Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies (x2), Simbe Robotics, Starlink at the White House, T-Mobile’s 5G speed record, Trump tries to fire FTC Dems, Verizon satellite messaging, Mark Vena podcast, Tools for Humanity

Months of on-and-off work for one of Fast Company’s most involved projects, the annual Most Innovative Companies list, finally yielded published copy this week. You can imagine my relief at that. This coming week should not feature nearly as many bylines for me, in part because I will be out of the office Thursday afternoon for one of the most important rites of spring: the Washington Nationals’ home opener.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in manufacturing for 2025, Fast Company

Some of the companies honored in this part of the MIC list were obvious calls, but more involved a lot of back-and-forth deliberation between me and my editors.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in robotics and engineering for 2025, Fast Company

I don’t cover the robotics industry all the time, but I spend enough time covering it to feel a little more at home judging what ranks as innovative in that sector.

3/18/2025: These retail robots travel through store aisles, scanning shelves for inventory and insights, Fast Company

Simbe Robotics earned a nod in last year’s MIC list, and this time around we elected to run a separate story about this startup’s work optimizing retail.

3/18/2025: Report: Starlink Tries to Fix White House’s Wi-Fi Woes, PCMag

The New York Times report about a deployment of Starlink broadband at the White House–which should neither be remotely necessary nor provide fiber-competitive speeds–didn’t mention how often Elon Musk has described Starlink as a rural-first solution. But I have those notes and made sure to surface quotes from them in this piece.

3/19/2025: T-Mobile Claims New 5G Download Speed Record, PCMag

My conversation with T-Mobile’s tech president Ulf Ewaldsson at MWC two weeks earlier helped me put this speed test in context.

3/19/2025: Trump Attempts to Fire the FTC’s Democratic Commissioners, PCMag

After I’d filed this report about Trump ignoring established law and a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling to try to fire Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, my editor improved it by suggesting I remind readers of the chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that suggests curbing the FTC’s statutory independence.

3/20/2025: Verizon Opens Non-Emergency Satellite Messaging to Galaxy S25, Pixel 9 Users, PCMag

Because I was swamped Wednesday covering the FTC news, I didn’t get to this news until Thursday–by which time Charter and Comcast had announced that their wireless services, based on resold Verizon capacity, were also getting Skylo satellite roaming for customers with Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 series phones.

3/20/2025: Ep 108 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Skype, NVIDIA GTC, MWC, BYD “fast charging”, Mark Vena

I spent most of my time in this episode of the podcast talking about what I saw at MWC, but the closing discussion of EV charging let me drop in a reference to The Cannonball Run that amused my fellow cinephiles.

3/21/2025: Bot or Not? To Prove You’re Human, Look Into This 8-Inch Orb, PCMag

Almost a month after I talked to Tools for Humanity’s chief architect Adrian Ludwig at Web Summit Qatar–during which that startup signed up a notable new partner and I developed a deeper understanding of what it’s trying to do with this identity scheme–the piece finally made it online.

#AlvaroBedoya #carrierAggregation #DOGE #ElonMusk #FTC #GalaxyS25 #MarkVena #MIC #MostInnovativeCompanies #Orb #Pixel9 #RebeccaSlaughter #satelliteMessaging #SimbeRobotics #Skylo #Starlink #TMobile #TallyRobot #ToolsForHumanity #verizon #WorldID #WorldNetwork #WorldCoin

Weekly output: Symbotic, Most Innovative Companies in robotics, Redwood Materials, Most Innovative Companies in manufacturing, Matter security label, SpaceX and Starship, AT&T and AST SpaceMobile, Android 15, Waymo, This Week in Tech

If you’ve been wondering why it’s been so long since I last had a byline with Fast Company, here’s your answer: I’ve spent a non-trivial part of the last three months helping to put together the robotics and manufacturing parts of the publication’s Most Innovative Companies list.

(In my nonexistent spare time, I also wrote a post for Patreon readers about my roadmap to getting our house off the methane gas grid–starting with the appliance that represents the smallest part of that fossil-fuel problem.)

3/19/2024: How Symbotic is speeding up warehouse robots, even in the dark, Fast Company

This piece profiles one of the finalists in the MIC robotics category–a warehouse-robot developer whose customers include Target and Walmart, and which the editors ranked number 34 among the 50 most innovative firms in the world.

3/19/2024: The most innovative companies in robotics for 2024, Fast Company

In addition to Symbotic, Doodle Labs, Agility Robotics, Locus Robotics, Dusty Robotics, Gecko Robotics, Nearthlab, Opentrons, Stratom, and Teleo earned MIC nods and brief writeups from me.

3/19/2024: Here’s how Redwood Materials is creating a circular economy for lithium-ion batteries, Fast Company

Here, I took a closer look at the company that ranked 19th among the top 50, a startup moving to scale up EV battery recycling with some help from the government.

3/19/2024: The most innovative companies in manufacturing for 2024, Fast Company

Our other MIC nominees in this category: Group14 Technologies, Holcim (written by another Fast Co. contributor, Ted C. Fishman), Mighty Buildings, Formlabs, Nucor, Cellares, Doosan Bobcat, Pyrowave, and Timken.

3/19/2024: Watch Out for This Blue Badge on the Next Smart Home Device You Buy, PCMag

The organization behind the Matter connected-gadget standard are now moving to sync up their security efforts with government labeling programs.

3/19/2024: SpaceX Expects Next Starship Launch in About 6 Weeks, PCMag

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell shared some news about the progress of the company’s Starship project and Starlink efforts during a panel at the Satellite 2024 show in D.C.

3/22/2024: AT&T, AST SpaceMobile Promise ‘True Broadband’ From Satellite Phone Service, PCMag

I filed a second piece from Satellite about AT&T’s plans to fill in dead zones using an upcoming constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites operated by its partner AST SpaceMobile.

3/22/2024: Android 15’s Second Developer Preview Augments Satellite Roaming, PCMag

Space-based broadband showed up in my coverage a third time when Google announced a new set of features coming to the next version of Android that include software to report when your phone has switched to a satellite connection.

3/22/2024: Waymo Wants You to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Robotaxi, PCMag

Thursday, I had to rush from Satellite to a Waymo event–a good use case not for a driverless car but for a bikeshare ride–to catch a panel about road safety that I found unintentionally revealing.

3/24/2024: This Week in Tech 972: Judicial Whimsy, TWiT.tv

I showed up at this podcast for the first time since August and joined host Leo Laporte and two people whose expertise I’ve leaned on before in my stories–game developer and activist Brianna Wu and lawyer Cathy Gellis–to talk about the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple, whether the government should ban business transactions with TikTok, Supreme Court cases involving social-media content moderation, and other recent tech-policy topics.

#Android15 #ASTSpaceMobile #Matter #MIC #MostInnovativeCompanies #RedwoodMaterials #satelliteToPhone #smartHomeSecurity #SpaceXStarship #Starlink #Symbotic #ThisWeekInTech #TWiT #Waymo