The torturous lost decade is behind us, and the New York Knicks have been reborn this season, with hotshots like Amar'e Stoudemire, Raymond Felton and Wilson Chandler lighting up the court. Knicks fans, who had spent 10 years griping about the team, aren't complaining these days. They're hopeful and eager to connect with the new Knicks and other Knicks fans, and they can do so via knicksnow.com.

Google gives away search tools and Android mobile handsets in hopes of driving more traffic to search and display ads. That doesn't seem enough these days to drive profits. Don't misunderstand - Google outperformed earnings and profit forecasts in Q4 2010. Net revenue came in at $6.4 billion, about 4 percent above Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter's estimate.

Boasting over 10 consecutive years of double-digit growth and some 400 employees, OLSON, Minneapolis, now rivals any shop in the world. No doubt, Paul Ratzky knew it was special in mid-2009 when he left Yahoo as senior director of agency development to take the reins at OLSON's interactive division. Since then, the "brand connection" agency has done pioneering work in the areas of consumer packaged goods with www.betterathome.com - the Better at Home website for General Mills - and entertainment, arts and tourism for Target Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular Facebook Experience.

AgencyProfile_OM_0311MUH_TAY_ZIK | HOF-FER calls itself a group of "creatively driven professionals in the industry formerly known as advertising." The approach is not nearly as apocalyptic as it sounds.

Nike and its agency, AKQA, took a good, hard look at what women want in an app before coming up with a radically revamped version of the Nike Training Club app for women. Released for the iPhone and iPod on Jan. 1, the app is designed to be streamlined, sophisticated and useful - with an emphasis on the useful. In essence, more functionality and less yoga.

The last two years have seen spectacular growth in Facebook's U.S. user base, comparable to the huge expansion of radio and TV ownership in the early days of those media. But inevitably, like its predecessors, Facebook will eventually begin to approach saturation - and indeed it seems to be reaching this stage now, judging by the flattening growth curve.

In the fairy-tale version of the social media revolution, consumers have all the power. This is a swell story to tell children, in between assuring them that they are beautiful and unique snowflakes, but it massively oversimplifies the situation, even as it's a story business-book writers seem to love to tell. There are now shelves full of these empowerment fables heralding the brave new world in which everything is transparent and open and shared, and brands cower at the strength of a proletariat flexing its collective might.

A quartet of Sunnyvale, Calif., start-ups got a high-profile visitor in early January: the White House's chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra. The government's tech czar is on a mission to build connections between young Silicon Valley tech companies and similar start-ups in less techie places, such as Detroit, Cleveland, Maine and Washington D.C. His ultimate goal: create new jobs nationwide by "out-innovating the rest of the world," as President Obama put it in his State of the Union address a few weeks later.

There are redesigns that need to happen. You know the ones. You look at your site and say, "This is butt-ass ugly and it has got to go." Complex.com wasn't one of those.

It's official. It's now more likely that someone will buy an electronic book than a printed one, by a wide margin. For every 100 printed copies of a book 143 digital versions are now sold, according to Amazon's Jeff Bezos.