We’re back with our weekly recap of the interesting and inspiring, with a particular eye for what shifts and ideas brands should be tracking, evaluating and acting on. This is a collection of some standout business strategy, brand-building and digital media stories catching our attention.

Discussions Shaping Strategy, Creativity & Innovation 

• The Cure for Our Economy’s Stationary State (less bureaucracy, more free thinking and more experimentation)
• Don’t Think: Why Customers Think A Lot Less Than We Think They Do
• Pinterest, Tumblr, and the Trouble with ‘Curation’ (addictive yearning for more, for something we think we lack)
• Why Don’t Young Americans Buy Cars? (a cultural shift from ownership to borrowing – or a bad economy?)
• The Future Isn’t About Mobile (devices); It’s About Mobility (context)
• The Money-Empathy Gap (new research suggests more money may make people less humane)
• Think Quarterly: The Play Issue (on the rising importance of play at work and in life)
• 6 Strategies for Stealing Customers Away from Amazon (and addressing the ‘showrooming’ risk)
• Ron Johnson (jcpenney) on the Future of Retail
• New Olympic Sport: Screen Juggling (how will we be following the games?)
• A Fundraiser for a Member of the Planning Community Fighting Cancer: Griffin Farley

Notable Ideas: New Products, Platforms and Projects 

• Buzzfeed Distributes Data On Online Content Sharing (sad lack of depth in what we’re sharing – lots of Snooki)
• See the Results of ‘Brandalism’, the World’s First Collaborative Act of Ad Subversion
• Chrome Experiments: A World of Data and Fun in Mobile Browsers
• The Exquisite Forest
• Healthy Dose of Imagination by the Collaborative Fund
• Tripit Brings Personalized Search to the iPad
• PayPal Buys Credit Card Scanner Card.io
• ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com

Brands, Companies and Entities of Note (some more obvious than others)n 

• Dear Marissa Mayer (please make Flickr awesome again)
• Mining Marissa Mayer’s Googly Past for a Glimpse at Yahoo’s Future
• Uber’s Brilliant Marketing Stunt: Hail Nearby Ice Cream Trucks from Your Phone
• Amazon’s Mobile Ambitions Grow
• A New Kind of Catalogue by Ikea
• Microsoft Reports First Loss To Date
• Nike Hosts Virtual Sneaker Exchange on Facebook

Digital & Social Media News and Resources

• Will Organizations Evolve in the Face of Mobile Interaction Patterns?
• Recorded Future Attempts to Unlock the Predictive Powers of the Web (data, really)
• Online Data Collection Explodes Year Over Year in US
• Buyers of Latest iPad More Likely to Use It for Business
• Foursquare Introduces Local Updates from Businesses