Are you prepared for the seismic shifts of digital/social/mobile transforming the business world, where the referral economy teams with the power of mobile computing to create tomorrow’s winners (and losers) in retail, publishing, marketing, communications, you name it?

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

Millward Brown released its yearly BrandZ report today ranking the world’s most valued brands, down to the penny. While Millward Brown is the trusted source for overall brand valuation, one thing its don’t seem to take into account is a brand’s social valuation. So we did it for them. Yes, what follows is a rejigging of the league table.

To be sure, marketers aren’t the best equipped in an organization to talk publicly about death and loss. (That’s the job of the PR pros, apparently.) But surely the occasional product recall, discontinued programme or goof-up are inevitable discussion topics that will arise in any community. Social media communities are no different.

Nobody saw this one coming. Flip video, the darling gadget of mobile journos and digi-documentarians, is dead, shut down by its under-pressure owner Cisco. We are morbidly fascinated here with the death of brands in this era of social networking. The death of Flip is the spookiest we’ve yet seen.

Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

For the 198,775 people who’ve declared their allegiance to the Microsoft Zune, these are troubling times. News reports are swirling that Microsoft will kill off the iPod-wannabe imminently. The only problem is Microsoft is denying the reports, but nobody’s listening. Yes, there’s a Zune metaphor in there somewhere.

Another day, another newcomer to the daily deals market. After the New York Times and Axel Springer announced their own Groupon clones earlier this week, Microsoft is saying it too is getting in on the action with Bing deals.

Facebook is the first to say its new communications platform, Facebook Messages, is not email, nor is it some kind of “email killer.” Maybe not. Still, the web’s biggest email providers, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, should be quaking today.

Yes, Google Instant is a time-saver. But does this new innovation in search (the first we’ve had in ages) really lead to smarter search results as Google claims, or does it tell us what we already know, just more quickly? We took it through its paces in multiple locations. Here’s what we found.