Summary：
Facebook: Change the company name to «META«. The company will start trading under the new stock code «MVRS» from December 1st. Previously, CEO Zuckerberg said that Metaverse will cover 1 billion people within ten years.
1. What is META
This word comes from Neal Stephenson‘s 1992 science fiction novel «Avalanche«, which probably means to create a world in a virtual space.
Metaverse is a speculative future iteration of the Internet part of shared virtual reality, often as a form of social media. The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds operated by social media companies but the entire spectrum of augmented reality.
2. Why Zuckerberg has to do META
It can be said: META has seized the commanding heights of future naming.
In fact, it can be seen that Zuckerberg has some anxiety. In the past few years, he has seen every technological upgrade, but he is not very sure. (Of course, I am not qualified to evaluate his performance. This is just a comparison between Facebook and other companies and industries horizontally (compared with other companies) and vertical (on the timeline))
- Originating in the web 2.0 era, Facebook has become the most successful case of this era and even became the target of the Chinese Internet in its early years of imitating (plagiarism).
-
But in the mobile Internet era, Facebook did not do well. Of course, it cannot be said that Facebook is out of date on the mobile Internet, but it seems that the gameplay has not been opened; (especially compared to China’s Tencent, which is also the main agency)
-
In the era of artificial intelligence, although Facebook has invested heavily in basic research, there are indeed many results. There are also big cows such as Yann Lecun, but they have not been able to find a good place. Of course, I believe that Facebook AI can help the company make money, but it may only improve its profitability in the advertising business, and the room for play is not large enough (in fact, this is also a common problem in the industry, and it is really not easy to make money with research results)
Therefore, compared with the above several waves of technological upgrades, the prospects of the meta-universe appear great. Facebook is very ambitious, and screen-based social networking, applications, and other functions are indeed saturated. However, AR/VR-based applications still lack platform-level companies and applications. Zuckerberg also said at the Facebook Connect conference that Meta will make efforts in social, gaming, work, education and other fields to cover all aspects of people’s daily lives. Ambition is not small!
From this point of view, what Zuckerberg wants to do is not just game worlds like «Ready Player One» and «Out of Control Player», but a larger community than this one.
Now Facebook, the main source of income is advertising, doing AI is also for advertising services. Of course, it’s not that the advertising business is not good. Facebook’s advertising business is also thriving. It’s just that a single business can easily reach the growth bottleneck, and for investors, it loses imagination.
In the meta-universe, there are many things that can be done:
1. Economic system.
I’m excited when I think about it, print money! FB previously released the Libra digital currency. Although the issuance was suspended due to disputes, with the establishment of the metaverse, Zuckerberg may issue this digital currency in this virtual space.
2. Platform-any application running on the economic system
With the economic system, developers have the motivation to create in this virtual world. In fact, creating a world through AR/VR and even meeting friends in this world is not a new concept anymore. We see more in science fiction movies. Unfortunately, Zuckerberg can still only demonstrate some concepts (rather than actual products), such as playing chess with friends in the meta-universe.
So I don’t blame Xiao for being courageous about changing the name, but for the fascinating imagination and large enough potential profit.
Of course, to say that is the case, can the matter of the meta-universe be done or another matter, do you want to follow to buy meta-universe concept stocks? I will not give any investment advice here.
3. Why Facebook Changed its Name to Meta
In fact, the name change has little impact on the company’s existing business, and it is not an all-in-xxx. Change the name to meta, and change the stock to META (metaverse), and directly account for the name Metaverse.
Because after all, the original origin of the name of Facebook is too small. It is essentially a school roster, and it represents the old social-based SNS era.
But META is awesome. This is an imaginative name. and in the future, if you do similar things, everyone will think that others are copying him, as smart as you: little Z!
But… there is another possibility:
