Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Yen Lee is the founder and president of Uptake, a social travel company that pairs personalized recommendations from friends with an extensive, searchable catalog of expert and consumer travel insights.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, check out the world’s most romantic cities — according to Facebook, that is.

My travel planning company dove into Facebook’s vast stream of status updates in order to bring you the top U.S. cities where couples are getting engaged (and subsequently talking about it on Facebook). Perhaps these cities are more romantic than the rest, or maybe they just put something in the drinking water – in any case, check out this list and see if a proposal is more likely to come your way this Valentine’s!

Since June of last year, Fab has been the go-to flash-sale site for ogling beautiful, design-y pieces. Today, the New York-based company is announcing that it is launching five independent verticals–or “shops”–for items related to fashion, food, children, pets, and vintage.

The launch comes just weeks after the company hit the 2 million users mark–and it hit that milestone long before its first birthday. The company added 450,000 users in January alone and has doubled its membership since November. And now, CEO Jason Goldberg tells Fast Company, the company is on track to do $100 million in sales this year–double the annualized take from last year.

Fab’s roaring success, like that of similar ventures like One King’s Lane, underlines how the next wave of e-commerce isn’t simply about executing well on a retail idea. Rather, with its gorgeous photos and sensuous content, Fab is leading the way in merging commerce with content–and showing that successful stores in this space will realize that they need to feed customers’ desire to browse and consume media, as much as their interest in shopping.

“We want to look like a glossy magazine,” Goldberg says.

Like Fab proper, each of the new “shops” will offer items for sale during limited windows–in the case of the verticals, seven days. Unlike Fab proper, the shops will roll out only weekly, rather than daily: Vintage on Mondays, Fashion on Tuesdays, Kids on Wednesdays, Pets on Thursdays, and Food on Fridays. Each “shop” will go live at 7 p.m. Eastern time, starting this Thursday.

Goldberg says their customers’ appetites for these particular categories demanded specialized treatment. “We were already selling fashion, and we were already selling kids and pets,” Goldberg says. “But we felt like to do them justice, it would be better to have a dozen of the same sales on a given day, so that, for example, the moms could say, ‘I’m going to go check out some great designed kids products, and I’m going to shop from hundreds of different products, versus doing one today, one tomorrow, and one the next day.’”

Unlike many flash sale sites, Fab’s catalog is not made up of inventory that existing retailers are trying to liquidate. Instead, most of it comes from smaller and emerging companies that are using Fab for marketing purposes.

“In this down economy, a lot of people have gotten back to making things,” Goldberg says. “But they didn’t have a platform on which to sell it.” Fab, then, which is backed by over $51 million in A-list venture capital from the likes of First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz, is providing that outlet. “We’ve enabled them to have millions of people discover their products.”

On the consumer side, the site is also feeding a burgeoning desire for unique and beautifully crafted furnishings, clothing, and decorations. (A desire, incidentally, that author Daniel Pink presaged in his 2006 book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the World, in which he described an emerging longing for beauty, design, and meaning, and predicted that those who could deliver it would have an advantage in the market over traditional left-brained thinkers.)

Goldberg calls this “a new wave of e-commerce.”

“Amazon took the super-store or the catalog and brought it online and enabled people to get the best price on commodity products,” he says. “Consumers are now saying not everything is just about price. There’s other things that matter. It’s about discovery, it’s about being delighted and being wowed by products that maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for each day but someone is curating it and putting it in front of you, and you say, ‘Alright, that’s cool, I’m going to browse and take a look at it.’”

But it’s also part of a next wave of media. As on Pinterest, consumers are flocking to Fab to feed a hunger traditionally satisfied by shelter and other lifestyle publications. “People say that getting Fab is like getting Dwell or Surface or Wallpaper magazine–just with the added benefit that you get it every day,” Goldberg says.

“When we talk to magazine publishers, they tell us, ‘If we would ever rethink the magazine, we would think along the lines of Fab,’” he continues. That’s because, in addition to beautiful content, Fab enables the “readers” to buy the things they see and because there are social elements–like the ability to share purchases on Facebook.

“Whether it’s us, Pinterest, or Flipboard, you’re seeing a change in the way content, commerce, and social are blending,” Goldberg says. “Media is not just about commerce or content or social. The new reality is that it’s all of the above, and we’re creating that every day.”

