Inspired by the urgency and audacity of those behind the bank robberies attempted daily, Ken Habarta has put together a book and matching blog compiling actual demand notes from successful and unsuccessful robberies.

The Leader column in the Economist defines use.

Alex Bogusky and John Winsor from CP+B have just launched their new book Baked In, which champions the idea that products and brands that have an intrinsic value will render traditional advertising methods unnecessary.

Netflix recently awarded their $1 million prize to a seven person group of statisticians and computer scientists for improving the accuracy of customer movie recommendations by ten percent.

We recently covered what the internet is killing and this video we came across shows through various statistics how the internet is changing our lives.

Brixton, the south London area in the Borough of Lambeth famed for it’s diverse community, has decided to single handedly combat the recession within it’s borders through an ingenious adaptation of money.

Are we in an “awful” in-between phase of our planet’s productivity curve and that technology is rapidly reducing the number of workers and resources that are required to make what the planet needs?

The Hub Culture social network has just announced a new contest named The Ven Prize. It will be awarded to “sustainable, circular, cellular economic systems in Hub Culture and the world at large.”

Artists Justin Gignac and his lady Christine have another inspiring project in addition to NYC Garbage that we covered earlier. It’s called Wants for Sale and the idea is simply this: painting things they want and selling them for the actual cost of the item. The works range anywhere from $5.85 for a painting of Pinkberry to $2,500 for a painting of Betsey Johnson and Bloomingdales’ iconic Big Brown Bag to represent their desire for a shopping spree in SOHO.
They’ve now expanded on the original idea to give back to those less fortunate, with Needs for Sale. This time they’re painting items such [...]

The Wall Street Journal recently produced a fascinating video covering the new world of peer to peer finance which features Hub Culture’s Ven, which can be used both online and off.

The Whuffie Bank, is hoping to reward Internet users who have a positive impact by giving them bits of a new social currency every time they contribute to the greater good.

The Pirate Kiosk is a local and public backup of the Pirate Bay’s torrent catalog broadcast from a WiFi router, allowing peer-to-peer file sharing without the need for the internet.

Mint, the newly acquired financial startup, crunches user data to reveal which American cities cut spending the most in 2009.

It turns out that peer pressure might not always be such a bad thing after all, particularly when it causes us to act in beneficial ways. With the economy already affecting consumer spending habits, companies are increasingly looking at the ways behavioral economics can be influenced by public transparency and participation.

Puma has created an extremely entertaining free iPhone app, the Puma Index, that mirrors the state of the financial markets.