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TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years on the platform now used by more than 200 million Americans.The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under “defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users,” the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app.President Donald Trump praised the deal in a Truth Social post, thanking Chinese leader Xi Jinping specifically “for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal.” Trump add that he hopes “that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew.The deal ends years of uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the United States. After wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in the place of China’s ByteDance, the platform was set to go dark on the law’s January 2025 deadline. For a several hours, it did. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration sought an agreement for the sale of the company.“China’s position on TikTok has been consistent and clear,” Guo Jiakun, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Beijing, said Friday about the TikTok deal and Trump’s Truth Social post, echoing an earlier statement from the Chinese embassy in Washington.Apart from an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok’s algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement.The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties specifically the algorithm with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining.The law prohibits “any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance’s continued involvement in this arrangement will play out.“Who controls TikTok in the U.S. has a lot of sway over what Americans see on the app,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University.Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX are the three managing investors, each holding a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture. Associated Press writers Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong and Didi Tang in Washington contributed to this report. Kaitlyn Huamani, AP Technology Reporter
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E-Commerce
For much of the modern corporate era, brand has been treated as surface area. A story told outward. A set of signals designed to persuade, attract, and differentiate. When companies spoke about brand, they were usually talking about perception: how they looked in the market, how they sounded, how they were received. That framing made sense in a world where markets moved a little more slowly, organizations were stable, and leadership could afford to separate strategy from culture, product from meaning, execution from belief. That world no longer exists. Todays organizations operate in a state of near-constant volatility. Strategy shifts quarterly. Teams scale overnight. Culture is tested publicly, in real time. And leadership is no longer judged solely by results, but by coherence and meaning. Do the choices make sense? Do the values hold under pressure? Does the organization know how to behave when the playbook runs out? In this environment, brand cannot remain a visual wrapper. It must become something more fundamental. It must become an operating system. When Brand Stops Being a Story and Starts Being Structure An operating system doesnt exist to impress. It exists to coordinate behavior, allocate resources, and make complex systems usable. It governs whats possible, whats prioritized, and what happens when things break. This is the shift now underway in the most forward-thinking organizationsbrand moving from expression to infrastructure. In this new paradigm, brand is no longer just what the company says. Its how the company defines itself. It shows up in how leaders frame trade-offs, how teams resolve tension, how products evolve, and how culture responds to stress. The question is no longer Is the brand consistent? but Is the brand functional? Does it help people make better decisions faster? Does it reduce friction? Does it offer clarity when data runs out and vision or judgment takes over? If it cant be used under intense pressure and scrutiny, it isnt an operating system at all. The End of the Brand Deck Era and What Comes Next This evolution didnt happen because brand teams failed. It happened because organizations asked brand to do the wrong job. For years, brand was tasked with alignment theater: values posters, messaging frameworks, tone-of-voice documents. Useful artifacts, yes, but largely disconnected from how power, priorities, and incentives actually worked inside the business. Meanwhile, leadership teams struggled with a different problem entirelyfragmentation. Smart people pulling in different directions. Strategy decks multiplying ideas while conviction thinned. Culture initiatives proliferating without changing behavior. The gap between what the brand claimed and how the organization actually operated grew wider. In that gap, trust eroded, employees disengaged, decision-making slowed. And companies found themselves saying the right things while doing the wrong ones. Brand-as-operating-system emerges as a response to that gap. Not as a creative flourish, but as a leadership correction. Brand as a Shared Logic System What does this look like in practice? When brand functions as an operating system, it becomes a shared logic layer across the organization. It provides a common mental model that helps teams answer questions like: What kind of decisions do we make here? What do we prioritize when values collide? How do we act when theres no precedent? What does good actually look like for us? This is where brand moves beyond language and into behavior. Hiring becomes more precise. Not just about skills, but about belief alignment. Innovation becomes more focused. Not just novel, but meaningful. Culture becomes less performative. Not whats celebrated on slides, but whats rewarded in practice. The organization stops asking people to remember the brand and starts enabling