SEARCH RESULTS

Hey, Metacrun.ch-ers, did you get to go to Davos this year? If not, don't worry, you weren't missing much. Here are all of the things you didn't miss. This is a special article for everyone who is mildly interested in the goings on at Davos and its annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. To be honest, I’m a total philistine and I don’t belong there but somehow I keep getting invited back. Prole And Proud When anyone arrives in Davos (and it's either by train or helicopter) you need to make the right choice of station. Davos Dorf is where the big bores gather at the WEF Annual Meeting and the rest of us get off at Davos Platz because that’s where the real party is at. The promenade at Davos is home to all the houses—houses are shops and stores and offices that have been commandeered for their street front doorways to be transformed into business, networking and meeting places or houses that are representative of the brands and countries that hire them. Some highlights this year included Accenture, L’Officiel, House of Indonesia, and my personal fave CV Labs Blockchain Hub where they seem to employ the best staff in the world. A Game Of Panoply In previous years we’ve experienced everything on the promenade from the House of Psychedelics, the Russian War Crimes House and Polkadot. This year seemed a little less bullish from the perspective of war (which you know, is still on the border of Europe) and crypto and way more flagrantly extravagant in the houses of tech and entertainment. This annual meeting is ALWAYS, yes, ALWAYS indicative as to the trends of the year. All of the usual economic incentivised national houses were on the main promenade from India to Malaysia, and from Greece and Poland. But I did not realise that Manchester United was a country until yesterday. I also didn’t realise that the big word of the year would be Youthwashing until I saw an open forum and a glut of Millennials and Gen Zs talking BS on their Youtubes and Tik Toks. Youthwashing. You’re welcome. The Great Desert Walking through the main promenade of the street going past the famous piano bar at the Hotel Europa where I managed to find then ditch a rooftop party last year, I was really struck by the fact that the energy and vibe of 2022’s event was pretty much gone. It was replaced by corporate tech and enterprise software houses and “parties”, which is for anyone's money, the driest subsection of human life. If you’ve ever watched a David Attenborough documentary set in the Gobi or Sahara deserts you’ve seen those parasitic worms that seek any droplets of moisture that they can find and then ingest it for absolutely no benefit at all. Well say hello to SAP, Qualcomm and I want to say AWS but if I say AWS three times it might summon some kind of sandworm, Dune-style, to end my newsletters forever. The Female Quotient Equality Lounge was also drier than a nun convention in a tumble dryer. Whereas last year there was a can-do/will-do energy and vibe from the speakers and curators, especially Decentraland. This year it was ridiculously over-corporate and sponsored. It was not my glass of Aperol Spritz at all. The Winner Of Davos Is... Vaporware. Plain and simple, there is a whole world of crappy shillers in this town for one week only. Like folks who knock at my door wanting to give me the world of their God, I am always on hand with sacred quotes and scripture to destroy all their theories. I was happy to do the same in and around Davos again this year. Here are some takeaways from a bunch of merchants that you don’t ever have to speak to because I packed them off for you. The Web Thing Them: “We’re building the next-gen app for people who want to track their b2b acquisitions through paid and organic.” Me: “Is it a website?” Them: “Yes.” Me: “Is it a website and progressive web app?” Them: “Yes.” Me: “The game industry invented this about 15 years ago. White label what they are doing and stop asking me for money.” The Alien Thing Them: “Oh I love your hair. Do you believe in aliens?” Me: “Do I look like that guy from Alien Astronauts?” Them: “No.” Me: “Ok what are you selling?” Them: “I’ve created the world’s first NFT and metaverse communication tool for aliens who wish to communicate with their own and us on this planet.” Me: “Like an Alien Tinder? Ok, I’m listening, show me the NFT and metaverse platform.” Them: “Oh the page doesn’t seem to be loading.” (Nervous laughter) “But—” Me: “The Aliens have chosen your fate. Now, GTFO.” The Real Winner Of Davos Is... I said I don’t belong in Davos. It really is a crazy cacophony of people trying to do good through doing crap and vice-versa. But the diamond in the rough is without question the World Innovation Economics event because this is where for one day only you can take a look at what is coming. Forget the fact that Meta wouldn’t let you into their party (“I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members”) and that you can’t just walk into Polkadot like you could last year (data capture is a bitch). World Innovation Economics is a place for start-ups, existing business and financiers, fintech, healthtech, the metaverse, crypto, and very real critics and friends of your products and services. I literally cannot praise these folks enough. Every year they come with a brilliant vision of the challenges that start-ups and existing innovative businesses face and they provide us the delegate with use cases, systems and ideas—against a backdrop of idealists and solutions-without-problem merchants. It’s a super mix that identifies exactly what the success ratios are in building business. Yeah, ok, it’s a bit loose, sometimes a little rough around the edges but inside that room for one day in Davos there is an absolute stellar microcosm of the future. It's always way more exciting than anything that happens at the WEF Meeting. I tried to avoid going there this year because well, I’m maybe too much of a handful for those people. But this year, I was really excited to get involved in it and see all of the incredible speakers. Mister, Get. Me. Outta Here! Have you thought about attending Davos? You probably never have - but you should! It’s amazing. Please, whilst you are reading this, book your plane/train and automobile tickets for next year—get your names down at World Innovation Economics, pitch your idea, meet your people and find your tribe. In one day you will have heard every kind of story, pitch, you will have networked til you drop and partied harder than the party hard guy.

