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General Mills is moving its open innovation efforts to the digital world. With G-WIN Digital, the food company is looking for your gaming and mobile ideas

Business schools and most jobs don’t teach you how important it is to sweat the small stuff.

The startup Womply recently brought us Groupon-like "effortless offers." Today it launches Loyalty Cloud, hoping to slice through the messy customer-loyalty market with the "simplest loyalty program ever for local merchants." Last month a new startup, Womply , launched to bring "effortless offers" schemes to local merchants--coming with an impressive pedigree because it's co-founder Brandt Squires was formerly GM and Head of Sales at LivingSocial . Just weeks later, Womply has an additional offering--Loyalty Cloud--that promises the same sort of effortless experience but for customer loyalty schemes, rather than Groupon -style "special offers." According to the new sitei, it's simplicity rests on the fact that, "Merchants create offers that reward customers for repeat visits and Womply handles everything else, from marketing and remitting offers to customers, to providing analysis and insight on the amount of revenue generated as a result." To this end, Womply's new Loyalty Cloud is trying to be a complete one-stop shop for local business loyalty schemes: Simpler even than stamping a rubber stamp on a collector card, and providing deep customer analytics that would be tricky to get any other way. It manages this by being seamless from a customer and merchant point of view, with the transaction happening "in the cloud" via "Womply's high-tech platform that enables the company to spot credit and debit card transactions at participating merchants and to push cash credits to customer payment cards." The whole thing is designed to be merchant-centric, rather than focussing on the deals or the end-user customers.

A site started by travel and search industry veterans--including Calvin Yang, who designed Google's image search--gives users a peek at what's inside and outside of a hotel room, before they arrive.

I want to start by saying I love music. Sharing music with my friends and colleagues is even more fun.

At universities, educational software largely means enterprise-scale, expensive, feature-stuffed "learning management systems." Blackboard has the majority of the market, but professors and students are about as enthusiastic about its various updates, crashes, and bugs as people are with the latest version of Windows (Blackboard scores a whopping 93% "hated" rating on website Amplicate ). Last week, a new alternative was launched--built by students--that looks and works a lot more like the social platforms people actually choose to use in their spare time.

The "Flex and the C-Suite" series periodically showcases leaders who have made flexibility at work a key strategy for achieving smarter and better business results.

The new tablet from Amazon is selling like crazy, and plenty of people are calling it a threat to the iPad. But the real story is how it flipped the script on the many makers of tablets running Google's operating system.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

When we look back at 2011, many will remember it as the year of the Occupy Movement, as the representation for the 99% found their voice, aiming to bring about change by influencing the controls of economic wealth and political power. Meanwhile, earlier in the year, Professor Michael E

On a summer day in 1975, I stepped up the tee at the Liberty Country Club .

Spotify's got a huge catalog of music and 10 million subscribers.

A crazy year for Apple shows no sign of slowing as 2012 approaches--more and more rumors are popping up. We've looked at them with a critical eye for you

This and more important news from your Fast Company editors, with updates all day. Spotify To Enable Third Party App Access . Spotify boss Daniel Ek has just revealed his music streaming website will enable third party HTML5 apps to integrate right into the Spotify platform

In May, cloud-based enterprise company Salesforce.com acquired