them to use it. Why This Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Marketing One Brand-as-OS doesnt install itself. It has to be architected, and that responsibility starts at the top. Brand-as-OS only works when leadership owns it, models it, and enforces it. This is where many organizations stall. Its easier to approve a campaign than to commit to a worldview. Easier to delegate brand than to live inside it. But brand is not neutral. Every organization already has an operating system. The only question is whether its intentional or accidental. Our Future of Brand Report 2026 reveals a clear pattern: companies that treat brand as infrastructure, embedded in systems, rituals, and strategic choices, outperform peers who treat it as a job left to the marketing department. What sets these companies apart isnt better branding. Its leadership that understands brand is the connective tissue between culture, vision, and execution. At Motto, weve seen this firsthand. In companies led by visionaries who treat brand not as a communications tool, but as a cultural code. Leaders who hold brand in the same regard as financial health or product strategy, because they understand its tied to both. And when that code is clear, everything else becomes faster, sharper, and more aligned. What emerges isnt language for the website or a better logo. Its a set of convictions that govern how the company behaves, especially when the answers arent obvious. The company doesnt just look different; it is different. The Cost of Not Making the Shift Organizations that fail to treat brand as infrastructure will continue to suffer from the same symptoms, no matter how many initiatives they launch. Theyll hire exceptional talent only to frustrate it. Theyll produce beautiful work that lacks cohesion. Theyll talk about alignment while reinforcing ambiguity. Most dangerously, theyll confuse activity with progress. In contrast, companies that build brand as an operating system gain something far more valuable than consistency. They gain velocity. Because when people share a belief system, they dont need permission for every move. They can act with confidence, even in uncertainty. The Next Frontier of Leadership Leadership in the coming decade will not be defined by charisma or control but by coherence. The ability to create systems that make sense to the humans inside them. Bran-as-operating-system is not a trend. Its a response to complexity. A way of giving organizations a spine when everything else is in flux. The leaders who understand this wont hand off brand to marketing and hope it holds. They wont treat vision, culture, and brand as separate lines of effort, but as one integrated system of belief, behavior, and direction. Theyll design for alignment from the inside out, not just to look good but to operate better. Because the future of brand leadership belongs to those who do more than tell the story. They architect the system. They run the code. They build companies where vision is felt, culture is lived, and brand is the connective tissue in it all. Not just brands with something to say. Brands built to lead.
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E-Commerce
Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. On January 16, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniakknown to all as Wozreceived the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Tech Interactive, a science museum in San Jose, California. The ceremony and a conversation between Wozniak and comedian Drew Carey capped a gala event in which several organizations were named laureates for using technology to improve the world. Their creations include a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps people with disabilities communicate, a forum that lets patients who have received BCI implants shape the technologys best practices and ethics, a headset that uses ultrasound therapy to treat mental conditions, and a device that provides people with Parkinsons disease the ability to walk more confidently. Until he took the stage himself, Wozniak sat in the audience with his wife, Janet, watching presentations about each honoree with rapt attention. In a conversation after the event, Wozniak marveled at what hed seen. They were creating something to solve a problem they had with the world, and that’s where you get the best products, he said. He likened the honorees ingenuity to his own implementation of color graphics on 1977s Apple II, a killer feature at a time when other microcomputers could barely draw pictures in black and white. Rather than adding to the machines cost and complexity, he explained, his approach took no chips at all. I mean, it was just so far out of the box. It violated all the rules of mathematics on color TV. From left: Tech for Global Good Celebration honorees Jay Sanguinetti of Sanmai Technologies, Sidney Collin of NexStride, Steve Wozniak, Andreas Forsland of Cognixion, and Ian Burkhart of BCI Pioneers Coalition in San Jose, California, on January 16, 2026. [Photo: Don Feria] Wozniak has spent close to half a century being celebrated for his technical brilliance and irreplaceable role in bringing computing to the masses. Just three years after starting Apple with Steve Jobs (and, briefly, Ron Wayne), he received the Association for Computing Machinerys Grace Murray Hopper Award. Six years after that, he and Jobs won the National Medal of Technology, resulting in a memorable photo opp with President Ronald Reagan. He said last weeks award was particularly meaningful to him because it reflected his efforts as a humanitarian rather than solely as a technologist. Those efforts have often focused on culture and education in Silicon Valley. A native of San Jose, Wozniak provided funding that was instrumental to bootstrapping the 27-year-old Tech Interactive as well as the citys Childrens Discovery Museum. (The latter is located on a street named Woz Wayyet another of Wozniaks many tributes.) In his memoir, iWoz, he writes about paying for computer labs in local schools and fulfilling a cherished