Yeesh! What a week. And the fun doesn't stop because we’re in Davos for the annual egoflex that is the World Economic Forum. Yes, it’s a place to go and listen to people big up their latest this or that and then we never see them again. But enough about that, how about we get down and dirty with a mixed bag of humblebrag and shitparade? That's So Last Decade According to Techcrunch web3 can really help fashion become more sustainable. D’uh. Don’t get me wrong, I really love everything that TechCrunch writes. I always get really excited when they release interesting news stories about new and existing tech. But this story is older than the Old Testament isn’t it? Everybody knows web3 can help fashion; everybody's well aware of the importance of digital design inside fashion and in creating a sustainable world. The Interline serves it up every week (and does it better than me, probably). It's just that fashion can't seem to make up its mind. It’s not very agile and though it develops at an impressively fast scale, it’s wasteful. Yes of course it may be to the detriment of the climate, but it isn’t necessarily to the detriment of their business model, which is doing really well—thank you. So if the status quo is fine, why try and change it? I think that this story is not about how web3 can help sustainable fashion. The story is more about why fashion isn’t using web3. And that's, for me, the biggest obstacle that we need to overcome in 2023. That status quo has to be changed. But not for this one. Bill Conflates The man who [insert your blah blah tech guy thing here], Bill Gates, is a great innovator but a visionary? Not really. For Bill Gates it was a question of when, not if. So now Bill Gates is telling us how web3 is not that much of a big deal, Bill, web3 is a huge deal. Web3 is an immense deal. Web3 is the destroyer of all those incredible walled gardens and corporations that you guys have worked so hard to build. Is that what this story is all about? Nope. This story is about the fact that he’s the emeritus "technology advisor" of Microsoft. And Microsoft, just in case you’ve been in a fondue induced coma this week, is doing BIG biz with ChatGPT which is a what for $60,000, Brenda? (I’m cupping my hand to my ear like a gameshow host). Our survey said: AI. If you were the emeritus "technology advisor" of one of the world’s biggest tech corps and you wanted to sweeten up your ChatGPT deal you would talk that baby up. And, you know, AI exists nicely in web3 given that it’s a mostly open technology. By my reckoning you might want to reevaluate web3, Bill. It’s a huge deal. TBH - I prefer the Bill who is spending his billions on eradicating malaria. You Know Nothing Remember those halcyon days of spending 90 minutes tweaking your race, class and nose shape to blend into Kvatch only to discover it had burned down? Well, here’s a similar shaggy dog story with no happy ending and no Martin Septim. Because when you build an NFT model without utility you get absolutely sledged. Everybody is losing their collective minds, and quite rightly so. And because I now feel like Anne Robinson and Nicky Campbell in BBC Watchdog I will tell you again that if an NFT doesn't have any utility, it is worth absolutely nothing. I don't know how many times I have to say this. "This Game of Thrones NFT collection is just like the last season of the show," tweeted user Justin Taylor, a former marketing director at Nike and Activision. "No creative vision and terrible." The problem was not the premise. God knows we’ve had to sit through 10 seasons of rape, murder, incest, pillage and dragons to get a worse ending than Encounter, but when GOT fans opened their $150 boxes of joy, it turns out they’d been Littlefingered. If you want to be able to break a marketplace that is populated with Oblivion era characters complete with a pair of Kruegers and nothing much else, be my guest. They say a fool and her coin are soon parted so, fill your greaves. Alternatively, wake the eff up and start recognising that you are shipping build-your-realm on what looks like shenanigans. Can I use it in-game? Not right now, but never say never. Will it get me money off at Target? Not right now but maybe in the future. If I were you, I'd go over and play MedievalEmpires. You're getting the same experience as you would be in Game of Thrones narrative-wise, sure, but my God, you're getting a heck of a lot more utility. Deep Yearning When ChatGPT came out, I didn’t dash off to the website to break the server. Instead I thought about Demis Hassabis and his genius. Since I worked at Jagex back in the day I have been utterly convinced that this one guy is a bigger brainbox than most of us can handle. When I heard him talk about DeepMind I was into raptures. So news of DeepMind’s Sparrow’s incoming technology is the gateway to a supernova in this suddenly overcrowded space. Whether a system is open or closed, it has a beast chained up in a server room which needs to be fed. And if that thing is unleashed on the public, it usually means that everybody can have at it. If everyone's contributing to it and taking from it, you just need to grab the popcorn and watch the spike of lawsuits grow ever-taller than the Empire-bloody-State building. By the end of this year it will be off the scale. It doesn’t matter whether it’s images or words, this will be the causality of using open technology. Yet this doesn’t describe DeepMind and if 2023 shows us anything, it will be structure: in our web3, metaverse, AI tech world. DeepMind was built on a structured approach to AI from day one, it was never open and isn’t open, allowing DeepMind to control the information that Sparrow processes. It will be the service of services—and Google acquired it in 2014. Think about it. Sophisticated, robust and reinforced deep learning that Demis says is the reason why they didn’t rush to release it “It’s right to be cautious on that front”. It was only last year that Google was putting press releases out about how robots were not sentient and just a few months later, it looks like that’s exactly what’s happening and no one cares. NLP is going into an entirely new generation, and use cases that we haven't really developed before. Woo hoo! Blandverse Unless it’s a death metal T-Shirt, I don’t wear anything designed in Norway, Sweden, Denmark or Finland, dahhhling. Why would I? It’s boring. Could I be persuaded? Always. Will it be in the metaverse? Not this one it won’t. We've worked so hard in the fashion industry to try and destroy any preconceived ideas about what the ultimate consumer should look like. Why on Earth would we throw it all away because of the metaverse? Hell, Karl Lagerfeld’s muse was the then plus-sized Sophie Dahl for ages. We come in all shapes and sizes, and we come in all skin colours and creeds and religions. So it strikes me as really strange that a couple of Scandi companies have entered the metaverse by creating fashion for avatars that basically look exactly the same as each other, just with different colour grades. Not only is it incredibly offensive, but also it's really tone deaf in terms of a world that we're trying to develop and enhance and encourage women, mainly, to enable them to picture ideals that suit their lifestyle, and suit their ambitions and aspirations. Yes, 12m users play in Ifland and no I won’t put that kind of pro-skinny trash in my weekly chart. I’m sticking with Zepeto. Sundae Worship There’s only one god for me. Anybody who knows me knows that it is the one and only Jungkook. He is the alpha and omega in my universe (see what I did there?) but aside from creating explosive ovary episodes in my diary, worship is in fashion. BIG TIME. No, no, not with BTS, but with that imaginary girl upstairs. Religious communities are starting to use the metaverse and I kind of love it. As a means to be able to retain and engage different communities and different demographics to spread the word of their particular God (Goddess if you please). I listened to an incredible podcast episode recently. Part of the You’re Dead to Me series on the BBC, Greg Jenner hosted a big discussion on the History of Fandom. If you live in the future, like me, you have to figure out the past before you can even hypothesise on what you’ll eventually make, let alone evangelise upon it. Fandom needs a few things to thrive, and if you’re a game developer like me, you know instinctively what these three things are: content, engagement and retention. In Daniel Shin’s article he’s pretty clear about why these three things collide with enigmatic results “the metaverse is the future of the new communication channel and media that can be compared to the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.” I heartily agree. But isn’t religion just an aggrandised version of fandom? This week, I am mostly cosplaying as Reno from Final Fantasy Crisis Core. I will probably worship at the altar of Jungkook and then go to Pocket Gamer Connects in London next week because that’s where my people are. How about you? Look, religion needs community activities to survive. If you bring all these attributes together in the metaverse, or as I just described, in a gamified experience, you’re in on the top floor boys! My take is that this is just an extension of the already established rules of building a good community and fanship, call it enhancing religion if you want to, but it’s already there, it just hasn’t been utilised for worshipful activities yet. Using technology to be able to drive this for your own “brand” (I’m gonna get in trouble) is a fantastic idea. Look at Vampire the Masquerade, FFS. That’s enough metaverse for this week. I’m off to write a pdf ransom note from the spare copies of Harry’s latest book - you asked for it Clarkson.

