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 Power of the Simplest Human Truth
• Marketing Worth Sharing: Google Keynote (or, why marketing right now shouldn’t feel like marketing)
• Strategy Ain’t What It Used to Be (on strategic agility and a case for dropping the one-year plan)
• Traditional Strategy Is Dead. Welcome to the #SocialEra
• Brand Building In A Digital Age
• Facebook Has a Big New Problem You Need to Worry About (usage and traffic declines among the younger demos)
• In the Shifting World of Product Design, the User Now Has a Voice
• Unilever’s Paul Polman Becomes First CEO to Look Further than Three Months Into the Future (doing away with quarterly reporting and investor guidance)
• What You Can Learn from the Funniest P&G Marketer Ever (insights, finding incongruence, slicing a topic 6 ways and changing the context)
• How to Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google
• Creativity Predicts a Longer Life
• Black Swan Farming (on the hard rules of startup investing)
• The Sneaky Psychology of Advertising
• Actual Things That Come Out of Humans’ Mouths at Day One of TechCrunch Disrupt’s SF Conference

Notable Ideas: New Products, Platforms and Projects 

• Behold, the iPhone 5
• iTunes Gets a Major Makeover (but how many people still use it, vs. Spotify/Pandora?)
• Caine’s Arcade 2
• You Can Now Buy Instagram Photos with Getty
• The Next Emerging Tech Powerhouse: Latin America
• 56 Finalists in the 2012 Innovation by Design Awards
• Banksy Brought to Life Through the Art of the GIF
• Ideo’s Fix for the Upcoming Healthcare Enrollment Blitz
• Curve by Getty Images: Strategy, Insights and Visual Trends for Business
• I Write Like…
• 12 of the World’s Most Annoying Technologies
• Maria Popova: How I Work

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

• Quirky + Fab: Vote for New Accessory Ideas for New iPhone 5
• Google Glass at New York Fashion Week
• Grey Poupon’s Society of Good Taste (first Facebook brand page to evaluate and reject fans based on ‘taste’)
• Who Wants to Be A Billionaire? (a profile on Y Combinator)
• How Instagram is Replacing $5,000 Cameras on the Catwalk
• Zuckerberg: A Facebook Phone Doesn’t Make Any Sense!
• Why Design? from Herman Miller
• Google Chrome: Jess Time
• Zappos: Pinpointing (scraping text in captions to suggest similar items: opportunity for improvement?)
• The Yoga Pants Patent War (Lululemon and Calvin Klein battle out the ownership of design)

Digital & Social Media News and Resources

• Social Networks Can Affect Voter Turnout, Study Says
• 5 Key Hurdles Before NFC Goes Mainstream
• Apple Offers (Global) Region by Region Breakdown of iOS6 Capabilities
• Fab Removes Signup Requirement (simplifying and improving the user experience)
• Instagram Just Passed 100Million Users
• Infographic: The Astounding Power of Pinterest
• Retailers Introduce Indoor Navigation In Apps
• Comparison of Curation Platforms