The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. “And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”Ĭomplicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it’s still not a concept that’s widely understood. The metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer. And just a couple of days ago Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe. More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer. This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team. The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.įacebook has been laying the groundwork for a branding changeĪside from Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology. A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years. I’m told that the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.
Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.įacebook isn’t the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand.
A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today.
0 kommentar(er)