Are you done with crappy reading lists about success and leadership? Have you read enough top 100 nonsense? Wondering who was killing it and who was quietly quitting in the metaverse this year? Wonder no more. As we look hopefully to 2023 into a galaxy far, far away from mega winters, hot girl summers and Prime Energy Drink fights at your local Aldi. I wanted to take a look back at the complete and utter hype that was The Metaverse. January Sales Walmart: the giant of supermarkets, drugstores and everything massive. Foreshadowing what might come to pass later on in the year, the mighty Walmart started applying for a bunch of trademarks, which, though isn’t at all unusual (they have a data centre called Area 71 FFS), it did feel to me a little cart before horse. For the big leagues of commerce, this Metaverse-thingy was, and still is, uncharted waters for a lot of retail - you know what I mean when I say retail: sausages, loo roll, mushy peas. The “intensity” that Walmart was applying for these trademarks hinted at the direction of travel towards crypto, NFTs and digital ownership, so when, in September 2022 Walmart entered the metaverse via Roblox, we all took a collective sigh at the biggest anticlimax since Y2K. Literally nothing to see here. Let’s hope they up their game a bit in 2023 because I’m running out of Pringles. Feb-book In February, a little company called Facebook decided to do a massive pivot into the metaverse. On the surface it looked like this could pay off, after all, Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire techbro. This rapid shift away from the social media business it spent decades building seemed like a huge gamble. Not just controversial for their shareholders but also for mums everywhere. If Facebook became Meta, they thought, would we ever be able to casually stalk our children? I wouldn't like to surmise as to whether Facebook/Meta did or didn't pull it off. I think you can figure it out for yourself. By the end of 2022 everything became Meta (which, you know, is quite meta). And because of that, people who work in the metaverse like me, and are passionate about the metaverse as I am; well, we spent the rest of the year trying to explain to people like our mums that the metaverse is not Facebook. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg. No wonder the Guardian has been trolling him for the past nine months. March Heirs Capgemini, American Express, JP Morgan and HSBC jumped into bed with the metaverse. Totally missing the point of future banking, they set up Second Life-style embassies in The Sandbox, Decentraland and there’s even a metaverse mortgage solution - like anyone needs that in Gen Z but ok. What I like about what Capgemini are suggesting is using the metaverse to power two-tier banking putting traditional banking systems into hyperspace or something. We hoped that DeFi had shaken up the traditionality of banking and its boring nonsensical processes during the pandemic. I’m not entirely sure the world is ready for game and virtual currency in banking/finance yet, but it better get ready, because my spidey senses tell me that things are gonna change around here. BANK YOUR ITEMS! April Fools Forbes, of all business-facing services, decided in April that they might quite like to create an NFT collection on FTX. FTX, do you know them? Forbes thinks that FTX, is a leading global cryptocurrency Exchange, which was to launch an ERC-721 token on April 13th. Unlucky for some. Whatever happened to FTX I wonder? Own goal? Forbes? Never. April Show-ers Also in April, YouTube decided to launch its own NFT so that fans could own their own videos. Wow, what a revolutionary thing this is considering that for the past 20 years “you’ve given up certain things to YouTube in exchange for the use of their platform.” However, now they're allowing you to own it as an NFT. Well, sign me up already! Now, this really is a revolution. My usual dose of salt aside, I do think that this has the potential to be quite a cool thing, but YouTube/Google are gonna mess this up. So grab the popcorn, sit back and watch how TikTok moves faster to keep creators creating. My take on this is that it’s a really messy business model, and considering we’ve heard nothing since it was announced last April, it may indeed have already been consigned to the Google Graveyard. May The Fourth (Of July) Be With You I've never ever wanted to be a Disney princess, because I have actual life goals. And I've never wanted to float around my living room singing Let It Go from Frozen by Adele Dezeem. I don’t even Star Wars. Sorry everyone. I'm more of a Hasbro girl: I like robots, and I like bronies but I love web3, so seeing that the Walt Disney Company had announced that six companies were joining them for a Disney Accelerator kind of made me scratch my head a little bit, because suddenly WDC became pretty inclusive, from a future-tech perspective at least. One such company who joined the accelerator was Polygon and I wondered why? It’s already massive and it would have been already massive in mid-July. So I wonder why it joined an accelerator programme? I guess that’s for the birds. But it does make us think, like the Walmart story from the beginning of 2022 that something is going on in these empires. It’s way more than increasing the Dad-balance of Mandalorian merch purchases (try saying that after a few sherries). My feeling is that this is about entertainment and retail corps taking on banking and wealth in a totally different way. Meaningful? No. Data driven? Absolutely. The Opposite Of August Some people worship Mark Cuban. I'm not one of those people. But I somewhat agree with him when he said that buying virtual real estate was the dumbest shit ever in August of this year. He's a great investor, that’s not up for debate. In fact not much that Cuban has said or done has been off the Mark (see what I did there?) Given that the metaverse has pretty much been built on virtual land ownership to this point, because it really doesn't have anything else to power it (you know, like good experiences for example). All those crypto bros needed somewhere to go that was a bit more legitimate than what it was that they were already doing. So invisible land sales seem legit, right? Well to some extent this works - particularly where brands want to rent land from an owner for a campaign or short term, but that quick buck could have been better made the Second Life way surely? And I know that Decentraland uses DAO to decide on land rents and ownership. So I’m half with you Mark. Trying to kill an area of the metaverse that probably should have been dead a long time ago isn’t a crime. The perps are the creators of metaverses that give the end user absolutely no reason to be there - spoiling the experience for everyone who visits. Cuban is a big DAO thinker, and that does fly in the face of land ownership metaverses somewhat. I feel like this is a puff piece where his bullish (they love using that word about Mark Cuban) approach to investments are actually rallied by what he predicts and says. Though I don’t worship Cuban as much as some of my contemporaries, I would love to know what he’s thinking. Mocktober Q: How many users did Decentraland have in October 2022? A#1: According to @0x_shake, 30 daily active users. Well, they asked that question anyway. A#2: 810. Dapp.com, AtlasCorp, gosh, even my mum has done the detective work on this but we’re all missing the point. The question is not how many, but why. Why are we sifting through AFK and bots to get to the truth? It’s cheeky. I come from the world of game development where you are as good as your last shipped game and its metrics, stats and user data. In my metaverse experience, if metaverse creators create such a huge brand platform, then they also have to be able to satisfy the brand owners. Surely, the way to satisfy brand owners is putting users on the platform. But if nobody wants to go to your metaverse platform, what do you do? Fake it? No, you try harder. Providing us with a good opportunity to be able to explore the metaverse in the means with which we want to explore it, is from a discovery perspective, rather than using bots to cover up your shortcomings. Slowvember I am allergic to coffee. That is something not many people know about me unless they're my friend, which means that if you’re reading this, you are now my bona-fide friend. So when people ask me to go for a coffee, I will often pay to avoid people ordering a cup of joe for me. Quite simply, coffee is the way that I will ultimately kick the bucket. I know absolutely nothing about coffee. I don't know the difference between Java and Arabica, for example and to be fair, I don't care. Costa Coffee cares. It cares a lot. So it has created, and I feel like this is just for me, a way for me to participate in its brand. It has decided to create its own NFT-based drip or should that be a drop? An announcement by the company that they teamed up with footwear creator Artisan Lab to create a series of NFT backed sneaks. As a sneakerhead this is exciting! Even I can hear a *but* to my excitement. Another thing that you might not know about me is that I hate the colours brown and beige. Rancid, nasty colours that compliment no one and nothing but used diapers and doggy doo bags. But in their wisdom they have gone beyond the toilet to create coffee-related dye profiles for the most unique sneakers you will never wear. Based on Costa Coffee’s iconic Italian Mocha brand. This NFT thing is quite literally hype. For idiots only. Why not stem the flow of folks crowding Costa Coffee on Saturday mornings, by actually using the sales of this NFT to hire more staff? Since Brexit the labour shortage has been real. Overall, this year has been mostly rubbish. From stupid raises to crap celeb endorsements I’m frankly embarrassed about how technology is being used to gather greed. We’re just trying to work out how to overcome pandemics by putting technology to a greater use for everyone, as well as creating an inclusive environment for folks to learn and develop at the same speed with the same chances and choices as everyone else. I hope 2023 is filled with intelligence rather than the artifice of tech bros and machines. I wish for more of this, dear reader, a chance for us to discuss and debate the future of a world that we can only touch briefly with our fingertips because the future doesn’t even belong to us. And finally, I want to thank you for your continued support: from our stealth beginnings in 2022 to who knows what in 2023? It has been amazing so far! As long as you’re ride or die with me, I’ll keep the salt levels higher than this utter douchebag.