dream by teaching computing skills to fifth graders. Even earlier, he donated the very first Apple computer to a teacher named Liza Loop. After Apple employees dating to its days as a garage startup werent cut in on its 1980 initial public offering, Wozniak gave them a meaningful percentage of his personal stock, purely because it felt like the right thing to do. He was also a principal founding donor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an essential advocate for civil rights in the digital age. The list of his good deeds goes on, and is not thoroughly documented: In conversations with people who have known him for decades, Ive heard multiple stories about his unpublicized support for other worthy causes. All along, Wozniak has remained on Apples payroll. (One of the best things about attending product launches at Apple Park is observing him mingling with the preshow crowd, otherwise made up of journalists, creators, influencers, and Apple PR people.) But its been more than 40 years since he wound down active work at the company. Though hes since been involved in several startupsin areas ranging from remote controls to space junkhis post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power. His desire to leave society better than he found it is one big reason why. Its not tough to connect the dots between the Woz who engineered the Apple-1 and Apple II when he was in his mid-twenties and Woz the 75-year-old humanitarian. He does so himself, arguing your personality settles down between 18 and 23 years old. From then on, youre the same person. (Having reassessed his priorities after surviving a small plane crash in 1981, he does allow that something like a horrible shock or near-death [experience] might have an impact.) His interest in inventing stuff, he told me, began as a form of self-expression that helped him overcome being painfully shy: The only way I could do anything to communicate was to design something cool. And people, other geeks, would talk to me about it. Steve Wozniak accepts the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award from presenter Katie Ferrick. [Photo: Don Feria] Apples first machines grew out of Wozniaks desire to own a computer himself, at a time when no computer was built or priced for consumers. That led to him wanting to help other people own them, an early sign of his fundamental generosity of spirit. At first, that meant sharing the Apple-1 schematics so that other hobbyists could assemble their ownin part because he couldnt convince his pre-Apple employer, HP, that PCs might become a pretty decent business. I proposed it five times, he remembers. I got turned down. No computer company really felt it was going to go anywhere. Fortunately for Wozniak, and us, others showed more foresight. Essential support came from Paul Terrell, whose Byte Shop computer store became Apples first dealer, and Mike Markkula, the companys first angel investor and, later, its CEO. It took a couple of people like that to really give us a chance, Wozniak says. (What about Steve Jobs? Discussing their time together at AppleJobs resigned after a board fight in 1985, the same year Wozniak moved onWozniak calls him a good talker, a good promoter, a good marketer of the Apple II but also points out the failure of the companys third and fourth computers, the Apple III and Lisa. As Jobss Mac got off to a sluggish start, he notes, the Apple IIs continuing popularity provided the company with a lifeline. Wozniak waxes more enthusiastic about the iPod, a crucial element of Apples comeback after Jobs returned: It wasn’t a computer, but he knew what people wantedhe knew people.) In this century, the Apple II has remained admired and loved in equal measurewhen I helped assemble a list of the greatest PCs of all time, we ranked it No. 1. Even so, the world may underappreciate the degree to which it reflected Wozniaks outlook on life. It certainly delivered on his life philosophy, which he calls the secret of being a good person: Happiness equals smiles minus frowns. Im not sure if a single offering from todays Silicon Valley outperforms the 49-year-old Apple II on that score, and AI is only making matters more fraught. Maybe thats a lesson for todays product designers: Be more like Woz. One other trait sets Wozniak apart. In an industry brimming with self-serious workaholics, he is a lifelong prankster, a pastime he discussed onstage with Carey last week. (My takeaway: Never, ever let Woz talk to Siri on your iPhone.) I asked him if theres a link between his mischievous streak and his philanthropic one. He wasnt sure. But he stressed that humor and creativity are deeply intertwined. If you can make jokes, you can look at the world in different ways, he told me. They just come together naturally. His own life proves his point, and were all richer for it. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company You probably shouldnt click that email unsubscribe link. Heres what to do insteadIts tempting to click on unsubscribe to defend yourself from spam emails. But that can sometimes make things worse. Heres a safer way to take control. Read More This ingenious weightless camera is changing live sports foreverNorwegian startup Muybridge has rocked pro tennis. Next up: soccer, hockey, F1even emergency medicine. Read More Intel admits consumers don’t care about ‘AI PCs’yetTurns out most folks just want better battery life and faster graphics. Who knew? Read More 2026 will be the year Cybertruck diesTesla CEO Elon Musk overpromised sales of 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025. The company has reached barely 8% of that target. Read More Google Glass, Amazon Fire, Friendster: Why great ideas from successful companies failHere are the traps companies fall into. Read More 37signals has a fix for boring, complex, AI-infested productivity apps: FizzyThis personality-filled organizational app has a radically different philosophy than Trello, Jira, and Asanaand youd better believe thats by design. Read More
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