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Tag: metaverse

  • Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after being sold for $207M – Ars Technica

    After that, the Napster brand changed hands multiple times, including with Roxio, which made Napster an iTunes rival in 2003. The early 2000s saw Napster try various business ventures, including a Flash-based site that let you stream for free but without playlists and a subscription model. Best Buy owned Napster for a bit in 2008 but eventually sold it to Rhapsody, which relaunched the Napster brand as a streaming service in 2016. UK-based MelodyVR paid $70 million for the brand founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in 2020 before selling it in 2022 to the blockchain firms.

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  • The media platforms that just won’t die – Axios

    Infinite Reality’s plan is to reimagine Napster as “a social music platform” that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening. Similar to companies like Spotify, it says the new platform will allow artists to “connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” The company will introduce features like 3D virtual concert spaces, merchandise and event commerce as well as AI-powered customer service and sales tools.

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  • Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207 million – CNBC

    Since 2016, Napster has been a music streaming service offering on-demand streaming of licensed tracks, currently for $11 per month. It’s a small player in a world dominated by Spotify and Apple Music. In 2022, Napster was bought by blockchain company Algorand, whose investors brought in Vlassopulos.

    Napster holds official licenses to stream millions of tracks, agreements that were attractive to Infinite Reality, which says that its version of Napster will “disrupt legally.” And Algorand’s background in blockchain technology was intriguing to Infinite Reality, which also develops Web3 technology, Acunto said.

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  • What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution – New World Notes

    I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds. Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

    It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding: “Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.”

    Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

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  • Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators – VentureBeat

    Those numbers represent a huge digital business that is good to remember as we all continue to discuss the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that sci-fi folks would love to see connected together one day as the next generation of the internet.

    In modern discussions about the internet, Second Life — which was inspired by the 1997 Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, where the term “metaverse” first appeared — is often dismissed. In fact, people normally think about Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft as today’s frontrunners for the metaverse. But Second Life is still around with a relatively small number of users in comparison to the frontrunners (Roblox has 89 million daily active users). Those users are dedicated and they have been on the platform for an average of around 14 years, Oberwager said. Second Life also has an economy of about $650 million a year, built on the buying and selling of virtual goods created inside Second Life.

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  • The Augmented City: Seeing Through Disruption – Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech (pdf)

    What is the next disruptive technology to reshape the urban public realm? And how can they better anticipate its effects upon arrival? … What are future uses of augmented reality in cities, and what are the implications for managing public space and safety? […]

    This report explores future threats and opportunities for cities posed by the next wave of potentially disruptive technologies, headlined by AI and AR. Before further unpacking these futures, it’s important to define key terms, technologies, and context — such as the difference between augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality (not to mention “spatial computing”). In addition, how do practices such as “luxury surveillance” and “digital redlining” combine to create “diminished reality?” And does “the metaverse” really mean anything at this point? (Not really.)

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  • The DeanBeat: Will the metaverse bring the second coming of Second Life? – VentureBeat

    Second Life has benefited from the pandemic, just like most games, as more users are coming into virtual worlds to socialize because they aren’t so sure about meeting in real life. “Second Life is back because it never went anywhere. Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,” he said. “We’re starting to grow again. Now more people are, are interacting. It’s a re-engagement strategy.”

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  • Meta Horizon Worlds has been taken over by children – WIRED

    This cultural shift is only growing more acute as the prices of VR headsets continue to drop, making them more accessible to more families, and as the big platforms build out new content tiers to appeal to younger and younger audiences. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that for a long time, people have worried about how VR affects kids. Usually, they’re worried about the prospect of adults harassing kids. That is a valid concern, of course, and still a very real problem. But in some ways, that dynamic has flipped.
    children metaverse video-games vr

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