Dear Metacrun.chers, I'll try and keep it short this week because I know how busy you are (what am I saying?) But I've got to be honest with you, the metaverse, for the idiots of tech and investment, is literally fighting for its life, and for the rest of us, it’s living its best life. Believe who you want to believe, we’ve never been busier. The Metaverse truly is the future of everything internet, so LFG with this week's news roundup. Techwashing Our old friends Microsoft must have really sore bums from constantly sitting on the web3 and blockchain fence. Picture the scene - Thursday of last week, Microsoft and a mixed bag of web2 tech companies looking for relevance alongside web3 bright young things decided to go green on our asses. It’s been COP27, don't you know? Well, they decided that one forum was not enough to try and control the decision-making of the tech masses, that they now want to get heavily involved in the decision-makers of climate change using language such as “opportunity to assist” in basically obfuscating the Ethereum carbon-footprint problem by making everything clearer and easier to implement. Bear in mind that this chapter of Ethereum started in 2015, it’s 2022 now. What took you all so long? This Bilderberg of blockchain appears to be a gathering of incentivized groups to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, by delivering positive environmental and social impact. Everyone from Consensys to w3bcloud to Polygon, basically, the whole gang is in. As far as I’m concerned, this looks like a bit of PR mining to show that the world of web3 is caring and supportive of climate change goals. Who would blame them? This kind of opportunity for a quorum of the intelligencia, obviously not led by a massive tech giant, to explore the opportunities that climate protection within this space is a direct response to the entire process of building web3, blockchain, minting, NFTs etc. These poor rich heavily invested businesses are having a terrible time of it lately. Guys, you didn’t need to go to Egypt or virtual Egypt for good PR though. Reach out frens. I got u. Boss-O-Matic Any fool knows that I am a huge robot fan: I worked on the ultimate robot franchise, and in 2016 I wrote a book about a robot doctor in the NHS. Please go read it. I could totally do with the 20p that Amazon gives me for every book sold. But seriously, I am a geeky super fan of every single automaton. But this whole idea about having a robot as a CEO, how far away is this from what we already have? I've been working in the games industry for years, and all my CEOs have been either robots or psychopaths. So, you know, trying to create something that Netdragon are doing seems to be a bit more like a hype story about a use case for ML and AI. This Chinese firm is betting on a Metaverse workplace, and that makes total sense, but I can't help but feel that we’re still trying to build avatars that are from 15+ years ago. The CEO in question is a weird Oddcast homage. By the way, I still really love Oddcast. But I love Netdragon, as cheesy as what they are attempting, I think what they're doing is really pushing the boundaries of what we can expect to see in the metaverse. It's not just about creating a 3D world, and it's not about creating VR and AR either. It's about everything else that plugs into it, whether it's virtual avatars, or volumetric capture, devices and other hardware or digital wallets. Did they take that into account as well as the hype? I don’t see it. I don't want to be cynical about it, but I have to be slightly cynical. The Robot CEO, called Tang Yu, operates as a real-time data hub. It reminds me of a battery-operated device I bought from Ann Summers that I lovingly call Skynet, why? Because it knows all my secrets. It knows when I work, it knows what I say, it knows where the bodies are buried. Ok, that bit is a pure troll. But do we want to revisit the philosophy of Terminator? I’m not ready, not for Terminator or Total Recall. To me, this feels a little bit like the ROBEO (see what I did there) is actively doing the work that no one else is doing instead of leading and guiding the business towards success. I call that a virtual assistant, not a ROBEO. Winner, Winner, Blockchain Dinner There's a new gaming award in town. BAFTA? No! Pocket Gamer? No! GDC? No! Web3 Gaming Awards, are you there? Come and get your, er, award thing to add to all of the other gaming events, awards, things that we have in our diary every year. I am told that this one's different, I don’t see how. Maybe it’s virtual, maybe it’s a bro-tie dinner, but it is happening on December 15th. Listen, I’m into it. Everyone worth their salt in the events space has pitifully added web3 gaming to its awards schedule over the course of the last few years, so it’s refreshing to see something truly standalone. It’s asserting web3 gaming as being something that's here to stay and not something that's just some kind of flash in the pan. We have to remember that blockchain games and metaverse projects have raised $1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2022, according to Dapp Radar, and that provides gaming activity for almost half of all blockchain activity that's been tracked through networks and through 912,000 Daily Active wallets interacting with game smart contracts in September 2022. That's not too shabby for an industry that has been lambasted by everybody else for not being real. Is it too soon to see the beginning of the end of game’s great walled gardens? Gaming consoles: we're looking at you. Everything Must Go What not to wear this quarter seems to be more focused on the platform it’s built on than the garment itself. But these things are not mutually exclusive, and it’s scary to think that there are folks in the fashion world at this very moment being silly sheep and deciding on what to buy based on currency, not quality. This is why we can’t have nice things I guess. The collapse of nutjob decentralised currency exchange FTX seemed somehow to be the sole culprit for why the digital fashion world is slowly collapsing. Crypto holders feel damaged. But more importantly, fashion brands have spent some time experimenting in this space and now, according to this article, at least, calling in or calling foul over the metaverse narrative, and how it's not working for them. Education, education, education - shame on you for not doing your homework. Not all is lost my dear Fashionistas: here's a little bit of advice I found dealing with digital fashion, and that is - you can have digital fashion and wearables without web3. Wow! Really? Yes. There are loads of different ways to on-ramp and off-ramp when dealing with blockchain, decentralised, digital or crypto-driven fashion. I think the most important thing here is to not bother your ass worrying about whether blockchain platforms or cryptocurrencies which have failed are the actual buzzkill. I think the buzzkill here is the inability of people to diversify and pivot around cryptocurrency until it's much more stable and more dependable, reliable and approachable. Perhaps if we focus on digital objects or digital fashion items themselves, then we won't find ourselves in a situation where we're eternally embarrassed by what