experience it, which varies wildly. For some, it resembles what the sociologist Max Weber once described as a “calling,” a source of meaning and even a kind of secular transcendence. For others, it’s closer to what Karl Marx labeled alienation: a draining, joyless routine that disconnects effort …

We need to have a blunt conversation about the word empowerment. In the majority of companies, the lie behind the word “empowerment” becomes apparent in familiar ways: job descriptions that promise autonomy, leaders who proudly talk about their empowered teams, and meetings that end with “you’ve got this.” Reality though strips away the veneer of this lie: that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs, and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. The result is not empowerment. It is dependence with better branding. In our work at Amazon helping Fortune 500 leaders understand how to dismantle their r…

Firefox is the browser that, statistically speaking, more people remember using than use today. Its market share in most countries is now just a sliver of what it once was. In 2011, it held more than a quarter of the U.S. desktop market. That many former users still remember it fondly may be a point of pride for the San Francisco-based nonprofit foundation behind the browser that broke Internet Explorer’s mediocre monopoly. But nostalgia alone doesn’t pay for the continued development of Firefox’s in-house Gecko rendering engine, along with versions of the browser for every major desktop and mobile operating system. “Anyone who was using the internet 15 years ago …

U.S. markets are poised to open with gains on Wednesday as bond yields slipped and oil prices fell. Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.4% while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.2% higher and Nasdaq futures jumped 0.7%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased overnight to 4.64% from 4.66% late Tuesday, but are up from less than 4% before the war with Iran began. That’s a notable increase and part of the reason that stock prices look even more expensive while threatening to slow the economy. Higher yields can drive up rates for mortgages and loans going to companies to build AI data centers, which has been a big source of growth for the economy. Ther…

Management and union leaders at Samsung Electronics failed to reach a last-minute deal over wages Wednesday, raising prospects for a strike at the South Korean electronics giant that could rattle global semiconductor supplies and the country’s trade-dependent economy. Government officials have threatened to invoke rarely used emergency powers to force a settlement at Samsung, where the union, which represents more than 70,000 workers, says the company has failed to offer adequate compensation despite its soaring profits fueled by the global boom in artificial intelligence. After the latest round of talks ended without a breakthrough on Wednesday, union leader Choi Seung…

Airbnb is becoming Airb-n-bigger. In an attempt to become what is something of an all-encompassing trip platform, Airbnb announced several new features and offerings on Wednesday, including a redesigned homepage, new service categories (such as airport pickups, grocery-delivery options, luggage-storage, and car rentals, along with new experiences), and even the ability to book rooms at boutique or independent hotels. That’s right: the company that built a name for itself offering alternatives to hotels is now folding some of them into its platform. Airbnb inflates The new features are wide-ranging, and users can even take advantage of social elements, like…

Meta officially announced a sweeping round of layoffs today that will impact thousands of employees across the business, or about 10% of the company’s 78,000-person workforce. In a memo to employees today—obtained by Business Insider—Meta remained coy about the rationale for the layoffs, using the same language as in prior internal communications. “As previously shared, we have decided to reduce headcount as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” the company wrote in the memo, which was signed by “Meta Leadership” and offered no further explanation for the job cuts. It se…

Elite education has spent decades competing on curriculum, faculty, and brand. Those signals still carry weight. But for founders, executives, and investors, the real question is no longer “Where did you study?” but “Who now takes your call—and why?” When high‑quality content is everywhere, the premium is shifting from information to access. What matters is the environment around the learning: who is in the room, how quickly trust forms, and what happens when people close their laptops and start talking about real decisions. That has become clear in my work advising GIOYA HEI, an institution that deliberately combines higher education with a curated leadership and…

The Ordinary, a cosmetics company known for its lower-priced, often single-ingredient products, just announced that it was furthering its mission to “remove unnecessary barriers to provide accessible, high-quality solutions.” To do so, it is offering people a free shuttle bus that runs between Williamsburg’s Domino Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. The company claims that The Ordinary Bus, which will run from May 26 through June 6, solves for a transit gap that can often involve a 50-minute subway detour through Manhattan. The tenuous parallel with the company’s skincare line is that it also provides a no-frills solution to a common problem (bad skin). …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up 0.7% year over year between April 2025 and April 2026. That year-over-year pace is the same as it was a year ago—back in April 2025, when the national year-over-year home price growth rate was 0.7%. And it’s up slightly from the recent year-over-year low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro-area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housin…

I’ve never been good at asking people for help. Then I lost my job, decided to start a solo business the next day, and needed clients . . . fast. I turned to my network to ask for both referrals and recommendations to jump-start my business. Asking for referrals is uncomfortable. Most solopreneurs would rather wait for business to come to them than put someone on the spot. But referrals are one of the most effective ways to grow a solo business. A warm introduction from someone who knows your work carries more weight than any cold pitch or LinkedIn message. Now, a few years later, most of my business comes from referrals. The trick is knowing who to ask, when to…

I’ve always loved the anthropology of everyday objects, the ways a mundane thing, when you look closely enough, turns out to be a repository of invisible intelligence. So when I was listening to a recent episode of The Wirecutter podcast and learned that plain dish soap mixed with water is often more effective than a cabinet full of specialized cleaners, I went down a rabbit hole that ended somewhere unexpected: a 1959 chemistry concept that reframes everything I believe about human collaboration. The concept is called Sinner’s Circle, developed by German chemist Herbert Sinner. It holds that effective cleaning depends on four interdependent factors: chemistry, temper…

Jeff Bezos is betting that the future of fashion won’t be made from cotton or polyester but, instead, from lab-grown fibers. Through the Bezos Earth Fund, Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos have committed $34 million to researchers developing next-generation textiles, including biodegradable fibers and plastic-free synthetic silk. Their aim is to replace some of the most resource-intensive materials in the global clothing industry with alternatives that could dramatically reduce the industry’s environmental footprint. The investment marks a notable shift for the fund, which has largely focused on conservation since Bezos pledged $10 billion to climate initiatives in 2…

It’s alive. The Terrarium Phone Case by U.K.-based designer Daniel Idle is a clear iPhone 16 Pro Max case with a vertical terrarium designed to show off small plants growing inside. “The idea came from noticing how personal phone cases have become,” Idle tells Fast Company. “People use them to carry objects, express themselves, and customize something they interact with all the time. That got me thinking about how much time we spend on our phones and how disconnected they make us feel from nature.” To bring nature to this most unexpected of places, Idle wanted to see if a phone case could include living elements by building an ecosystem directly into it. …

Robotaxis are multiplying across American cities. But are consumers actually ready to trust them? Zoox CEO Aicha Evans discusses the company’s strategy as an Amazon subsidiary, its intensifying rivalry with Waymo, and why a new partnership with Uber could be the key to getting autonomous rides from novelty to scale. Evans also reveals why she recruits what she calls an “invisible army of rebels” inside Zoox. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders …