New Delhi: Mark Zuckerberg, co-owner and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of social media giant Facebook Inc. has renamed his company Meta Platform Inc., popularly known as Meta, to rebrand the tech behemoth, showing its transition from being a social media firm to the metaverse.
A blue infinity logo replaced the thumb logo that symbolized the Facebook ‘likes’.
Speaking at the live-streamed Virtual Augmented Reality conference late on Thursday, Zuckerberg said, “I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same, still about bringing people together; our apps and their brands are not changing.”
There will be no changes in the corporate structure or the names of Facebook-owned social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp.
The company wishes to be known for its technological advancements instead of being a social media service provider.
The Metaverse is part of a broader push to re-establish the reputation of and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of the upcoming internet technologies.
“Today, we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA, we are a company that builds technology to connect people. We have learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we have learned and help build the next chapter,” he added.
The Meta Platform Inc. will offer a metaverse incorporating online shopping, social media, smartphone applications, games, work, and meeting people in a virtual environment using virtual reality (VR) headsets and glasses.
Showcasing how VR works and calling it a vision of the future, Zuckerberg said, “Within the next decade, Metaverse will reach a billion people, post hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”
The company also announced plans to hire 10,000 people from the European Union to create the Metaverse.
Author Neal Stephenson had coined the term ‘metaverse’ in his 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, to depict a game wherein characters wear virtual reality headsets and interact in a reality-based virtual world.
(Avya Mathur)