may or may not have happened in this last financial quarter of cryptocurrency shenanigans. Keep focusing on fashion and the rest will fall into place. If fashion only focuses on how they’re going to make a return on their initial investment, instead of the quality of the object being committed to the inventory or wallet; then they’re really not understanding what this space and these ecosystems are about at all. Everything Everywhere All At Once Everyone wants into the metaverse. I feel like I’m in a really select group of amazingly talented and skilled individuals who are crafting imagination into view like alchemists. So it’s no surprise that two talented and skilled professionals who bring every single media consumable and charitable organisation to the fore are looking for a piece of the metaverse action. Step forward the Duke and Duchess of Sussex: podcasts, books, United Nations, World Wildlife Fund, She Can, inner-city violence programmes, soup kitchens, and now Pax World, whatever that is. I say whatever that is because, as a huge cheerleader for the metaverse, I will keep banging the drum for going to places where the people are first. How much work are you going to get done in a space with a small amount of daily active users? If you have a message and you need to get it out there, be smart, no, smarter. It’s vital that we have role models who represent these kinds of areas, and the Sussexes may not be messing around here. They know their worth, they have a personal brand, and they want to go fully global. Now they have been enabled by the metaverse, will this make their voice stronger, or will it dilute their brand entirely? I’m not entirely sure this first foray into the metaverse will make meta of the Duke and Duchess of Success, but I’m ready to be proved wrong. What Meta Did Next Another week where Meta tries to make themselves relevant, and this time they're using National Treasure of the United Kingdom and the World Sir David Attenborough. I just hope the universe can forgive us. Together with Alchemy Immersive and Meta’s Immersive Learning division, they've once again created something that we never asked for using a hardware device that we can’t afford. Conquest of the Skies VR - hey schools, are you paying attention? If you are in the UK, it will be available from 29th November to the 4th December, at Westfield White City using Meta Quest Headsets. Wait. That's a physical real-world location, with a virtual experience, le sigh. Listen, what is the actual point of this? The point of this is, obviously, a promo, or more importantly, a transmedia connection to Meta Quest TV’s new show of the same name, which I’m guessing you can watch in your expensive headset for hopefully 20 minutes at a time. These three episodes will show viewers how insects, reptiles and birds have evolved to fly. Am I going mad? Do we actually need this? Can we afford it? What the hell are we trying to achieve by creating an experience in an expensive tool, for something we can only do in short bursts to protect our eyes and central nervous systems? My feeling is that Meta doesn’t actually need a VR headset to experience this. Why aren't they using AR? Why aren't they creating a virtual rainforest? Or a Foxtrail? I think these interesting opportunities to create a digital version of real-life experiences do not need a VR headset. Fix the poverty gap instead - it’s not that hard to make a change - just stop being selfish. He's So Shy There's a really quiet, unassuming footballer called Cristiano Ronaldo, who you may have never heard of. He currently plays for Manchester United, kind of, or maybe he doesn’t anymore, he just never speaks about it. He's very quiet and unassuming. Not many people know about him. But I'm here to tell you that there is a huge global ad campaign about to begin which puts this shy young man front and centre of the spotlight thanks to his love of NFTs. This relationship between football and finance comes at a time when we are trying to figure out why the FA can’t be bothered to stand up for the principles of its association against the might of FIFA. Money, I don’t hate it. But I hate it when the making of money is so badly thought through. So what are these NFTs? Well, Binance is the big king of this campaign, and they have promised an auction of 45 of the highest value NFTs which will be available for auction for 24 hours with bidding prices for the rarest 5 NFTs starting at 10,000 BUSDs (their US dollar-pegged stablecoin). My beef is the utility. It’s woeful. A personal message from Ronaldo himself? I can get that anywhere and pay less. Autographed merchandise? Is it really 1998? I'm not really sure whether people fully embrace or understand what utility means, but it certainly isn't getting a personal message from Ronaldo, I'm just saying this is really boring stuff and I’m actually in this industry. Sometimes Your Words Just Metaverse Me If you know me, and a lot of people reading this do, you will know that I am a very big hip-hop fan. In fact, I'm such a big hip-hop fan that I rap. It’s cringe. It’s mostly cringe because, along with my sneakerhead creds, I am an almost 50-year-old woman trying to be down with the kids. Someone else who would have been turning 50 this year (last May) was the incredible Notorious B.I.G Christopher George Latore Wallace. We will always love Big Poppa, and we don't have to miss him anymore, because he's going to be performing a concert hosted by Meta (yes, Meta) on December 16th in Horizon Worlds: WOW. In non-hip hop news, I went to see The Cure last week, and I have to say it was pretty boring. 10,000 annoying dicks shoved into an arena that I paid $80 to experience in all its dreadful glory. I was very, very cheesed off indeed. But I love Robert Smith, and when The Cure played Burn, all I could think about was this: Why can’t I watch this concert in The Crow? I can watch Medicine perform in that film, but here I was in a dark arena filled with people, I was unable to get a drink or a hot dog because I couldn’t leave my spot for fear of losing it. This is a direct throwdown to my good friends at Dimension Studio, you remember Dimension don’t you? They are the ones who brought us the 4 Madonnas for the Billboard Awards. So if Meta wants to do anything to save face from their bizarre takeover they want to do with their devices and software and general zeal to make themselves relevant, perhaps this is the thing that they've been looking for. I want to see more concerts in the metaverse space, and I'm not talking about just watching Ariana Grande. I'm talking about going and seeing the greats. I'm talking about seeing Elvis and Tupac, INXS and A Tribe Called Quest. I want to see The Prodigy with Keith, I want to see Madonna. Please make this happen. Stop thinking about utilising your services as Metaverse developers to a platform with no users: go and create something really beautiful for us. And if you can't, you are losing out on a massive amount of the population that really needs you. Guess that's why you’re broke, and we’re so paid. That’s enough Metaverse for this week. Do give us feedback and thoughts! Also, don't miss out on joining our amazing community on both Telegram and Discord. Until next week folks!

