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Why They Won: We Break Down The Finalists From Our Retail Accelerator
The Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator challenged entrants to design and build an app that would extend the Target customer experience into new areas, leveraging mobile software--native or...
View ArticleBreaking Down The iBooks Suit: Was Steve Jobs a Criminal Colluder?
Two Sides to the ChargesApple is accused of conspiring with publishers to raise e-book prices: "a collective effort to destroy Amazon’s model of selling e-books for a uniform $9.99," according to...
View ArticleHuman Editors Are Returning To Music
Looking back, it seems Pandora may have been the tipping point, the proof of concept that swayed people and subliminally convinced them that curation could be done by robots and algorithms just as well...
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Finally, Three Ways To Automate iOS App Testing
Agile development has long been all the rage; indeed, in most modern development shops the great agile methodologies are old hat. If you come from a software background like Ruby on Rails, Python, or...
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Why Frustrated Apple Developers Need AltWWDC
In 2010, tickets to WWDC sold out in eight days. In 2011, tickets sold out in under 12 hours. 2012? Two hours. And this year when the $1,599 tickets went on sale on April 25th, they sold out in just...
View ArticleThe Web Is Getting Better So Fast That Apple's Brand New OSes Look Broken
The Mac and iOS developer community is perhaps the most brilliant single group of technologists in the business. Which is why it's so damn painful to watch web development run circles around what used...
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How Proper "Dogfooding" Might Have Saved Facebook Home
One of the biggest misconceptions in the world of programming is that "eating your own dogfood" is a magic cure-all. Sure, developers should use their own apps, it brings the team up to speed and gives...
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Four Android App Design Guidelines You Should Break
While Google’s Android Developer Guidelines do help developers create better apps, there are a number of places where usability and common sense should win out over standards. Of course, before you set...
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How I Learned To Build Products People Care About
On August 23rd, 2011, I was sitting on the concrete in the Y Combinator parking lot, trying to find some space to be alone and call my wife. It was Demo Day, and the crowd was full of elite and...
View ArticleThe Kind Of App Experiment You’d Only Find In NYC
Life in New York can be a lot like the life of one of those trees that attempts to grow into a cliff. Unlike the Bay Area, with its downy-soft incubators, people here invent a lot of things based...
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I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself
We don't plan to stop experimenting, so we'll be continually updating this post. If you have any comments or suggestions, tweet us @FastCoLabsLast week, we learned that the NSA has been secretly...
View ArticleGoogle Reader’s Death Will Vastly Improve The Way You Read
June 13, 2013Prepare to see reading apps improve like never before. There’s no shortage of feed-reading solutions either underway or already on the marketplace. Each has its devotees, but last-minute...
View ArticleIs Rubber Cement Seriously The NSA’s Anti-Thumbdrive Strategy?
In November 2008, the NSA experienced a major network security breach at the hands of a miscreant with a thumbdrive. The deputy secretary of defense at the time, William Lynn III, responded by having...
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Why The Boom In Enterprise Tech Will Happen In New York
A year ago at this time, as I was preparing to be thrown out of my Greenpoint loft for Airbnb'ing too much, I began to realize what can happen when you let things get too complicated.People like to...
View ArticleInventor Of Oculus Rift: The Future Of Virtual Reality Is Social Networking
Palmer Lucky is a California native who had an affinity for computer hardware, and for games. This led to him thinking about the bigger picture for this tech. “I had been building computers for years,...
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Does Exercising With Apps Actually Get You Fitter?
Here at FastCo.Labs, we've been pondering how to cover wellness--you know, fitness, nutrition, stress management--in a way that makes sense for people on technical teams. The idea got me wondering...
View ArticleWhat Happens When Robots Eliminate All Our Jobs?
In his weekly column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman talks about a problem that is likely (or at least should be) on the minds of many technologists: Companies are making more money today on the...
View ArticleHow This Ad Agency Is Measuring The Value Of Awesome
"We like proving that the stuff we think is awesome is worthwhile," explains Charlie McKittrick, co-head of strategy at Mother, the ad agency. "My greatest fear is of being full of shit, or selling...
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Announcing Divvy: The App That Won The Co.Labs And Target Retail Accelerator
The Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator challenged entrants to design and build an app that would extend the Target customer experience into new areas, leveraging mobile software--native or...
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This Simple Toy Shows Why Girls Hate Engineering
Growing up in Ireland my three siblings and I had a favorite game; We called it James Bond. One of us would play the coveted role of secret agent, and the remaining siblings tried to stop them from...
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