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 

• How Focusing on the Tactics Will Lead to Digital Failure
• The Ad Contrarian’s Reality Check (on the state of the digital marketing & advertising industry)
• The Rise in Anti-Social Behavior
• Creative Thinking and Being Introverted or Highly Sensitive
• Being Peter Thiel: Thoughts On Creation, Risk, Rapid Innovation, Thoughtful Investment & Entrepreneurialism (on ideas gleaned from emerging markets, from not-so-popular culture, from the spaces in-between)
• People Now Spend More Time Watching Their Phones Than Watching TV (infographic)
• Why Cable Is Winning the Cord-Cutting War
• Should We Nationalize Facebook? (to protect users)
• Facebook: The Teenage Version of Email (on teens’ declining interest in the platform, vs. adults)
• How Remix Culture Fuels Creativity & Invention
• Designing the Company, Not the Product

Notable Ideas: New Products, Platforms and Projects 

• The Invisible Helmet
• A Concept Postcard Printer Lets You Send the Scent of Food
• Typecast: Experiment with Type
• Merchant Customer Exchange: A New Mobile Payment Solution
• 13 Ways of Looking at Medium, the New Blogging/Sharing/Discovery Platform
• MakeLoveNotPorn.tv
• Swirl Mobile Personal Shopping Assistant
• How to Use FF Chartwell (a typeface for creating simple graphs)
• Terms of Service: Didn’t Read
• Staggering Beauty (an experiment in responsive design?)

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

• LEGO Celebrates 80th Birthday with Short Animated Film
• Nike Beats Adidas In Social Buzz During the Olympics (but Adidas takes the .com traffic)
• Google To Enhance Travel Searches with Frommer’s Acquisition
• Chipotle Resists Tech Automation in Restaurants
• The Engagement Olympics (London 2012)
• LA Restaurant Pays Customers to Put Away Their Phones
• Puma: Love Or Football
• Triscuit‘s Toppers’ Tantrum
• Mountain Dew Soda-Naming Contest Crashed
• Jaguar Chill NY
• The Blonds’ Diamond Barbie
• Domino’s Ultimate Delivery Vehicle Project

Digital & Social Media News and Resources

• How Big Data Became So Big
• The First Rule of Big Data: Don’t Talk About Big Data
• Official Olympics Numbers: Engagement Was Mostly Mobile
• Instagram 3.0 Update - photo maps as social discovery
• Google Maps, now with schedules for more than one million public transport stops worldwide
• Klout’s Updated Algorithm
• London Calling: A Google Search update on the digital games
• In China, It Was the Sino Weibo (microblog) Olympics 
• Pinterest for Android and iPad Announced