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Harry McCracken’s Stuff

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This is an automated feed of everything I write for Fast Company and Technologizer. For my main Bluesky account, check out @harrymccracken.com.

82 Followers  |  1 Following  |  90 Posts  |  Joined: 18.11.2024  |  1.6951

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Disney’s startup accelerator is about more than accelerating startups By investing in cool tech companies, the 102-year-old media giant wants to foster relationships that matter for everyone involved. Hello again, and thank you for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.
07.11.2025 18:11 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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How I ended up with 111,582 iPhone photos, and what I’m doing about it I’ve kept so many terrible images that it’s hard to find the wonderful ones. An app, and a few new habits, are helping. Greetings and thank you once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In—and a happy Halloween to you.
31.10.2025 17:04 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Figma acquires Weavy, a workflow tool with ‘artistic intelligence’ Figma CEO Dylan Field on why the design platform bought an Israeli startup’s tool for making AI images a starting point, not the destination. Recently, Figma CEO Dylan Field assembled employees from throughout the company for a demo of a new-ish tool for generating, refining, and editing synthetic images and videos. Rather than being built around one-off prompts, it allowed users to create visual workflows for comparing and manipulating options created by different AI models. It also facilitated putting imagery through multiple rounds of polishing and remixing, adding a large dose of human taste and quality control to the process.
30.10.2025 14:28 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Logitech is everywhere. It’s betting on design and AI to keep it that way ‘The mouse built this house,’ says CEO Hanneke Faber. But to extend Logitech’s reach, she’s focused on upping its software game and thinking bigger than ever. There are bigger, better-known tech brands than Logitech, but few have ever rivaled its quiet but pervasive impact on how people engage with the digital world. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, but with equally deep roots in Silicon Valley, the 44-year-old company helped to popularize once-unfamiliar devices such as computer mice and webcams. Those are still two of its marquee product lines.
29.10.2025 09:59 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Meet the humanoid robot headed for homes 1X Technologies is taking orders for a robotic household helper it thinks could change the world. Neo’s first chore? Learning how to do its job. With one sweeping gesture, Dar Sleeper hoists the humanoid robot off the ground. Bracing its back with one arm and its legs with the other, he gently carries it across the room and lowers it onto a sofa, where it lies in repose as if catching a quick nap.
28.10.2025 18:47 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The new MacBook Pro: Still a workhorse Apple’s latest laptop packs the new M5 chip—but it’s still defined by its quiet focus on everyday benefits. Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In.
24.10.2025 12:11 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Toonstar’s new ‘Uncle Roger’ cartoon embraces AI—but slop it’s not Nigel Ng has a very precise vision for the animated series based on his YouTube comedy bit. AI is helping him achieve it. “The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. It’s too pink.”
17.10.2025 12:59 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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I see dead people on Sora, and I’m conflicted about it OpenAI’s social network allows users to make videos depicting deceased celebrities. They can be disturbingly crass, boring—or hilarious. Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, it’s our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspects—and many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and you’ll come away with some discoveries.
17.10.2025 12:02 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Inside Microsoft’s quest to make Windows 11’s AI irresistible Executives with a combined 130+ years of tenure on the company’s decades of work to get people to talk to their PCs—and why the time might finally be right. People remember many things about Windows 95, which turned 30 a couple of months ago. There were its signature new features, such as the Start Button, taskbar, and long file names. The launch event—hosted by Jay Leno—at Microsoft’s campus. The TV commercials with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” The crowds of PC users so eager to get their hands on the upgrade that they descended on computer stores at midnight.
16.10.2025 13:14 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The 5 next big things in computing, chips, and foundational technology for 2025 AI goes to the edge, AR displays get better, quantum computing becomes real, and other breakthroughs. The companies that create the foundational technologies that enable other companies’ progress are embracing AI, of course. But that’s only part of the story. These honorees made big progress in 2025 on quantum computing, battery science, and other fronts.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Behind the scenes of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech 2025 Here’s how Fast Company’s small army of editorial staffers judge our annual Next Big Things in Tech awards. For the past five years, Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards have celebrated technological breakthroughs that are changing the way we work and live. This year’s awards include 137 honors for innovations impacting everything from applied AI to telecommunications to agriculture.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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These 3 tech executives show uncommon vision Why Abel Avellan, Ahmad Ghahreman, and Amy Gilliland are Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech visionaries of the year. Our honorees in the new tech visionaries category are executives who applied new thinking to pressing problems. One is working to take cellular broadband places it’s never gone before. Another aims to make the tech industry less dependent on the risky business of mining rare earth materials. And the third is applying AI to the thorny challenge of defending against ever-smarter missiles and drones.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The 8 next big things in foundational AI for 2025 Realistic, real-time voice generation for conversational AI, a plug-and-play AI infrastructure stack, video with consistent characters across multiple clips, and more. Now that we’ve all grown used to the fact that computers can pull off once-astounding feats such as speaking in a convincing human voice and generating photorealistic video, the unglamorous work of integrating AI into real-world business is more crucial than ever. These honorees for foundational AI are solving basic issues such as preventing image generation from becoming a copyright nightmare, ensuring the world doesn’t run out of truly high-quality training data, and beyond.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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These 3 enterprise-size companies innovated in a big way in 2025 A better antenna for satellite broadband, a tool for automating data use governance, and hearing aids that do more than aid hearing, Not every breakthrough comes from a tiny startup or one of a handful of familiar tech giants. The honorees in the enterprise-size category are large enough to marshal serious resources but small enough to pivot quickly. That balance allows them to pursue ambitious projects without losing focus.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The 5 next big things in data for 2025 These innovations put data to work in sales, marketing, music, and beyond. If there’s one thing businesses have in abundance, it’s data—in some cases, far more of it than they know what to do with. AI can turn daunting mountains of information into knowledge that’s accessible to staffers across the organization, regardless of their technical chops. These honorees are helping their customers unlock better understanding of data to do everything from supercharging sales teams to choosing the right music to license.
