According to a source with intimate knowledge of the situation, Facebook will change its corporate name next week to reflect its focus on establishing the metaverse.
The upcoming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to discuss at the company’s annual Connect conference on Oct. 28 but could be announced sooner, is designed to signify the Internet giant’s goal of being known for more than just networking. social and all its associated problems. . The makeover will most likely introduce Facebook’s blue app as one of many products run by a parent company that also oversees Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and other companies. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.
Facebook currently has more than 10,000 employees working on consumer devices such as augmented reality glasses, which Zuckerberg hopes will become as common as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that “we will effectively go from people seeing us primarily as a social media company to being a metaverse company” in the next few years.
A name change could also help further distinguish Zuckerberg’s futuristic work from the tremendous criticism Facebook currently faces over its current social platform. Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower, recently revealed a cache of embarrassing internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified before Congress about them. Antitrust regulators in the United States and internationally are trying to break up Facebook, and public confidence in the company’s operations is eroding.
Facebook isn’t the only well-known tech company changing its name as its goals grow. Google was completely reorganized under the Alphabet holding company in 2015, in part to show that it was no longer just a search engine, but a global conglomerate with subsidiaries developing self-driving cars and healthcare technology. In 2016, Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc., the same year it began referring to itself as a “camera company” and introduced its first set of Spectacles camera glasses.
I’m told that Facebook’s new corporate name is a closely guarded secret within the company’s gates and not widely known, even among the company’s top leaders. Horizon, the name of the as-yet-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been building for the past few years, perhaps a competitor. Shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms, the app’s name was changed to Horizon Worlds.
Zuckerberg’s comments aside, Facebook has been quietly laying the groundwork for a greater focus on future technology. He established a specialized metaverse team last summer. Andrew Bosworth, the company’s head of AR and VR, was recently promoted to chief technology officer. Just a few days ago, Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more people in Europe to work on the metaverse.
The metaverse is “going to be a major focus,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer. “I think this will really be a big part of the next chapter on how the Internet evolves after the mobile Internet.” “I also believe it will be the next big chapter for our company as we will triple in this area.”
To complicate matters, even though Facebook has been widely hyping the concept of the metaverse in recent weeks, it’s still a poorly understood concept. Neal Stephenson, a science fiction novelist, created the word to represent a virtual environment where people can escape from a grim real world. Now it’s being embraced by one of the world’s most powerful and divisive corporations, which will have to justify why its own virtual world is worth exploring.
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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn