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 

• Evolution of the Web
• Next Step for Technology is Becoming the Background
• The Next Secrets of the Web (the importance of changing your interface through insight and understanding)
• The ‘Busy’ Trap (on the necessity and benefits of idle time)
• When ‘Creative Destruction’ Destroys More Than It Creates (slow responsiveness as the death of corporate innovation)
• 1 in 5 Americans Have Bought A Brand That a Friend Have Followed
• 100+ Beautiful Slides from Cannes Lions 2012 (presentation design inspiration)
• What If We Gave It Away? Lessons from TED (in favor of free content…)
• Collateral Damage: How Free Advertising Destroys Advertising (and the dangers of free content when that content is art)
• Earning A Place In the Future of Marketing
• From Islands to Ecosystem: Connecting Offline,Online and Mobile
• Hierarchy of Internet Needs
• On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels (more on profiling/targeting customers based on behavioral + attitudinal data)
• Stop ‘Doing’ Advertising (the formula for creativity? divergent ideas from areas other than your own)

Notable Ideas: New Products, Platforms and Projects 

• Escape the City (inspiration to do something different)
• Whisk and Foodity Raise Funds to Link Recipes to Grocery Stores
• Food Sleuths: Sniffing Out Where Our Meals Really Come From
• Thunderclap: letting people be heard by sharing a single message at the same time
• Four Concepts for the Future That Could Create a More Sustainable World
• Pinuff, A Klout for Pinterest than Measures ‘Pinfluence’
• Site to be Seen: Everlane.com
• Swaag.it
• The Mantry Company (a curated monthly subscription of global products for men)

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

• How Chipotle Changed Fast Food Forever (a brand with meaning – that may or may not be lost on customers)
• Banana Republic, Bon Appetit and Open Table Team Up on Desk to Dinner Clothing Line (pairing food with clothes?)
• Google Just Declared War on These 12 Products
• Google Launches Compute Engine to Compete with Amazon
• It’s a Sphere! The Inside Story of Nexus Q, Google’s Hardware Gamble
• Clinique Tells Sales Staff to ‘Back Off’, Product Is Here to Play With
• Uniqlo Dry Mesh Project
• The Rolling Stones Celebrate their 50th Anniversary with a New Cover (by Shepard Fairey)

Digital & Social Media News and Resources

• The Economist On Paying Less Online
• When Do Summer Shoppers Splurge Online?
• A Majority of Cell Owners (55%) Now Go Online Using Their Cell Phones
• Facebook Quietly Releases ‘Friends Nearby’, Then Quietly Pulls It
• How Zappos Makes $3.50 per $1 Spent on Facebook Ads
• Facebook Testing ‘Want’ Button Plugin
• Facebook Plans to Speed Up Its iPhone App
• Facebook‘s Email Switch Program Prompts Criticism  by Users
• Twitter‘s Mobile Ads Begin to Click
• The Google+ Stats Google Just Bragged About
• AirBnB Adds Wishlists to Make Site More Social
• Pinterest Adds Support for Slideshare, Etsy, Kingstarter
• Instagram‘s New ‘Explore’ Bring the Future into Focus