After a brief flurry of interest in the early nineties, haptics, telepresence and VR have continued to quietly advance. Of course the Department of Defense has been spending a lot of money on this research.
In order to buy itself respect among the affluent kids of the planet, Microsoft has taken to advertising Xbox via graffiti, following IBM’s lead. Of course Adbusters probably has a lot to say about this attempt by global corporations to buy hip.
Speaking of ads, more companies are following Google’s lead in paying for text-based ad links on the Web. At the same time some have proposed using META values to decrease a page’s relevence in specific keyword searches.