Week in Review - The metaverse reversal

Saturday, July 31, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, I talked about the specter of an “eco-friendly” future for crypto. This week, I’m looking at Zuckerberg’s comments about the future of that company of his.

If you're reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

The big thing

As much as I wanted to write several paragraphs on the juiciness that is Scarlett Johansson suing Disney over the release of Black Widow on Disney+, I will refrain and talk about something with potentially more relevance to the topics generally discussed in this newsletter.

This week, I wrote about Facebook’s ambitions to become a “metaverse company,” something Mark Zuckerberg played up pretty heavily in his quarterly earnings call with investors and analysts.

"I wanted to discuss this now so that you can see the future that we're working towards and how our major initiatives across the company are going to map to that," Zuckerberg said on the call. "What is the metaverse? It's a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at."

I shared a few thoughts on the significance of this pronouncement in the story, but I’ve had some more time to stew on it since. I think in some ways, Zuckerberg distinguishing that he sees Facebook’s future as a metaverse company versus an AR/VR company doesn’t mean that much when it comes to what Facebook’s far-flung future might look like, it’s more impactful on the path to get there.

Facebook has spent the past five or six years basically brute-forcing virtual reality on the market by spending a lot of money, its headsets seem to be selling well enough today despite lots of supply issues, but it’s also clear that Zuckerberg probably thought they’d be much further along by now. I think one of the reasons they haven’t advanced as much as expected is because there’s been such a huge divide between the experiences available on VR (gaming) compared to what Facebook’s core offerings are (news, community). There have been some efforts to bring more functional 2D experiences into VR but I think Facebook is realizing that to convince people that buying a VR headset is a logical thing to do, they’re going to have to make their mobile and desktop experiences more game-like.

Facebook as Roblox is a very strange picture, so I’m kind of doubtful they’re going to fully commit to putting the entirety of their services into 3D space, but even capturing part of that experience on existing platforms could offer them an easier transition to AR/VR hardware down the road. The big question is whether Facebook is even structured to make a sweeping change like this at all or whether they end up pushing to buy their way into a metaverse future with a big acquisition. We shall see.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

AI that explains its recommendations delivers far better ROI

Other things

Here are the TechCrunch news stories that especially caught my eye this week:

Google mandates vaccines for employees returning to office
In what I can almost guarantee is going to become the next big question every major tech company faces amid the resurgent Delta strain of the coronavirus amid a return to work, this week Google shared that they will mandating vaccines or weekly Covid tests for employees returning to the office.

Scarlett Johansson sues Disney
Not tech news you say? Only in the world where Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney aren’t locked in a streaming battle. The famous actress’s suit against Disney largely revolved around contract disputes, but the conversation that followed seemed to center on who loses when major studios use major releases to bolster the subscriber base of their streaming services.

Court orders accused Capitol rioter to unlock laptop ‘with his face’
Here’s a reminder that while biometric logins may bring security and ease of use when it comes to protecting your data, Uncle Sam doesn’t afford those logins the same respect. In a case related to the January 6th Capitol storming, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ordered one of the accused to unlock his Windows laptop with a facial recognition login. Courts have protected US citizens from being forced to give up passwords but have been less hesitant to force them to give up biometric logins.

Nikola founder indicted on fraud counts
Autonomous driving startups seem to be where all the drama is these days. Nikola has had its fair share of bad headlines over the past few months, but the worst for its CEO came this week when the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan unsealed an indictment detailing charges that Trevor Milton "engaged in a fraudulent scheme to deceive retail investors" for his own personal benefit.

Elon Musk slams App Store fees
Musk took a shot at Apple this week seemingly out of nowhere, tweeting that Epic was “right” and that Apple’s App Store fees are "a de facto global tax on the Internet.” This is going to be good.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:

The RapidSOS EC-1
“…Like many emergencies, the company's story is one of reverses, misdirections and urgency as its founders worked to find a model to jump-start 911 response. RapidSOS may well be the only startup to pivot from a consumer app to a govtech/enterprise hybrid, and it has the most extensive directory of partnerships and integration relationships of any startup I have ever seen.”

Treat your tech career like an app
“The model is based on a principle that every developer can relate to: Treat career advancement as you would a software project. That's right, by thinking of career development in stages like those used in app production, developers and engineers can gain a holistic view of where they are in their professional lives, where they want to go and the gaps they need to fill.“

Robinhood’s CFO says the company was ready for its IPO
“…The comments put us in something of an odd spot. Robinhood says it went public because it was ready. And our read of the markets is that it's a healthy and appealing time for high-growth tech companies with a history of losses to go public. And yet the company is underwater — and it doesn't appear it will regain much ground today, if any.”