Hey, Yon here! Welcome to Into The Metaverse. My mission is to help you understand what is the metaverse, how it will impact our lives, and what opportunities it unlocks. If you are a marketer, entrepreneur, investor or simply a curious professional, Into The Metaverse is for you. Subscribe to get access to every letter and podcast show that I publish.

I’m heading to GDC to attend the conference and exhibition for the first time. I look forward to participating in a panel about unlocking creation on the Roblox platform and especially excited to meet many fellow builders.

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve got for you this week:

1. Weekly News Roundup

2. Spotlighting a previous episode on Into The Metaverse podcast: A conversation with Tim O’Reilly (O'Reilly Media)

Let’s dig in!

(1) Weekly News Roundup

Platforms

• How Roblox’s new ad standards could help assuage consumer advocates’ safety concerns. The company also reported that daily active users (DAUs) hit a new record in February and hours of engagement and bookings continued to grow. Daily active users reached 67.3 million in February up from 65 million in January 2023 and 55.1 million in February 2022. Hours engaged increased 24% year-on-year to 4.6 billion though were down from January. Net bookings grew 22% year-on-year to $245 million.

• Epic Games Store 2022 Year in Review + launching self-publishing tools for game developers and publishers. Epic also announced that the Unreal Editor for Fortnite launches next week during GDC → check one of our most popular letters on the Unreal/Fortnite topic.

• Meta abandons NFTs after less than a year. The company is also putting its metaverse is on the back burner. Zuckerberg in the meantime published a letter on its Year of Efficiency

• The 20-year-old metaverse game 'Second Life' is getting a mobile app

• Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1 unveils early access program for open metaverse ecosystem

• Fashioning the future: Decentraland and Spatial.io come together for Metaverse Fashion Week 2023

• Mastercard charts a path to becoming the metaverse’s default payment processor

• Loneliest Pub in the Metaverse: St. Patrick’s Day in The Sandbox

• Google Glass Enterprise Edition is no more → The company’s no longer selling the headset and will stop supporting it in September

Gaming & Entertainment

• Music and gaming continue to merge as producer BloodPop announces studio

• A Counter-Strike skin just sold for $160,000

• Billions of people play games – yet marketers still aren’t spending

• Could gift cards be a gold mine for games?

• Sesame Street to launch first NFTs with VeVe, starting with Cookie Monster digital collectibles at $60 Each

A World of AI

• This Changes Everything → Ezra Klein’s essay on AI’s impact

• GPT-4 is OpenAI’s most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses

• Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot—A whole new way to work

• How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race

• Spotify’s new ‘DJ’ feature is the first step into the streamer’s AI-powered future

• Wonder Dynamics puts a full-service CG character studio in a web platform

• UK to invest £900m in supercomputer in bid to build own ‘BritGPT’

• China's answer to ChatGPT? Baidu shares tumble as Ernie Bot disappoints

A World of Wonder, Expression, Beauty & Fashion

• Cartier and Tiffany are getting into AR to sell luxury to Gen Z

• Metaverse fashion is on the rise, but for whom?

• What can beauty expect from generation alpha?

• Disney unveils next-generation robot and other 'blue-sky' technologies at SXSW

Aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank Demise

• Scott Galloway steps in on the matter in Venture Catastrophists

• What social media is doing to finance

Other Writings, Podcasts and Opinions Worth Checking

• Why “digital twins” will be the building blocks of the industrial metaverse

• The great computing stagnation

• Can the metaverse make its mark on business?

Fundraising

• Virtual-Fashion brand and platform DressX raises $15 Million

• Metaverse payment platform Tilia gets strategic investment from J.P. Morgan

It’s Personal

• Unstoppable Domains promotes Sandy Carter to chief operating officer (Sandy is a previous guest on Into The Metaverse. Her episode was very popular!)

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(2) Spotlighting a previous episode on Into The Metaverse podcast: A conversation with Tim O’Reilly (O'Reilly Media)

The eponymous Tim O’Reilly, the man who helped popularize the term Web 2.0 in the aftermath of the dotcom crash, joined us to discuss his views on building the protocols for the metaverse, where the next highly-profitable walled gardens may reside and his views on web3 technologies.

Aside from being notorious for coining the term Web 2.0, Tim is the CEO and Chairman of O’Reilly Media and a partner at early stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. He’s also a board member of Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. His book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, explores what technology advances teach us about the future economy and government as its “platform.” And he’s a Visiting Professor of Practice at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, where he is researching a new approach to regulating big technology platforms by limiting their ability to extract economic rents.

Our conversation was broad and far-reaching, covering the value of data and analytics, the power of open source software and protocols and how that can help shape the metaverse, the role that governments can play in helping to shape the future direction of the metaverse and venture investing strategies in the next era of the Internet.

Listen to the episode on: Spotify / Apple / Anchor.

Watch:

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