The early 90's were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.Into this time of innocence came a radical vision of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man.

It was a future in which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. [Read the full article]

The Groupon website offers coupons for nearly 200 promotions a day in the United States and Canada. These coupons provide big discounts at local businesses, but with a simple catch: a certain number of people have to sign up within an allotted time limit for the deal to work.Groupon users are encouraged to spread the word about an offer to their friends, often through social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. And companies are attracted by the promise of getting a large influx of new customers, and having those customers do their marketing for them. But a recent study questions how profitable such promotions really are for the businesses that get involved."If things continue the way they are, I would be very surprised if it's sustainable," says Utpal Dholakia, an associate professor of management at Rice University, who led the study. He surveyed 150 businesses that had run promotions through Groupon between summer 2009 and summer 2010. [Read the full article]

In the age of viral videos, advertisers sometimes call what they create "content." That may be justified in the case of Unilever, the London-based consumer products giant. A few years back, "Evolution," a one-minute video by Dove fast-forwarding the transformation of a girl into a model, became one of the first ads to spread to tens of millions of people through social media. A recent consumer survey from ExactTarget named Dove and its Campaign for Real Beauty among the five favorite brands on Facebook (along with iTunes, Oreo, Victoria's Secret, and Wal-Mart). Meanwhile, Unilever's Axe brand has a decidedly different message. Most famously, when its "Chocolate Man" video for body spray went viral, it seemed to convince millions of guys that using the spray would make them as irresistible to women as a fudge sundae. Earlier this year, Unilever revealed that it is doubling its spending on digital marketing globally. [Read the full article]

A study that involved downloading more than three million Facebook profiles has provided the largest-ever snapshot of the methods used by spammers on the world's biggest online social network.The study, led by researchers at Northwestern University, turned up hundreds of thousands of spam messages, most of which were sent by compromised user accounts in coordinated campaigns similar to those carried out by e-mail spammers."For normal users, it mostly remains a myth," says Yan Chen of Northwestern, whose team led the study, "but spam has been a big problem to Facebook."Reports of user credentials being sold online also motivated the researchers, says Ben Zhao at University of California, Santa Barbara, who with a colleague also contributed to the study, which will be presented at the Internet Measurement Conference in Melbourne, Australia, next month. [Read the full article]