Amazon may have decided to shut up shop, but that’s not put Facebook Meta off.
Meta plans to open its first retail store as it highlights metaverse-related products – The New York Times
The Meta Store, at the company’s campus in Burlingame, Calif., will open on May 9, Meta said. The store will showcase Meta’s hardware, including the Quest 2 virtual-reality headset, the Portal video calling device and the Ray-Ban Stories smart sunglasses. Customers can try out the devices to experiment with virtual and augmented reality and buy the items in the store or later online at Meta’s or Ray-Ban’s website.
I won’t be rushing to get there.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse obsession is driving some current and former Facebook employees nuts: ‘It’s the only thing Mark wants to talk about’ – Insider
Last year, it lost $10 billion on its Reality Labs segment, which handles metaverse projects. It intends to spend that much this year, too, and possibly for many years to come. Zuckerberg has said the metaverse is a long-term project that won’t be fully developed for a decade or more. So far, there’s little to show for so much money spent, according to another employee who recently left. “There’s still not much to touch or look at, much less use,” the person said, “for all of its metaverse proclamations.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s augmented reality – The Verge
Animating the push for AR glasses and Facebook’s rebrand to Meta is a desire by Zuckerberg to cast the company he founded as innovative once again, people familiar with his thinking say. The social network’s reputation has been stained by a series of privacy and content moderation scandals, hurting employee morale and faith in leadership. Regulators are trying to break the company up and curb its business of personalized advertising. And among its Silicon Valley peers, it has become known as a ruthless copycat. If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. “Zuck’s ego is intertwined with [the glasses],” a former employee who worked on the project tells me. “He wants it to be an iPhone moment.”
They are such immoral and unethical companies with terrible reputations for selling people’s data, people likely have that in mind when they decide whether or not to go into the physical bookshop. It’s creepy as hell how they do the AI tracking of customers. Personally I would never set foot in an Amazon or Facebook shop.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Agreed. What worries me is that, whilst *we* can remember a time before Amazon and Facebook, when things were “normal” for want of a better word, the generations below us are growing up not knowing any alternative and thinking that it’s Amazon and Facebook that are “normal”…
LikeLiked by 2 people
😳🙀😬😬
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh you are so right Terry that is really scary 😨 I could say that it’s a good thing to not have children but that may sound a bit nihilistic…it’s a confusing time for everyone let alone the kids 🤔
LikeLiked by 2 people