Image: Fab

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is working with its Eastern suppliers to design and test a smaller version of the iPad hardware. People supposedly with intimate knowledge of the situation say it’s going to have a screen size around 8 inches, compared to the 9.7 inches of the current (and presumed future) iPads and the 3.5 inches of an iPhone. The idea, these sources tell the WSJ, is to broaden Apple’s product offering amid ever-more intense competition and maintain a dominant market share. You may think “no s%&t Sherlock!” to this, as it’s pretty much what every company would like to do when it leads a market that’s seeing more and more competition. But this is the WSJ, and since we suspect it’s an official leaky channel for Apple to influence the media, then perhaps we should pay serious attention.

Technically it’s plausible for a bunch of reasons. Apple’s revamping the current iPad design into the iPad 3 with a better processor and a radically enhanced screen, so the thinking goes. That leaves room for the firm to take all its own know-how and all those apps built up for the iPad 2 (as well as tech from the iPad 3, like LTE) and capitalize on them by releasing a new device at a lower price, to target the market now being served by the Kindle Fire, cheapish 7-inch Android tablets, and the rumored own-brand Google tablet.

The screen tech, so the WSJ has learned, would remain at the iPad 2′s current resolution–meaning Apple wouldn’t have to pay top dollar for an 8-inch retina screen, the power demands of the screen could be lower and thus translate into better battery life, and all the current iPad 2-compatible apps would run on it seamlessly. It would also be distinguished from the throng of 7-inchers by having a slightly bigger size, while still being theoretically more portable than the (already incredibly portable) iPad 2. At the right price, which is somewhere around $300 we think, it would absolutely squash much of its competition. They could even call it the iPad 2S, where the “S” stood for “small.” You’re welcome, Tim Cook, you can have that for free.

But we’ve argued all this before, when the iPad Mini rumors first began to arrive:

iPad Mini Rumors — borrowing iPhone tech, seriously boosting the FaceTime empire.

iPad 4 In October Rumors — possibly an iPad with a smaller size, we thought.

iPad 2 to Stay In Production — a good move, especially if well-priced and maybe a 7-incher.

Those iPad Mini Rumors Make Sense — because, well,  see above.

And then maybe we’ll reconsider this post:

The iPad Mini Myth, Busted — where we argued it’d be all about the iPad 2 (the iPad “Lite”?) and the iPad 3. Before the big excitement about the 7-inch Fire really hit.

And then again, maybe we won’t: The WSJ did note Apple could opt not to proceed with taking the prototypes into real on-sale hardware, and that Apple was wedded to the existing iPad size. Steve Jobs even pooh-poohed the smaller size, saying such Android ones were “dead on arrival.”

But frankly, this is Apple, and it has both the cash and chutzpah to let it do anything, including change its mind.

Image demonstrating the perfect cat-size of the iPad: Flickr user earlysound

Chris Lee is the cofounder of the Seattle-based Meeteor, which scours your social graph in search of second- and third-degree connections to people who might be able to help advance your career. Fast Company caught up with Lee to talk about coffee, sandwiches, beer, and other networking tools.

The person I know who is the best networker has a technique: He looks up friends of friends on Facebook, messages them and says, “Hey, I see you know so-and-so. Want to get coffee?”

A big part of our inspiration came from seeing how friends would, in a casual, analog way, talk to friends whenever they ran into them, and express, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for.” And friends would make referrals. Similarly, people were using online tools like Facebook or LinkedIn, but in a very manual way. We search through your network to highlight people you might want to reach out to, and we tell you why. Basically we want to remove as much friction as possible from the networking process.

Why do you use Facebook instead of LinkedIn, the supposed professional social network?

One reason is just pure numbers: Facebook has close to around 850 million users, while LinkedIn has around 130 million. Also your friends on Facebook are more likely to help you; they’re the ones you’d casually reach out to anyway. Facebook friends are your close friends, the people who are gonna go out on a limb for you. That said we’re currently exploring integrating with LinkedIn more.

But are sites like yours a real warning sign for LinkedIn? If Facebook takes over networking, what does that mean for LinkedIn?

I think it’s also very much a demographic issue. For people in their late 30s, LinkedIn is very much their siloed professional network. Lower in the demographics, people are blending personal and professional social network use. For a lot of people in their 20s, they’re adding people from work, their bosses, on Facebook.

Who is Meeteor most popular with?

