Entertainment

Mark Zuckerberg is really excited about the metaverse

He's been extremely active over the past seven days.

Mark Zuckerberg is really excited about the metaverse

Zuckerberg is envisioning a digital commerce empire.

Photo: Meta

It’s been a big week for Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page. The chief executive of Meta has in the past few years transformed his social network account into a press release distribution center, featuring personalized messages about news, product updates and company announcements and usually only ones Zuckerberg himself is pretty excited about. And now hardly a week goes by without some major Facebook post detailing a new product initiative or update about the topic Zuckerberg is most passionate about: the metaverse.

Zuckerberg has been extremely active over the past seven days, posting four major company announcements about metaverse-related news.

  • Last Friday, Zuckerberg announced a new store for Meta’s 3D avatars with virtual clothing from luxury brands like Balenciaga and Prada. On Monday, he debuted experimental headset designs from Meta’s VR group.
  • Then, on Tuesday, there was an overhaul to Meta’s monetization system for creators, including news the company would hold off on collecting its share of revenue until 2024 and plans to expand its NFT test to include Instagram Stories and Facebook.
  • On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said his company would be rebranding Facebook Pay into Meta Pay, with the goal of turning it into a “wallet for the metaverse.”

The Meta Pay news is a big deal. Before Facebook was Meta, the company tried and failed both publicly and spectacularly to get an ambitious digital currency and crypto platform off the ground. But it failed to woo regulators and eventually shut everything down in January.

  • The remnants of that dream exist today only in the form of Facebook’s digital payments system, which lets users on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp send money and shop online. After Wednesday’s rebrand, which the company first teased in May, the product is taking on new responsibilities.
  • “Beyond the current features, we're working on something new: a wallet for the metaverse that lets you securely manage your identity, what you own, and how you pay,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
  • “In the future there will be all sorts of digital items you might want to create or buy — digital clothing, art, videos, music, experiences, virtual events, and more,” he added. “Proof of ownership will be important, especially if you want to take some of these items with you across different services.”
  • Not coincidentally, Meta is one of the founding members of the new Metaverse Standards Forum, an industry group that’s pledging to work toward platform interoperability for the metaverse. Not on the list of members right now: Apple, Niantic or Roblox, though Niantic told Protocol it’s “looking at it.”

Zuckerberg is envisioning a digital commerce empire. If Facebook the product became one of the world’s most effective and lucrative advertising machines, then the metaverse of Zuckerberg’s dreams will be the largest and most dynamic shopping mall ever made.

  • “We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves,” Zuckerberg told CNBC’s Jim Cramer yesterday.
  • “So whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall,” he said.
  • Zuckerberg clearly sees Meta’s advantages right now — owning the most popular VR platform, investing in early AR hardware and operating social networks used by billions of people — as the reason the company needs to move fast lest it cede any ground to rivals.
  • “We are at this point, you know, a company that can afford to make some big long-term research investments, and this is a big focus,” Zuckerberg said.

This isn’t anything we haven’t heard from the Meta CEO over the past nine months, since rebranding the company as Meta. But it does help contextualize many of this week’s announcements. The New York Times reported yesterday that since the metaverse shift, Zuckerberg has been notably less interested in what preoccupied him largely in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, like election integrity, Facebook’s reputational issues and data privacy scandals.

Instead, the company and its most influential decision-maker are now laser-focused on the metaverse. It’s how Zuckerberg imagines Meta will build the next multibillion-user platform, how the company will make most of its money when or if Facebook and even Instagram’s user bases mostly move on to greener pastures and how it will avoid the pitfalls of building its business on platforms, like mobile, that it does not control.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins