Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday, October 28, that the Facebook holding company will be renamed Meta. The company’s CEO said the initiative is aimed at embracing his vision of virtual reality. The disclosure of the new brand repositioning, which had been planned since the middle of this month , took place at Facebook Connect’s augmented and virtual reality conference.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and president of the company, the new name reflects the group’s ambitions beyond social media with “metaverse,” a sci-fi term that Facebook absorbed to describe its vision of working and playing in a virtual world. .
“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 as social networking was when we started,” Zuckerberg said in a presentation at the event. technology.
The company has also said that it will change its stock ticker on Nasdaq from FB to MVRS as of December 1st. The news pleased the market, and the company’s shares rose more than 3% this Thursday.
Facebook isn’t the first big tech company to change its name amid new projects. Google, for example, reorganized itself into a holding company called Alphabet, in 2015, signaling that it would not be just a search engine, but a conglomerate with companies working on different technology projects, such as autonomous cars, for example.
The repositioning of the brand will place Facebook (which means name of the social network will not be changed) as one of the several brands of the group, which also has products such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, the latter of headsets, games and equipment for VR (virtual reality).
The change comes at a time when the company faces several setbacks, such as investigations by antitrust authorities in the United States and problems that have led to a global network blackout recently.
Facebook invests in metaverse development
Facebook has been betting its chips on the metaverse for the past few months. During the presentation of the company’s financial results, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he plans to spend US$ 10 billion to create the metaverse. The investment will also be used to attract young adults to the company’s platforms.
The new project will also result in new professional opportunities. On October 17, the company announced the opening of 10,000 vacancies in Europe for highly qualified people with the aim of developing the new virtual environment. The posts are expected to become available over the next five years.
It does not stop there. Facebook also said in September that it would invest $50 million in creating the metaverse . In addition, the company also detailed what would be its next efforts at the time. The company also partnered with Ray-Ban to launch Stories, a dual-camera smart glasses.
