By: Shane Weston
October 31st, 2021
On Thursday of last week, the tech giant, Facebook (FB), released a statement that they were changing their company name to Meta. This change was announced at the company’s Facebook Connect and virtual reality conference. At the conference, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, stated, "today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started." Along with this statement, the company announced a $10 billion investment over the next year to help develop the technologies required to build the metaverse.
The change does not come off as that far-fetched because earlier this year the company stated that the were creating a team to work on the metaverse. The metaverse is a virtual reality space that allows users to interact with each other with a computer-generated environment and its future outlook shows tremendous growth. Zuckerberg hopes that within the next decade the metaverse will reach a billion people and as his hopes grow larger, he will continue to ramp up the company's effort towards this project. Last month, we saw him promote Andrew Bosworth to the role of chief technology officer beginning next year and others will be transitioning as well.
In addition to the metaverse, this rebranding comes at a time where the company has been facing harsh news reports pertaining problems at its company. Over the past month, there has been whistleblowers who have released internal documents that clearly show that the company is aware of its harmful effects coming from its apps. Although, there has yet to be any statements from the company regarding this matter.
The company’s name change now gives it a more forward-thinking approach as it starts to focus on "the next successor to the mobile internet." The metaverse could be decades away, but the investment and drive are being put into motion by one of the largest companies in the world.