It’s been just over a year since social media giant Facebook rebranded as Meta at the Facebook Connect conference on Oct. 28, 2021. The name change reflected the company’s growing ambitions to transcend past social media and into the world of Web3, crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse — virtual worlds where consumers are likely to spend more of their time for both work and play. The company has been busy. In December 2021, Meta debuted its Horizon Worlds virtual reality social networking project, while it also opened up advertising for more crypto ads on Facebook. In April 2022, reports emerged …

As inflation continues to grow, coupled with a looming recession, many tech firms are having to cut portions of their staff. To put this in perspective, data from Layoffs.fyi found that over 700 tech startups have experienced layoffs this year, impacting at least 93,519 employees globally. It has also been reported that tech giants like Google, Netflix and Apple are undergoing massive job cuts. While many of these layoffs are likely due to an economic downturn, this has resulted in an overwhelming amount of talent flocking to early-stage Web3 companies. For example, Andrew Masanto, a serial entrepreneur who has founded …

Facebook’s rebranding into Meta was Mark Zukerberg’s latest attempt to retain dominance in the social media world of Web3, specifically, the Metaverse. On the occasion of Meta completing one year on the rebrand, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, shared his thoughts on the rebranding and what it means for the future of Meta. Zuckerberg’s $100 billion Metaverse experiment first raised eyebrows when the CEO released the avatar for Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR platform. Subsequent releases of the Zuckerberg avatar fell prey to internet memes, although each new iteration seemed visually better than its predecessor. According …

The Japanese city of Toda, Saitama, adopted a metaverse-schooling service to encourage students — especially those staying far away from school — to attend their classes. The metaverse schooling service opted for by the city of Toda allows students to explore the campus and study in virtual classrooms. However, the students must get approval from respective school principals for attendance via metaverse schooling, confirms local media NHK. Government data showed that 244,940 Japanese elementary and junior high school students were absent for at least 30 days in FY 2021. NHK's report highlighted a fifth grader's interest in chatting online instead …

Not everyone is convinced that Mark Zuckerberg’s massive metaverse experiment is a good idea. Since Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, the social media giant’s focus has increasingly shifted to connecting the digital and physical worlds through augmented reality. However, a shareholder of the company recently issued a letter to the CEO calling the metaverse investment “super-sized and terrifying.” It didn’t take long for those concerns to be justified. Meta published its third-quarter financial results after the bell on Oct. 26 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its metaverse division underperformed. Meta’s Reality Labs lost a whopping $3.672 billion during the quarter, mirroring …

Subscription-based services have become so ubiquitous it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t the norm. Streaming companies have sought to take advantage of that norm by fleecing consumers for everything they’re worth — just look at Netflix’s decision to start running advertisements. Another benefit of leveraging NFT technology is that streaming services can increasingly be used to create communities. As with all consumer culture in the digital world, we are what we consume. NFTs, however, have the potential to make the relationship between the consumer and what is consumed far more profound. There is a solution to streaming …

During a Wall Street Journal event, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that they are not big fans of a metaverse in its current form. Spencer called the metaverse’s current iteration a “poorly built video game” referring to the ecosystem's bad graphics and low-quality interfaces. The Microsoft gaming chief noted that the gaming world still has an advantage over the Metaverse in creating different engaging virtual worlds. At the same time, he compared most of the current metaverse projects to virtual reality room meetings and explained: “Video game creators have an amazing ability to build …

Monetizing Web3 projects requires a look beyond technical updates —a new team of experienced advisors helps businesses get off Web3 on the right foot. From NFT profile images on Twitter to the major rebranding of Facebook to Meta, the pioneers of the corporate world are adopting Web3 at a mind-bending speed —and it’s not a futile effort. Analysts predict an $81.5 billion market for Web3 by 2030, and the business world has no intention to lag behind. Sports, luxury, music and other industries also want to chip in, but keeping pace with such a fast-growing and tech-heavy trend proves a …

Big Five technology player Meta is still burning cash through its Metaverse research and development arm Reality Labs with a $3.67 billion loss posted for the third quarter of 2022, stating those losses will further deepen next year. The company’s Q3 2022 earnings released on Oct. 26 show the biggest-ever quarterly losses for Reality Labs from earnings dating back to the fourth quarter of 2020, the business also made $285 million in revenue for the third quarter, its lowest on record within that time. With its Reality Labs business marking its third straight quarterly loss totaling $9.44 billion so far …

The Brønnøysund Register Center, a Norwegian governmental agency, partnered with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) to step into the metaverse with a new virtual office location. The center is responsible for managing numerous public registers for Norway, along with systems for the government’s digital exchange of information. According to the announcement, the agency is choosing to create a metaverse location because the “future users of public services are there,” and it wants to connect with the younger generation that utilizes its services. Magnus Jones, Nordic innovation lead at EY, told Cointelegraph: “More and more authorities see …

Reddit NFTs among OpenSea’s top 10 collections Reddit’s Polygon-based nonfungible token (NFT) venture continues to impress with three of its tokenized avatar collections cracking the top 10 projects on OpenSea in terms of sales volume this week. Looking at the 24-hour sales volume chart, Spooky Season by Reddit user poieeeyee is ranked second with 274 Ether (ETH) ($401,000) worth of sales, behind only Yuga Lab’s Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) at 684 ETH. The ninth and tenth spots are then taken up by Imagination Station from user Chipperdoodle and The Senses from user Rojom with 121 ETH ($177,400) and 120 …

1. Hello! So you've launched The List and you're now working on Klubcoin. Can you tell us about these two projects? If we are going to use the language of music, The List would be the prelude to Klubcoin. The List is an NFT collection that serves as a bridge between IRL events, the Web3 world and Klubcoin — which is the first global cryptocurrency for all clubbers, festival goers and electronic music fans. These nonfungible tokens will serve as an entry ticket to two festivals per year organized by Klubcoin and The List. Not only that, owners will have …