Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the company's Connect 2021 that the new name of the company is ‘Meta’. The name brings together the Facebook social network as well as its apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram and technologies like Oculus, under one new brand. Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses. The group changed its name to reflect its broader vision and better represent what is doing today and in the future, Zuckerberg said.
The company's mission is still about bringing people together, he added. The company's apps and its brands are not changing either. However, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth said in a Facebook post the company will be discontinuing the Oculus brand. Starting in early 2022, customers will start to see the shift from Oculus Quest to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App.
Bosworth also said the company will also expand Meta Horizon as the brand that will encompass all of its first-party immersive social experiences. Soon, people will see the name shift from Oculus to Horizon Home, Horizon Venues, Horizon Friends, and Horizon Profile as they’ve seen this already with Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds. Over the next few months, the company plans a phased roll-out of the brand across all the relevant products and services, including Facebook Portal to Meta Portal.
Zuckerberg also emphasised the company's new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. He said in a post that the metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.
The company will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first, meaning that over time people won’t need a Facebook account to use its other services, Zuckerberg added.
The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let people share immersive experiences with other people even when they can’t be together — and do things together they couldn’t do in the physical world.Connect conference
The annual Connect conference brings together augmented and virtual reality developers, content creators, marketers and others to celebrate the industry’s momentum and growth. This year’s virtual event explored what experiences in the metaverse could feel like over the next decade — from social connection, to entertainment, gaming, fitness, work, education and commerce.
The company also announced new tools to help people build for the metaverse, including Presence Platform, which will enable new mixed reality experiences on Quest 2, and a USD 150-million investment in immersive learning to train the next generation of creators.
The company’s corporate structure is not changing, only how it reports on its financials. Starting with its results for the fourth quarter of 2021, the company plans to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs. The company also intends to start trading under the new stock ticker it has reserved, MVRS, on 1 December. The announcement does not affect how the company uses or shares data.
In related news, the company announced in mid-October a plan to create 10,000 new high-skilled jobs within the EU over the next five years to build the metaverse.
