On Thursday, the company finally announced that Facebook will now be called Meta. The company said in the rebrand that they now focus on building the metaverse which is a shared virtual environment and has also bet that it will be the successor to the mobile internet. As the world’s largest social media company, Facebook, was facing criticism from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, algorithmic decisions, and the policing of abuses that were on its services, the name has now changed.
CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a company’s live stream virtual and augmented reality conference that the name means it works investing in the metaverse, rather than its namesake social media service, which will continue to be called Facebook. In the dystopian novel of 3 decades ago, the metaverse means the “snow crash”, and now, attracting the buzz in silicon valley. It refers to an idea of a shared virtual realm that will be accessible by the people with the use of different devices.
Mark Zuckerberg said, “Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can possibly represent everything that we are doing today, let alone in the future.” The company has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality and has said that the change will bring together its apps and technologies under one new brand, and informed that it will not change its corporate structure.
The tech company, which reports around 2.9 billion monthly, has faced scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in recent years. In the latest controversy former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen leaked some documents. She said that companies choose profit over safety. But Mark Zuckerberg said that the documents were used to portray a “false picture” earlier this week.
The company informed in a blog post that they aim to start trading on the new stock ticker it has reserved, MBRS, on December 1st. On Thursday at the headquarters in Menlo Park, California, they revealed the sign which replaced the thumbs up “like” logo with the blue infinity shape. On Thursday, Facebook shares closed 1.5 % higher at $316.92.
This week Facebook informed that Facebook reality labs its hardware division which is responsible for AR and VR effects, wil be a separate reporting unit and its investment would reduce this year’s by $10 billion. The company created a product team this year in this unit to focus on the metaverse and recently announced the plans to hire around 10,000 employees in Europe in the next 5 years to work on the efforts.
Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with the Information said that he has not thought about stepping down as CEO and not thought very seriously about spinning off its unit. On Thursday it was declared by Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the head of the reporting unit, that the division will be called Reality labs instead of Facebook Reality Labs, and the company will not use oculus branding for VR headsets, instead will call it ‘meta’ products.
According to Prashant Malaviya, a marketing professor at Georgetown University Mcdonough School Of Business, he said that the plans to phase out Facebook name even some video calling device portals show that the company is equal to prevent the unprecedented script unity from hurting the rest of its app.
Mark Zuckerberg has also shown the video Demos of the metaverse giving an idea of what it could look like. The video showcases the people connecting as Avatar and being transported to digital versions of various places and periods, and in addition to this, he said that the metaverse would need to be built with safety and privacy.
