Over the past year we’ve noticed experimentation in Starbucks’ marketing, a reflection of an identity crisis in the industry as “mass-market powerhouses” McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts use the recession to rise from below. On the opposite front gourmet coffee startups are beginning to present the premium quality Starbucks once used as its primary selling point.

The Brooklyn Typology Project is an unbelievably informative and multi-layered work by artist and urban planner Neil Freeman that merges the aesthetics, history and demographics of Brooklyn within a tapestry of web links.
2100 photographs were taken to represent each of Brooklyn’s block groups, and clicking on each photo leads to a storehouse of data about a particular neighborhood- census numbers, the age and type of the neighboring structures, and historical information. All of this is meant to provide insight into the borough’s dense and varied population, layout, and design.
This project and others are gathered on Mr. Freeman’s site- Fake Is [...]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the hit book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has shared ten principles with the Financial Times that he believes can help make our world more resistant to unexpected events. Taleb says using these guiding principals will make our economic world resemble a healthy, balanced biological environment, with “smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.”
He begins:
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become [...]

HOK pointed us to this eye-opening way of looking at the $780 billion stimulus package. The pictures speak for themselves.

… And you’re not even halfway there.
[via Life at HOK]

Umair Haque, the director of the Havas Media Lab shares five questions (and possible answers) he believes can generate valuable insights on how to thrive as a business in the sometimes dizzying world of the 21st century. Haque says that to mitigate the effects of the gloomy economic future, people need to radically change assumed operating procedures and re-wire the fundamental ways they do business. He discusses how to manage a world based on decreasing consumption and how to build on two-way value chains such as the member submitted culture of Threadless.
He explains:
Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. This is [...]