14.10.2025 11:50 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ service is no Waymo My rides in Elon Musk’s supposedly autonomous ride-hailing cars still involved a human overseer in the driver’s seat—among other notable rough edges. Greetings, salutations, and my thanks—as always—for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.
10.10.2025 12:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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YouTube conquered TV, podcasts, and shorts. Will AI slop be its kryptonite?  YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and creators Casey Neistat, Cleo Abram, and Michelle Khare, among others, discuss how the video site took over the living room and whether AI will help or hurt its future. The final installment of our five-part series. In this final chapter of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, the platform migrates from computers and phones to the biggest screen in the house: the living-room TV. It also takes on TikTok with brief videos called Shorts and becomes a major destination for podcasts. And it begins to tackle one of its greatest opportunities—albeit a fraught one—by incorporating AI into the creation process. To succeed, it will have to do this without losing the human element that made YouTube a phenomenon in the first place.
09.10.2025 10:15 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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OpenAI’s Sora could save social networking—as long as it doesn’t ruin it While Meta’s Vibes offers a sea of AI-generated sameness, OpenAI has imbued its similar app with a spark of life. It’s tons of fun, for now. Hello there, and welcome once again to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
03.10.2025 18:26 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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From Khan Academy to Skibidi Toilet: The inside story of how YouTube’s creators saved the platform In part four of our five-part series, Rebecca Black, iJustine, Felicia Day, Casey Neistat, Sal Khan, and other early YouTube creators reveal what it was like to break through—before the slop came. 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.
01.10.2025 09:26 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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How YouTube went from money pit to money printer YouTube could’ve been Google’s first flop. Robert Kyncl, Lyor Cohen, and key engineers from YouTube and Google reveal new details on how they innovated their way to success. Part three of a five-part series. In part three of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, new parent Google confronts the messy issues standing in the way of the video streamer’s long-term viability. As Viacom sues over YouTube users’ unauthorized uploading of intellectual property, Google and YouTube engineers simultaneously build technology that will save the business. Called ContentID, it lets copyright holders remove their work—or, better yet, leave it up and benefit from its monetization.
29.09.2025 09:56 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Before Adobe Flash was terrible, it made YouTube great How a humble browser plug-in put video at the heart of the web—and eventually lost its way. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
26.09.2025 12:35 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Pit bulls, rats, and 2 circling sharks: The inside story of Google buying YouTube In part two of a special five-part oral history, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, Sequoia investor Roelof Botha, and others share how the video site’s success and struggles led to its historic $1.65 billion acquisition. In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.
25.09.2025 09:59 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever In part one of a special five-part oral history, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, music executive Lyor Cohen, investor Roelof Botha, iJustine, Felicia Day, and others revisit how a Flash-enabled video site became the cultural force of today. In YouTube’s early days, the odds seemed good that the platform would be destroyed—not by a competitor, but by its own popularity.
23.09.2025 09:32 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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How I’m really using AI right now I have no desire to turn my most important work over to the technology. But I’m getting more and more out of it. And I’d sure miss it if it ceased to exist. Greetings from Fast Company, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Plugged In.
19.09.2025 12:26 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The foldable smartphone’s moment is finally arriving Honor, Samsung, and Google are among the companies overcoming long-standing design challenges inherent in folding-screen phones. Next up: iPhone? Hello once again and thanks for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In.
05.09.2025 12:14 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The secret history of how Intel ran the tech industry—until it didn’t In the 1990s, Intel didn’t just make the lion’s share of the world’s processors. It determined what a PC was, and even how it was marketed. Welcome, and thanks for reading this issue of Fast Company’s Plugged In.
29.08.2025 12:06 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Reddit—and a dash of AI—do what Google and ChatGPT can’t The human-powered megasite’s Reddit Answers feature hints at its ambition to become even more essential to online research. Hello, everyone, and thanks once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.
22.08.2025 19:36 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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How ESPN finally made the leap from cable TV to the app era The first name in sports’s product and tech chief shares with Fast Company how it’s melding games, data, wagering, and even a TikTok-like feed across multiple screens. CEOs rarely talk about plans that are a half-decade or more away from reaching reality. Yet way back in 2015, Disney CEO Robert Iger confirmed the company would eventually offer ESPN as a direct-to-consumer service. It would be an epoch-shifting moment for a channel that has been a cornerstone of pay TV in its traditional form for decades, and Iger said it wouldn’t occur until at least 2020.
21.08.2025 17:57 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The case for personality-free AI The tech industry is working hard to make AI your buddy. What if that’s pointless at best and dangerous at worst? Hello again, and welcome to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
15.08.2025 12:48 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Podcasting is bigger than ever—but not without its growing pains Talking heads have nudged out storytellers. Video is becoming as essential as audio. And the medium’s key platform might not even be a podcast app. Greetings, salutations, and thanks for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.
08.08.2025 12:40 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

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