Hello jetlag! This week I have been in Chicago, engaging and educating the last few unsullied souls in the ways of the metaverse, web3 and all that jazz (see what I did there?) However, whilst I was away, the whole world went completely mad. But hey, we’ve got a full tank of gas (fees), half a pack of NFTs, it’s dark, and I’m wearing sunglasses. HIT IT! Comparing Sizes I’ve worked for enough guys to recognise when there is a measuring contest happening right before my eyes in the boardroom, and trust me, during my tenure as guardian of the blockchain, crypto and NFT commonsense policies, nothing made me laugh harder than the great FTX fail. However, what is driving this Napoleonic wave has given way to more concern than comedy: step forward Sam Bankman-Fried - the Leif Garrett of Crypto [insert your scandal-hit child star here] - who I am sure, like the rest of us, laughed from the sidelines at the absurdity of Do Kwon of Terra-LUNA. But the motherlode of FUBARs has not only made us question our own community, but it has also made potential business, brands, and believers run for the hills. Fine with me. The crypto ecosystem is volatile once again. Over the last six months, the web3, fintech and crypto communities have uttered the words “crypto winter” like a sigh to a scream: brought about by a whole heap of other things that have happened, and where other crypto bros have crashed and burned or the market has been overvalued it’s high profile individuals like Tom Brady, who let’s face it is having the worst quarter of his life, find themselves connected to failure. “This type of thing just doesn’t happen in normal financial marketplaces,” is the Keyser Söze of this whole situation. IT EXISTS. If you work in and with crypto, as I do, and you believe in the power of crypto, you have to accept that where there are successes, there are also going to be catastrophic failures. This is the world of financial technology. This is the world of investments; where values go up as well as down. So why is everyone losing their collective minds? This isn’t a chess lawsuit, this isn’t a dodgy festival on a paradise island [insert your own weather system here]. This is just one guy. Like Do Kwon. And that’s the problem. Crypto can no longer be about just one person. Crypto has to be about everybody. If we're going to weigh the entire crypto development process, success ratio, and ROI pivoting on just one person who is hailed as a messiah, what does this say about you? What we have to do is stop putting all of our trust and hopes into one person and start sharing our risks the way that we spread risks generally; that way (perhaps), we won't have crypto winters, and instead, we might work towards acceptance and regular stability. But right now? Crypto has a serious image problem and a volatile demeanour which might be difficult to shake. So let’s put our collective appendages back in our trousers and work a bit smarter. Ok? Go-Go Power Lawyers One of the greatest places I've ever lived is Japan. For the Japanese, the future is something that they can’t touch, which gives ways to innovation and ikigai in that innovation, from gigantic robot statues nestled beside goddesses to fully functioning AI bars and sleep capsules. If the future was something we could touch, the Japanese would have given it to us in tablet form. Meanwhile, in the West, our arrogance leads us, and we believe that we can create the future, and therefore we can grab it and own it. The tangibility of Japanese innovation is real; real enough for us to be able to experience, so it's very uplifting that the Japanese are exploring the letter of the law in metaverse and NFT concepts and new technologies for sport. E-sports to baseball: the Japanese are a sporting nation, but what does that look like in a world of rigid rulesets and unwavering regulation? How will that work in a world where the users are the law? The recent development in Japanese laws specifically designed to regulate the metaverse and/or NFTs in a place where there are no laws that regulate NFTs or the metaverse, feels a little cart before the horse - but is it? On the surface, it seems like a really good use case because sports in the physical space are heavily regulated, so how the law will operate in a free, open and transparent space might seem like an anathema to people who work in both law and sports. I think this is a great way to test the rigorous nature of what is created on both sides (physical and digital). In a country where even the law is ikigai, I’m keen to see what happens next. A Game Of Two Halves You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that at some point or another in (the last two years, or) the next five years, sports are going to be an incredible source for NFT creation, development, trading and metaverse creation (see my opinion above). FIFA is working with Upland to create gamified experiences as part of an overarching metaverse. This is how the metaverse should be, right? Accessible, inclusive and interoperable. The FIFA 2022 World Cup (your politics notwithstanding) starts in a matter of days as you read this, and Upland has created a digital twin of the Lusail Stadium with the brand and villages included. So when we all made a collective gasp at FIFA pulling out of their successful EA relationship, it was inevitable that they would innovate out of the situation. And they have. Into something more open and transparent-ish. This is a vision for the metaverse that everybody expected. My big favourite bit of this piece is the real-world utility aspect through real estate - this is a great use case for this - but will it bring the punters in? And what will they actually do there? What they want it to be able to achieve is the start of a legacy; with a current community of 3 million users (not too shabby) to explore the World Cup fandom in a metaverse experience where they will create community content and acquire digital assets developed during this process (I hope that means open ownership). Overall, I think having any sport, not just football, presented as a decentralised practice means that finally, we can have a full community-owned and backed football experience in a virtual or gamified space that until now has been difficult to cultivate beyond the physical because of, well, money. I really want this concept to outlive the politicking of the current status quo - and I’d love it even more if we could use this year’s event to highlight human rights violations in all its forms digitally, if not physically too. Wouldn’t you? (You're My Favourite) Waste Of Time Question. Do you have $2000 to $3,000? I don't. And if I did, I still wouldn't be buying that ridiculous Apple headset. So let’s set the scene, 83.32% of the world’s population uses a smartphone for any form of communication. Apple claimed a 15.6 percent share of the global market in the second quarter of 2022. And for overall clarity of the smartphone users in the USA, 45% of them are Apple users. But the world is not the USA, and according to Tim Cook, the metaverse isn’t even the future, so, is this leak more vanity than sanity? It’s no mystery that Apple has designs on VR, but let's face it, VR is having some growing pains. It has been suggested that breaks should be taken after between 15 and 30 minutes of use, which impacts massively on the success of this particular device-driven experience. If I had $2000-$3000 to glean from users, I would spend it on innovating to narrow the poverty gap between people who have devices and people who do not. If Apple really cares about VR that much; inclusivity, accessibility and discoverability are exactly what they should spend some time and profits on. Welcome to yesterday, Apple, we hope you have fun. Turning Back The Tide In my long-running series on tech bros who want to own the world, Microsoft and Dentsu International have partnered to build a collaboration space in the metaverse. Don’t sigh just yet, it could be ok… right? This initiative is underpinned by a web3 Centre of Excellence (whatever that is), where clients and Dentsu teams have the chance to innovate, test ideas and experiment with hypotheses. My big question is why. Whenever people put these weird wants and needs into a partnership and decide that they want to build and power a metaverse that needs to be completely exclusive. I just wonder why. There are plenty of awesome metaverses out there that they could use - why build one? Designed specifically to create accessibility for more people through any web-enabled device, that doesn’t seem very exclusive, does it? But the horror show is that it’s Microsoft powered. Jeez Louise, if 2022 is anything, it’s a fairly clear evolution of web and suite users away from Microsoft. It all just smacks of a ruse to get us to use Microsoft more, and that’s not really the idea of the metaverse, in my opinion at least. Additionally, it's built on Unreal Engine 5, which is the world's most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool, we know that! But that also means it will be very impossible to use on mobile, where, you know, the metaverse really lives. My feeling is that this isn’t very agile, so until it is, I urge you all to try Canva. That’s enough Metaverse for this week - my comfy, real-life bed is calling me.

