Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When Sonos unveiled its first connected speakers over 10 years ago, it may have seemed a bit gutsy. At the time, the idea that Wi-Fi would blanket every home and serve as reliable way to pipe music from room to room wasn't necessarily a given. But having checked off its first big bet as a safe one, the company is ready to roll the dice on another unconventional idea: The music industry is about to explode again. And increasingly, it's betting, music will be even more integrated into our everyday lives.

This isn't to say that record labels will see their profits return to pre-Napster levels—Indeed the entire structure of the music industry is fractured across many more players now—but according to Sonos's chief marketing officer Joy Howard, the rise of paid subscription services will lead to a new phase of the music industry. And the streaming boom is only just getting started.

"In the first six months of this year, the number of paid subscriptions have doubled," Howard said at a session hosted by Fast Company as part of its 2016 Innovation Festival in New York City. "That’s the fastest that they’ve ever grown. Now people are saying that in the next 15 years, the music industry will double in size across the entire ecosystem."...

The key to a gadget’s ubiquity is balancing both function and design, so the device can enhance someone’s lifestyle without requiring them to change their behavior…too much.

I was lucky enough to spend 17 years of my career at HP, mostly with the PC and printer business, at a time when we were creating new businesses and taking new ideas to market at a breakneck pace Some of the basic rules

I learned back then became extremely relevant when I joined Livescribe. Right away, we shifted our product design to embrace smartphones and tablets given the ubiquity and power of modern mobile devices....

The modern family is always in flux. That's why this house--with flexible walls, sliding cabinets, and moveable outlets--is easily reconfigured to meet the changing needs of our lives.

Americans spend around $300 billion each year on home renovations, adding to the construction industry's giant carbon footprint. But what if houses could reshape themselves as needed, so people could add a room or change the size of a kitchen without bringing in bulldozers or building new walls?

The Adaptable House, part of a new development in Denmark, is designed to change over time. If a family has kids and wants to add a room or make a living room bigger, the house can expand. If a grandparent moves in, the family can slide walls around to add another room. The house is even designed to split in two in the case of divorce....

Clean towels in seconds! A global design competition reveals our shared frustration with smelly socks.

Hoarding stacks of quarters and schlepping bags of dirty laundry may soon be footnotes in the history books, if product designers can realize their visions for better fabric care.

This year the annual design competition sponsored by Swedish  appliance maker Electrolux has elicited a range of ideas for saving lazy urbanites a trip to the laundromat, from a system that cleans your clothes using a system of “purified air with silver ions” to something involving “jelly and vibration."...