Welcome back to Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter. I’m global technology editor Harry McCracken, and I’m filing this edition from a surprisingly comfy armchair in a hallway at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, the most peaceful spot I found to do some writing during CES. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself ev
No upsells to premium versions, no ads popping up every other minute, no charges whatsoever.
It’s hard to find truly free apps nowadays, but they’re still out there. And if you’re looking to stay in shape during the long winter months, here are some excellent fitness apps that won’t cost you a penny.
Nike Training Club
A great workout app that could absolutely get away with a premium version, Nike Training Club appears to be a brand-
On Tuesday, X published a roadmap explaining how the social network will be “transforming the global town square” over the coming year. The plans include leaning into features the site rolled out in 2023—things like allowing Premium subscribers to upload two-hour-long videos, introducing Grok as a rival chatbot that is “based & loves sarcasm,” and doubling down on Community Notes to fill a gap caused by gutting the 1,500-person content moderation team.
The Department of Labor on Tuesday enacted a new rule aimed at preventing the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The effort, first proposed in October 2022, provides a guide to whether a worker is an employee or an independent operator under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a difference that could afford someone key legal protections and compensation.
Proponents of the rule have said that this guide will allow workers more protections from companies that are worki
Tinder’s chief operating officer Faye Iosotaluno is taking over as CEO of the dating giant, effective immediately, parent company Match Group announced Tuesday.
Tinder’s top role has been empty since the August 2022 departure of Renate Nyborg. Match Group CEO Bernard Kim was serving as the company’s interim leader.
Iosotaluno became Tinder’s COO in August 2022 after spending five years at Match Group, where she had served as chief strategy offic
AI is transitioning from a 2023 electrified by ChatGPT to a 2024 when the tech industry and the Fortune 500 will try to make new “transformer” based language models perform meaningful work and create real value. But that transition could be seriously slowed because of the way AI companies routinely train their models—that is, by feeding them large amounts of data, some of it copyrighted, that they scrape from the web.
A number of copyright lawsuits were filed by
TikTok has restricted one tool researchers use to analyze popular videos, a move that follows a barrage of criticism directed at the social media platform about content related to the Israel-Hamas war and a study that questioned whether the company was suppressing topics that don’t align with the interests of the Chinese government.
TikTok’s Creative Center—which is available for anyone to use but is geared toward helping brands and advertisers see what’s
Santa Monica-based rabbit debuted the r1, a small personal AI device that operates multiple apps on the user’s behalf to get things done.
The device, whose design comes courtesy of the eclectic Swedish tech firm Teenage Engineering, is the size of a stack of Post-it notes and slips easily into a pocket. It uses a large language model—courtesy of OpenAI—to understand the user’s spoken requests. But rabbit’s idea is to go well past the generative out
L’Oréal is giving the hair dryer a long-overdue makeover.
“Over the last 100 years, since the first invention of the hair dryer, people have been drying their hair in the same way,” says Guive Balooch, global managing director of augmented beauty and open innovation at L’Oréal.
The standard hair dryer found in homes and salons uses convection heating, which are thermal rods that turn orange as they heat up, with a motor powering wind t
Recently, Microsoft built a clock.
Well, “built” may be overstating things. Members of the company’s quantum computing team found a small digital clock in a wood case on Amazon—the kind you might mistake for a nicer-than-usual trade show tchotchke. They hacked it to run off two experimental batteries they’d created in collaboration with staffers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Then they dressed u