Mashable lists 35 companies that are actively pursuing connections with customers via social media.

Nike celebrates 20 years of encouraging athletes to Just Do It with this fantastic ad.

Knowledge@Wharton interviews Sunil Bharti Mittal, who started in business more than 30 years ago with $1,500 borrowed to make bicycle crankshafts. Today, he heads the $5 billion Bharti Group, whose flagship company, Bharti Airtel, is India's largest mobile phone operator. Mittal spoke on lessons learned from his experience, including the emphasis on speed as a strategy.

If you're caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow. You never wait for perfect positioning, because in business you don't have the time; especially if you're small, you can't do it.

Thanks to AK for the link.

BooRah looks like a pretty good restaurant review site. This listing for Brooklyn shows there are tons of reviews for the more popular restaurants.

Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm continues a thread started by Dave Winer in this strange little story about a talking pig, about how Google can take a successful idea started by Amazon with Amazon Web Services, and really do something with it. Kevin's quick description sums up how this is playing out in a way.

As valued Google workers pack up their desks and launch new startups, this is the single best strategy for Google to bring them back into the fold. And it’s a great way to pull the rug out from under Amazon, strategy-wise and profit-wise.

And this is where Google's brain drain might be perceived as not being a drain at all. Successful startup businesses operate without the control of the corporation, but have all the risk and therefore all the opportunity of innovating. If and when they are folded back into the company through acquisition, the reincorporation of the talent and the new techonologies they bring with them provide the bursts of innovation that keep Google's sails full.

It's an excellent analysis that I have to admit I've never thought about, and there doesn't seem to be any confirmation that this is what Google is thinking. But if they are, I would bet my dollars on that strategy.

David Pogue's blog entry, "Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?" starts out talking about why companies aren't using Web 2.0, but specifically he is discussing business blogging and the advantages of transparency and open communication with your customers.

We all know, intellectually, that no matter what image a corporation tries to project, it's made up of ordinary people with personalities, insecurities and lives. But because the marketing and P.R. teams work so hard to scrub, control and package a company's image, the public ordinarily sees none of that human side.

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

This is Cluetrain Manifesto stuff. Read that if you want to be convinced of the bigger picture of transparent businesses.

The new iPaper interface for documents hosted on Scribd is pretty awesome. Their FAQ describes what's different about iPaper:

Unlike traditional document formats, iPaper is viewed inside a Web browser and doesn't require additional software to view it. At 100 KB the iPaper application is about 1/1000th the size of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software, making it an incredibly fast way to view documents. Despite the tiny size, iPaper integrates Scribd’s social features, like emailing and embedding. iPaper' security system allows content owners to protect their work without clumsy DRM solutions. iPaper also builds on the rich features of PDF, including full text search, copy/paste functionality, view modes, and zoom.

I moved all of the presentations found in my Publications section over to Scribd. There's an example below. Click the square icon in the upper right corner to expand iPaper to full browser size. From there you'll get access to all of the following features in the top control bar:

• link to the original document on Scribd
• email a link to the document
• copy the embed code or permalink
• view document info
• print
• view document in list, book or slide mode
• zoom
• previous/next navigation
• switch from thumbnail view to full page view
• search the text in the document
• select text

Scribd also allows document owners to share the revenue from Adsense clicks that it places between slides/pages of your document. This works better when the slides are embedded at large sizes or when viewed in full screen, where the Adsense text is legible.

Scribd's Flash player is really turning out to be a versatile application, with the ability to serve up most document formats and with an excellent set of user controllable features in the embedded player. Slideshare has some catching up to do.

Best banner ad campaign ever.

Wieden + Kennedy and Psyop produced advertisement for Coca Cola.