We’ve gotten really positive feedback from college students who we talk to. They need more of a helping hand at this point. They don’t have large professional networks, or a huge Rolodex of people they can call upon. They’re really looking for tools integrated with their lives, and their lives revolve around Facebook.

Part of the insight of Meeteor is that help can come from unlikely places. You might think your guitarist friend would have the hookup to the music industry, but it turns out to be some random person you played soccer with in first grade.

Exactly. I have 800 connections on Facebook. There’s no way I can keep track of all those people. We’re really trying to tap into the network you may not even know you have. One of our users mentioned she was interested in meeting people connected to libraries. Meeteor introduced her to one of her brother’s friends, and she quickly realized that this friend was working at the place she wanted to intern at. The exact person she wanted to get in touch with worked down the hall from her brother’s friend. Three days later she had an interview with the woman, who offered her the internship on the spot.

You talk about Meeteor as though it were a being of its own.

We position Meeteor as this service that’s working for you. You could be the one that’s doing the grunt work.

But you’re not. Step two of the “how to use Meeteor” section on your site is, “Make a sandwich.”

Networking is kind of a pain. And we don’t think you should have to spend all your time doing all this arduous labor.

You were president of the Brewmasters’ Guild in business school. That sounds like a good way to build a network.

I still love exploring all the local breweries and beer bars in Seattle. When I do come across someone with a love of beer, there’s an instant connection there, something we can easily chat about. In general, when you find another person has a shared passion, it accelerates the relationship.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Think you’d make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

Follow Fast Company on Twitter.

Image: Bell Helicopter

Bell Helicopter unveiled its largest commercial helicopter ever, and the 16-passenger aircraft is getting as much attention for its fly-by-wire system as its ability to carry, say, a crew of oil workers to an offshore drilling rig.

A pair of 1,800-horsepower General Electric turbine engines will allow the Bell 525 to carry a work crew (or a few VIPs) 400 miles at 140 knots (161 miles per hour). When it comes to quickly moving heavy loads, brute power remains key. But to control that power, Bell Helicopter will use fly-by-wire technology for the first time. Although such tech has been common in airplanes for many years, it remains rare in the rotary-wing world.

Bell plans to join the small club of fly-by-wire helicopters, a move that will dramatically change the cockpit for the 525 pilot. The helicopter will be flown via two small joysticks rather than the large control stick and lever that has dominated helicopter cockpits since the early days of rotary-wing flight. The extra room will open up the view for the massive touchscreen displays.

The new cockpit of the Bell 525 featuring joysticks (with armrests) for both the cyclic and collective controls. The seats have been left out of the image. Image: Bell Helicopter

It’s been more than 66 years since Bell first flew the Model 47, the bubble-canopy helicopter everyone knows from the opening sequence of M*A*S*H. (Yes, the Army actually flew the H-13 Sioux.) The company cemented its iconic status more than 55 years ago with the UH-1 “Huey.” But in today’s world, a growing part of the industry is focused on ever-bigger helicopters that can carry work crews long distances, often to oil rigs in the middle of an ocean or mining camps in the middle of nowhere.

Bell has been late to the game of producing a model for the new class of “medium lift” helicopters. Civilian variants of its Huey were for decades a big player in the offshore industry, but it was left behind as Eurocopter, Sikorsky, AgustaWestland and others offered faster, more capable models.

Bell’s latest is aimed squarely at reclaiming lost ground. The fly-by-wire control system, and the paperless cockpit dominated by four large touchscreens, put it a step beyond the competition from a technological viewpoint.

The fly-by-wire system on the 525 is similar to that of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, and a triple-redundant system ensures a measure of safety. Pilots will have to get used to flying through a computer rather than direct mechanical linkage. For the uninitiated, fly-by-wire essentially means the pilot tells the computer what to do, and the computer determines how best to fulfill the instruction. There are times when the computer can override the pilot if it determines the person at the controls is asking for something unsafe.

Of course, the potential disconnect between pilot and computer has led to problems and occasional disasters like the crash of Air France Flight 447.

Bell Helicopter’s Larry Roberts told Vertical that the flight control computer on the 525 should not limit the pilot’s capabilities and the helicopter “will provide an impressively wide range of maneuvering capability and not require the need, or, for that matter, the ability, to override.”

According to Vertical, the launch customer for the 525 is PHI Inc., one of the biggest players in the offshore oil transportation business. But the company also sees potential sales in search and rescue as well as other markets.

The Bell 525 Relentless is expected to make its first flight in 2014.