Kate Rockwood

It's diploma season again, which means not only that a new batch of students will soon be facing the reality of the workplace but also that universities will be handing out honorary degrees. A look at several honorees—and how they earned their doctorates.

Originally published June 2008, Fast Company magazine

You can see it in their stats and in their cityscapes: These 12 Fast Cities around the globe are thriving. We'll be watching these nodes of creativity and innovation this year and beyond—we're expecting big business and big things.

Originally published June 2008, Fast Company

Chicago is the creative capital of the universe. Discuss.

"Big yes! A great creative place has to have great art, great food, and a combination of beauty and grit to be inspired by. Chicago has all of that." —Brad Morris, Second City ensemble member

Originally published June 2008, Fast Company

Buy: Wal-Mart Annual Shareholders Meeting:

Call it what you will: a pep rally, an old-fashioned Arkansas revival, a Peoples Temple brimming with Kool-Aid and those creepy Wal-Mart smiley faces. We still can't wait to see what kind of hoopla the WMT annual meeting generates this year, with the company's investors and employees expected to pack an 18,000-seat arena near its Bentonville headquarters...

Originally published June 2008, Fast Company magazine

Wrap: The Packaging Summit

Coffee lids that change from crimson to mauve as the cup's contents cool. Sex-toy filled tubes for hotel minibars. Pop-top plastic fruit containers to replace metal cans. Before innovations like these get to consumers, they're shown at the Packaging Summit, home to the Ameristar Awards (aka "the Oscars of packaging").

Originally published May 2008, Fast Company

AOL's Greatest Hope:

With the online-ad market expected to hit $42 billion by 2011, AOL's headlong rush into advertising makes plenty of sense. Following the 2004 purchase of Advertising.com, the company has gone on an acquisition bender, snapping up specialized ad servers with the intention of building the world's largest third-party network, dubbed Platform A. Here's how it all fits together.

Originally published April 2008, Fast Company

Illuminate: Light + Building:

This biennial, which bills itself as "the world's biggest innovation platform for lighting," puts the sector's smaller trade shows into the shadows. (Lightfair, we're talking about you.)

Originally published April 2008, Fast Company

With Car Sharing, More Means Less

As car sharing gets bigger (thanks largely to Zipcar), so does the ecological impact: fewer cars on the road and tons less CO2 emissions in the air.

Originally published March 2008, Fast Company