Welcome to this week's news roundup. Sometimes you move with the times, and sometimes you don't. This week is a mixed bag of a bit of everything that might tickle your fancy: featuring drag queen levels of pure shade, all the way through to saying NFT in a way that doesn’t sound scammy. Perhaps you're from Jurassic? Let's start with some dinosaurial editorial from Web Summit this week, which I had hoped to attend, but I'm somehow glad I missed. Once upon a time, there was a man who created an open internet called the World Wide Web, and in it, he created a place to share, discuss and debate the future of technology called the information superhighway. When the young people came and saw what he had created, they were so amazed to find something that they could forge, create and develop for their futures, they called it web3. From a mountain somewhere in our minds (or from a stage in Lisbon), this wise sage said, “NAY! Thou shalt not take the world wide web and bastardise it into a chain of blocks! You will not use it for profit! Instead, you will listen to me!” This man is the great Tim Berners-Lee, who, you know, we all admire - however, I’m concerned by the overzealousness of his words. With most of the Metaverse powered by blockchain, using the power and frameworks of the web to be able to distribute their applications directly to users has nothing to do with it. Web3 is happening, but Berners Lee doesn't think so, and he's quite pissed off about it. But wait… What is this smoking gun I smell from yonder backstage area? A start-up. Not any ordinary start-up either, oh no, this is a decentralised startup that has already raised $30m for a business model focused on: 1) a global single sign-on feature that lets anyone log in from anywhere. 2) Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others, and 3) a common universal API or application programming interface. Take a look at my most recent article where I explore some good use cases for single sign-ons, KYC, CIAM etc. He's not the only person thinking about this. This has been thought about by pretty much everybody. So sadly for the mackdaddy of web1, 2 and 3, this is not going to be a revolution, it’s going to be a bun fight. I won't do what you tell me This week, a guy I've never heard of, sat down with Yahoo Finance to talk about tech trends. When the fun Bobby of technology (sans booze) popped into the conversation, Michael J Wolf, late of the MTV parish, was fairly clear that the term ‘The Metaverse’ is cringeworthy. Here’s something cringeworthy: a middle-aged guy in a suit talking to the future of technology as a word that he finds cringeworthy. We all need hobbies. Get back to work everyone, this town hall is over. The shade of it all I love you, Phil Spencer. Fresh from his phishing campaign (LOL), Phil is eager for us to now immerse ourselves in a digital world. Microsoft's gaming CEO has thrown shade on Facebook, I mean Meta, by describing it as a “poorly built video game”. A master’s degree in fierce. He's not enthusiastic about it, because for him building a Metaverse that looks like a meeting room is not a place where he wants to spend his time. That's cool. His company owns Minecraft. Should we be building a meeting room that looks like a bunch of blocky things? Yeah? Interesting, and I mean in the British sense. My take is this: When Phil Spencer says that video game creators have an amazing ability to build compelling worlds, I really do believe that: a million percent. Do you want someone to build a good Metaverse for you, Mark? Hire a game studio, you know enough of them, and game studios know about two amazing things: good design and great community building. Mind you, Microsoft also owns Bethesda now. Surely that means our Teams meeting rooms should look like Skyrim, right? So why do they still look like hell? Web3 Fantasy In the world of games, Square Enix seems to be the go-to web3 or blockchain name du jour because people simply cannot stop associating themselves in some way with them. The next time you are at NFT.[insert your city here], shout Square Enix in the centre of the auditorium and watch the VCs travel, in formation, to where you are. Cross The Ages (abbreviated for punnery to CTA) is no different. The trading card game is in place, half a million cards have been minted, and 600,000 community members are signed up from the concept art alone. Okay, stop, stop, stop. Wait. I am really bored. I love everything about web3 games, blockchain games and NFT games; but even I know that this is ambitious. As a games person of some experience, and yes, this crops up every single week, I want the names of everyone interested in this because I've seen some web3 games, blockchain games and NFT games over the course of the last six months at least: and they are terrible. The really terrible ones are aimed at the most niche audience ever, yes, those guys who wear leather forearm bracers at the weekend. The best ones are seemingly getting a good exposure by folks like Oasys: I love a wide-ranging choice machine like an arcade or an old-school console. If you like it too - Oasys is for you. Be honest with yourselves, you've created this game experience because you want to develop a deep IP. In order to do so, you need to forge deeper links with companies and VCs who can proliferate your brand across web3. I get it. It's great that you're creating an IP, but that IP has really got to sustain itself big time, and you can always lean on the 170 million units that my beloved Final Fantasy series has sold worldwide if it doesn’t. The reason why we love FF is because it’s diverse, open, aspirational, cosplayable, and a lasting IP. But then I saw the team and realised that they really need to make this work. It’s like Ben Hur in there. Does my block look big in this? Digital fashion has the potential to fix that landfill problem that still no one is talking about seriously. Refreshing though it sounds, The House of Blueberry and Natori have teamed up to make yet another digital fashion collection for Roblox. It promises to be direct to avatar, I just can’t fathom D2A in something as weird as Roblox. What are we actually going to do with it? Can we wear it? Is it interoperable or what? What is the point of everything that it is we're trying to create in digital fashion? Is it a massive flex? I just want to know how people think that Roblox is somehow sustainable as a fashion practice. Because Roblox fashion is ugly. Do you really want to look like this series of blocks with a ponytail that looks like… well, just look for yourself. If you are looking for a metaverse that appeals to your age and doesn’t make you feel like an old creep, Roblox is not the place for your or your digital fashion unless you are Vans and you literally want that Gen Z audience that has no disposable income for couture. Roblox should be for playing with and creating in, that’s all. I know Kung Fu I’m a mega fan of 3 things: education, the metaverse (that includes web3) and Jungkook from BTS. And almost a year on from my endeavours of building a metaverse for children, I am so excited to see that people are coming around to the theory of the metaverse being a big driver in this space. Yes, yes, of course, it all tends to start with Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar cosplaying as Emperor Augustus in the Circus Maximus or somewhere near, telling us all how you could go back to a time to learn about the Roman Empire in Trajan’s Market. I mean, we can learn about the Roman Empire just by reading Meta news in Forbes. But let’s be serious, during the pandemic, education was at its lowest ever in terms of reach and retention. We have got to start focusing on children and looking at the world through their eyes. We have got to stop talking and chalking. The amount of devices and technologies that are at our fingertips is exactly why Tim Berners-Lee has put so much stock into his beloved World Wide Web; because it is both an encyclopaedia and a library, it is an adventure and a playground. So surely, with those keywords at the beating heart of what the metaverse could potentially be, we should start focusing on how education is going to be for Gen Z and Alpha, not for us. If you've seen any of my talks, you know that I sort of started doing this with my students back in 2009. When I was teaching inside a metaverse called SmallWorlds, yes, the metaverse isn’t new. I even did registration, pastoral care, etc, using something called Ustream if you can even remember what that is. This evolution of the student learning with AR and VR inside the classroom along with the metaverse is really making the metaverse an exciting place to be able to learn and teach. The global digital education market size is valued at USD $77.23bn by 2028, in a combined space worth $29tr. The golden rule of this vertical is simple: if we're going to learn, we've got to do it inclusively. It's got to be accessible and discoverable, and it's got to be for all of us. Dude, where's my NFT? I went on a huge night out in Cambridge with my game dev team a few years ago and one of my colleagues, whose house I crashed at that night, woke up the next day to realise that he had bought a $4000 Alienware gaming laptop. Beeple, who holds the record for the most amount of money paid for an NFT artwork. Recently has decided to break out into the world of sensible people by creating something that, hold your pearls, actually has a modicum of utility. The Render Network has just raised $30 million in a funding round (a familiar figure this week) to develop, with Beeple’s, their/his very own Immersive 3D NFTs. Participants, including the Solana Foundation and Alameda Research want to develop their decentralised peer-to-peer network that allows users to tap into remote rendering power from anywhere for anything web3. Anytime, anyplace, anywhere. To me, that seems a little bit like hype. Can we afford Beeple? Because I know that my colleague could not afford that Alienware laptop and defaulted on his rent for two months straight. The Golden Hind pub quiz was never the same again after that night. Art should be for everybody. That’s the point I’m making, and if it's only for rich people, I’m not interested. An NFT pastiche worth millions can only afford to sit on the wall of the rich folks, or dare I say it gathering dust in a museum paid for by the taxpayer (that’s us). Shouldn't we be helping young people to be educated in the ways of art, accessing and developing their minds towards the beauty of a discipline that few of us are able to touch. We should be helping the future, not forcing the future to conform to our ideals. That’s enough Metaverse for this week.

