#1: The value of the Metaverse, new ventures, ETF, and the latest technology development
Hey đ Metaverse folks,
Welcome to the first issue of the Metaverse for Biz newsletter. In this number you will find:
Opinions about Metaverse name and how to measure its business value
New business initiatives launched during the last week by global brands
How to invest in the Metaverse on the stock market
The latest development relating to technologies underpinning the Metaverse.
Donât forget to subscribe now to not miss any future issues. Enjoy,
Dario
đ Opinions
Should we rebrand the Metaverse?
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple doesn't like the term Metaverse. He thinks that the majority of people donât understand the word itself and what the Metaverse is. On the one hand, I agree with him because, from a brand perspective, the term seems nebulous and might not have a good connotation. It might recall some dystopic futures like the Matrix. On the other hand, I wonder whether Timâs concerns are driven by the competitionâs concerns. Why should Apple use a term that has a strong link with one of its rivals, Meta?
Measuring the value of Metaverse
Someone thinks the Metaverse is just hype, while others are investing and finding ways to measure its value. That is the case of the UAE with their latest proposal: the Gross Metaverse Product. As the GDP measure the value added created through the production of goods and services in a country during a certain period, so does the GMP, but for the virtual world. It will include tourism, retail, real estate, and government services, among other things. According to a UAE minister, they âwill be able to create billions of dollars in returns from Dubai without people being physically in the emirate but experiencing it in the metaverseâ
đŒ New business initiatives
Last week saw the start of quite a few new business ventures in different markets, from luxury and fashion to media and transportation. Global brands like Christieâs, Hugo boss, Wall Mart, Emirates, HSBC, PwC, NVIDIA are entering the Metaverse. Letâs recap here their use cases, just as inspiration in case you are thinking to move into the Metaverse too.
Art auctions
Christieâs 3.0 launched a platform for online auctions of art-related NFTs. You can enter with your browser their virtual gallery, walk around and see NFTs hung on the walls. If you like them, just open your Ethereum digital wallet and make your offer. The piece of art that you like might be yours and you could show it off in your house, in the Metaverse of course.
Fashion
You might think that Hugo Boss is just another company entering the Metaverse by launching their new, exclusive NFT collection. But what I found interesting about this news is their phygital strategy, that is to say, combining the best of physical and digital to craft a new catchy offer for their target customers. Among the 1000 NFT launched by Hugo Boss, 500 will be allocated to people who buy an exclusive Hugo Bos T-Shirt. Each will contain a QR code where users will be directed to a Snapchat Lens to create a special augmented reality effect. Can this combination of Metaverse and traditional products generate new demand?
Training and Education
For large corporations with a distributed, global workforce, training is demanding in terms of logistics as well as budget. Metaverse can definitely help. The chief operating officer of Emirates, Adel Ahmed Al Redha, during the recent Dubai Metaverse Assembly event, said the airline would hire 4,000 cabin crew to train in the metaverse. This means 1 out of 4 cabin crew employees that are currently in training will be instructed in the Metaverse.
HSBC showed the further potential of the Metaverse for education by supporting the most important rugby event in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong sevens. Specifically, HSBC will deploy a grand rugby stadium in The Sandbox, where it will teach Metaverse users about the sport.
Media and entertainment
Concerts
Itâs recent news that Walmart has chosen Roblox to enter the Metaverse. Now, âfor the first time on Roblox, Walmart will be hosting a music festival experience featuring three of the worldâs top musicians, Madison Beer, Kane Brown, and YUNGBLUD, to offer users an immersive concert experience from the comfort of home,â the company said. Roblox is an online gaming platform that has evolved into a non-blockchain Metaverse by offering its users the possibility to create games and content and sell/buy them on the platform itself. With more than 50 million daily active users, it is definitely interesting for the retail giant willing to target more young shoppers!
In addition to concerts, what are the prospects of the Metaverse for the media and entertainment industry? At the Royal Television Societyâs annual conference in London, various speakers from companies like BBC discussed whether the Metaverse is the inevitable destiny of entertainment. Considering that the most common applications of the Metaverse are related to the gaming industry, that is a good start for more lucrative use cases in the media and entertainment space.
Consulting
Hong Kong is a fertile area for Metaverse business. In addition to HSBC recent investments, PWC and TerraZero have just signed an agreement to collaborate on a go-to-market strategy to help businesses across all sectors create immersive 3D experiences to engage and retain customers.
Industry
NVIDIA offers the processing capabilities of its data centers to design and publish metaverse applications. They launched Omniverse Cloud services, a software-as-a-service platform where, for instance, robot manufacturer can train their digital twins of robots with AI or car manufacturers can test digital models of new cars with physically based sensor data that simulates traffic conditions, in the Metaverse.
đ° Money
Stock market
You donât need a VR headset or a crypto wallet to invest in the Metaverse. You can choose funds that track the performance of globally-listed equity securities of companies engaging in the Metaverse by offering products, services, technologies, or infrastructure. Nasdaq highlights some of them in a recent post.
đ» Technology
A key concern about the growing Metaverse business is surely interoperability. Currently, there isnât a single Metaverse, but multiple Metaverses that donât interact with each other. On the contrary, besides some of those projects being based on the same Ethereum blockchain, most of them have introduced their own tokens, the local currency to buy digital assets.
So letâs welcome any attempt of making the metaverse and its underpinning technologies more open and interoperable like the recent project done by SWIFT and Chainlink. They have developed a proof-of-concept for blockchain interoperability by creating the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Regarding new features, Meta is updating its platforms Facebook and Instagram. Anyone on those platforms can connect their digital wallets to share non-fungible tokens (NFT) which means Meta users in 100 countries. This move has the potential to make cryptos, NFTs, and generally speaking, digital assets accessible to the mainstream. On the other hand, this is a clear way to make the Meta metaverse, itâs not a tongue twister :-) , more popular and attractive to the large user base of Facebook and Instagram.
Metaverse is often associated with blockchain and NFTs, but are they the same things? This article aims to make some clarity. According to Abhijit Shukla, CEO, and Director of Tarality, a next-gen crypto banking platform âIn a nutshell, Web3 and the metaverse promise to change the way we use the Internet; but even though they are closely related, they donât mean the same thing. One will decentralize the Internet, and the other will create a virtual ânew worldâ â Actually, I donât fully agree with this statement. My opinion is that to make business in the Metaverse, we need web3 technologies. Blockchain and NFTs create economies based on scarcity and ownership, the roots to propel trading by creating marketplaces in the Metaverse where buyers and sellers can meet and exchange services and goods.
Thatâs all Metaverse folks, see you next week.