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Think about the last time you made a purchase using your phone. Maybe you were at a coffee shop and when your turn came, you opened your payment app, tapped your phone on the payment device, grabbed your cappuccino, and were done. Quick and easy. Maybe too quick and easy. Did the coffee shop miss a chance to engage with you? Did Mastercard miss an opportunity to show how their brand made this “priceless” moment possible? Did you miss an opportunity to teach your 8-year-old daughter a lesson on the value of money? As business leaders in an increasingly digital landscape, we’ve learned to treat “friction” as a dirty word. “Remove friction at all costs” is the ra…

Baby care brand Frida is facing online backlash after screenshots of sexual innuendos in its marketing materials began circulating on social media. Frida, which describes itself as “the brand that gets parents,” sells a range of baby care, fertility, and postpartum products through major retailers, including Target. Last week, an X user shared images of several products’ packaging, writing: “sexual jokes to market baby products is actually sick and twisted @fridababy this is absolutely appalling and disgusting.” The post has since gained almost five million views on X. Among the examples highlighted is a social media graphic promoting the company’s 3-in-1 Tru…

A haunting 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million and became the top-selling work by any female artist at an auction. The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed — titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. The sale at Sotheby’s in New York also topped Kahlo’s own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold p…

Almost 1 million Frigidaire minifridges are being recalled because they pose the potential to catch fire, according to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) released on Thursday. The notice expands an earlier recall from 2024. Canada-based Curtis International is recalling another 330,000 minifridges, on top of the 634,000 minifridges it recalled back in July of 2024. The company has received at least six reports of the model EFMIS121 minifridges catching fire, with property damages, per the CPSC notice. The minfridges were sold exclusively at Target stores nationwide and online at Target.com from January 2020 through October 2023, for a…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has classified a recall of Frito-Lay potato chips at the highest level of risk. The newly announced classification means that under certain conditions, those who consume the chips are at risk of experiencing serious adverse health consequences or even death. Here’s what you need to know about the Frito-Lay potato chips recall. What’s happened? On December 16, 2024, Frito-Lay issued a voluntary limited recall on select packages of some of its Lay’s Classic Potato Chips. The recall was first published on the FDA’s website two days later. But this week, the FDA said in its enforcement database that it has classified the reca…

Which terms best represent 2025? Every year, editors for publications ranging from the Oxford English Dictionary to the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English select a word of the year. Sometimes these terms are thematically related, particularly in the wake of world-altering events. Pandemic, lockdown, and coronavirus, for example, were among the words chosen in 2020. At other times, they are a potpourri of various cultural trends, as with 2022’s goblin mode, permacrisis, and gaslighting. This year’s slate largely centers on digital life. But rather than reflecting the unbridled optimism about the internet of the early aughts—when words like w00t, blog, t…

Whether talking about underwear brands hand-selecting the perfect models to break the internet or the endless wooing of Gen Z and its style sensibilities, there was no shortage of creativity among the fashion brands that set the trends over the past year. Here are the 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the fashion space that innovated on how style showed up for consumers in the past year. Bogg Bag When the function of a tote bag meets the versatility and kitschy-cute style of Crocs, the possibilities are endless. So proves Bogg Bag, a brand that’s constantly riffing to create collector’s items and limited-time variants of its signature design by switching up …

When he was 17 years old, Arne Hillerns moved from his small village in Northern Germany to spend a year in Wausau, Wisconsin. For a brief period of time, he felt like the foreign exchange high school student that he was: “People look at you [and think,] ‘Who’s that kid?‘“ he recalls. Just a year prior, Hillerns had discovered skateboarding, and the skate scene in Wisconsin was buzzing. Within three days or so, he had found a community of skateboarders. “Skating made me so much more open in my personality and gave me confidence,” he says. “It was a very easy entry to this new world for me.” Fast-forward 25 years, and Hillerns’s passion for skateboarding has spread acr…

For decades, Adobe’s software tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, have been the universal language of visual communication, shaping how marketers, artists, and brands build the modern creative world. As artificial intelligence transforms the nature of work and how we define productivity, the 42-year-old creative tech company is reinventing itself once again, transforming the world’s creative supply chains through its AI ecosystem. Designers and marketers globally are using Adobe Firefly for generative image creation, Substance 3D for photorealistic modeling and digital twins, Express for rapid on-brand content production, and Experience Manager for…

In 1983, six businessmen got together and opened the first Hooters restaurant in Clearwater, Florida. Hooters of America LLC quickly became a restaurant chain success story. With its scantily clad servers and signature breaded wings, the chain sells sex appeal in addition to food—or as one of the company’s mottos puts it: “You can sell the sizzle, but you have to deliver the steak.” It inspired a niche restaurant genre called “breastaurants,” with eateries such as the Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery and Twin Peaks replicating Hooters’ busty business model. A decade ago, business was booming for breastaurant chains, with these companies experiencing record sales growt…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On a nationally aggregated basis, U.S. single-family home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are up 2.8% year-over-year, while U.S. condo prices have risen 0.4% over the same period. In much of the Midwest, Northeast, and Southern California, regional home prices have seen even stronger gains. However, some areas—particularly around the Gulf—are experiencing greater softness, with a few even undergoing home price corrections. Look no further than Florida. Among the 26 major Florida condo markets that ResiClub tracks, condo prices…

New York City kicked off the new year with a new mayor in democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose inauguration flooded the internet with viral moments. Mamdani took the oath of office via two separate swearing in ceremonies. The more intimate one took place underground at midnight at a decommissioned City Hall subway station. With just a few hours as mayor under his belt, Mamdani was then sworn in for a second time by fellow Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders. Mamdani first reached internet stardom during his mayoral campaign thanks in part to his campaign’s design and witty social media content, prompting a landslide victory and the highest mayoral race voter…

AI was supposed to make our lives easier: automating tedious tasks, streamlining communication, and freeing up time for creative thinking. But what if the very tool meant to increase efficiency is fueling cognitive decline and burnout instead? The Workflation Effect Since AI entered the workplace, managers expect teams to produce more work in less time. They see tasks completed in two hours instead of two weeks, without understanding the process behind it. Yet, AI still makes too many mistakes for high-quality output, forcing workers to adjust, edit, and review everything it produces—creating “workflation,” which adds more work to already overloaded plates. AI has …

A video game once synonymous with one of the most disastrous launches in history has not only redeemed itself, but will be getting a proper second act. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red announced in an earnings call Wednesday that the company is at work on a follow-up to the futuristic role-playing title, which was released in late 2020 and universally criticized for being unfinished, glitchy and at times unplayable. CD Projekt Red said that the conceptual phase is complete and pre-production has begun on the “next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe,” which it is calling Cyberpunk 2 for now. The company expects the game’s development to take four to five…

In part four of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, insiders describe how the company’s Partner Program began sharing ad revenue with creators, kicking off the age of the professional YouTuber. As monetization transformed the platform, creators faced the newfangled challenges of managing fame in the viral video age. YouTube, meanwhile, wrestled with hate speech and other unsavory content. With YouTube increasingly competing with TV in its classic form, it also spent billions to bring one of broadcasting’s most iconic offerings—the NFL—on board. Comments have been edited for length and clarity. Read more How YouTube Ate TV Part one: YouTube…

It’s one thing to invent something cool within controlled laboratory environments. It’s entirely another to scale that new baby for sale. The tension between innovation and commercialization is something we regularly wrestle with at Abstrax. Every morning, we don lab coats and ask the same question: “How do you make money from research done in a lab?” Balance innovation with commercial reality Discovery for its own sake isn’t enough. Many R&D-heavy companies discover that brilliant ideas can languish for years if they don’t have a system for bringing them to market. We decided early on to build that bridge proactively. This meant investing heavily no…

Nvidia has agreed to license technology from AI startup Groq for use in some of its artificial intelligence chips, marking the chipmaker’s largest deal and underscoring its push to strengthen competitiveness amid surging demand. Here is a list of multi-billion-dollar AI, cloud and chip deals signed recently: OPENAI DEALS Amazon and OpenAI Amazon is considering an investment of around $10 billion in OpenAI, though talks remain “very fluid,” according to a source who requested anonymity due to the private nature of their talks. Disney and OpenAI Walt Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and will let the ChatGPT-parent use characters from Star Wars, P…

Cheating has long been an unwelcome but expected risk in the hiring process. While most people are honest and well-intentioned, there are always a handful of candidates who attempt to game the system. Today, however, the problem is evolving at an unprecedented speed. Generative AI has made new, more sophisticated types of cheating possible for any position, from software development to finance to design. In my work with hundreds of employers helping them hire and develop talent, I’ve seen firsthand the myriad ways candidates attempt to game the system. So, why are candidates resorting to these methods? Sometimes, candidates are attempting to secure a position they’re …

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. When I was a college student renting an apartment in New York City, I learned firsthand that the rental process was overly complex and inefficient. My friends and I lost out on an apartment we really wanted simply because we couldn’t gather the necessary documentation fast enough. That experience stuck with me, and it sparked an idea—why not electronically store all of the d…