This week is an awe-inspiring mix of some of the biggest tech and entertainment companies in the world, but how will their fortunes fair in the metaverse? Let’s find out. The Metaverse of Broadway “When you wish upon a star”, “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, “The Siamese Cat Song”, these are just a few of the things that we grew up in the 70s with, on vinyl. Called Walt Disney's Original Soundtrack Parade, it was a double album of around 25 original songs from the movies that our parents had taken us to see at the cinema; before DVDs and streaming. Yes, we used to have to go into a building with a big projector screen and beg our parents for a choc ice at the interval which was always delivered in a state of melt. BUT KIDS! It’s 2022. So to celebrate 100 years of music in Disney, they have collaborated with Obsess which is an ecommerce platform known for creating interactive virtual storefronts to release this new web3 experience for its Disney Music Emporium. What would Danny Kaye think? And more importantly, what should Monsieur D'Arque do? Encanto, Turning Red, and The Lion King musical are reaching even more audiences through Disney+, then add Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings being something totally new - it makes incredible sense to bring these together with Steamboat Willie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the evergreen Fantasia. What I find fascinating though, is that Disney are not going to partner with just one company this year; they've decided the other web3 platforms that they want to connect with include Flick Play, Polygon and Lockerverse. They're also exploring QR code opportunities for users to scan inside their Disney+ app to buy merchandise directly (welcome to yesterday everyone!) For me? This all feels a little bit clunky and I will be so interested to see how this will work. Perhaps this will only work if it's part of their overall metaverse. If it's just one interactive ecommerce platform store, then it's going to be a little bit limited and that's not really web3 now is it? We'll see. Team Metaverse: World Police Everyone knows that I’m a bad girl. I make no apology for being rude, naughty and rebellious. And when it comes to the metaverse, I’m even worse! Perhaps I’ll be in trouble with Interpol? I hope so. At their General Assembly in New Delhi, they presented a vision of the future for the global police organisation: they have decided that they would like to create a metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide. You know, because the metaverse is a place for everybody; and that should definitely include Interpol. What they plan to do is allow registered users to tour a virtual facsimile of the Interpol General Secretariat in Lyon, without any geographical or physical boundaries, to interact with other avatars, aka police officers, and even take immersive training courses in forensic investigation. This bit is really interesting to me because I'm a person who loves a bit of CSI. What is really important, though, is that this is an opportunity for the police to enhance their awareness of threats and harness opportunities. However, what I don’t like is that phrase registered users. Sounds a bit centralised doesn’t it? But wait! In conjunction with the World Economic Forum, Interpol, Meta, Microsoft and others they have created an initiative to define and govern the metaverse. OH GOD - IS THE METAVERSE STANDARDS FORUM BACK AGAIN? My take on this is really simple. This is Second Life-ism. This is an opportunity to create something that exists in the built space, or IRL, but within a web3/digital or supposed decentralised space, which it isn’t. Like for like. Instead of opening up the conversation about policing the metaverse safely it will most definitely limit the user experience for visitors to Interpol. But if Meta is involved in it, the chances are probably only your mum is going to be there. Is that naughty enough for ya? Playing with Apes When someone mentions games, my Grimes’ elf ears prick up. I was only mildly interested to read that Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Otherside is making a game. Despite decrying the amount of time it takes to make a game (3 years or something - WHAT?) this supposed game will be out only in beta and in 2023. Next year. This multiplayer game is going to be similar to Roblox, (which only game lovers know isn't an actual game), but okay, let's gamify something. Yugalabs, who developed BAYC described this game as “The Persistent World”. Yes, very good. But all I could think about was how much I miss playing The Secret World, that well-known Funcom game from 2012. What do you mean I can still play it? All I want to know about the BAYC game is this: will it be made by game developers? Because if it isn’t going to be made by game developers, then what the hell are we going to play? Axie Infinity? So I guess next year's conversation is going to be what is a game rather than what we've been talking about for the last two years, which is what is the metaverse. Watch this space? Maybe go and do something less boring instead. Messing with the Yen On the subject of games, the Japanese are really pissed off, and quite rightly so. Why is everybody incredibly frightened of web3 technologies like cryptocurrency? In Japan, this is costing their place as the world’s gaming capital. Now, look, we've had these conversations about NFT gaming before, sure we have. We've talked about how cryptocurrencies are helping games to be able to develop faster and seamlessly in a world that is becoming ever virtual. However, companies like Nintendo, Sega et al. want to be able to constantly change with the times. They want to be able to look at the game-fi sector and the opportunities it provides such as using crypto assets as an extension of in-game currency to develop IP way beyond games. Let's face it, we already use currencies inside games. I can't understand why everybody's losing their minds about this. Auditing. These strict listing rules drawn up by the financial aid agency suggest that the value of game currency as a coin in Japan, might be confusing and frustrating. The great news is that Sega, Square Enix and more Japanese developers and publishers are already partnering with third-party web3 services to keep the game playing and the IP strong. Check out Oasys if you don’t know what I mean. This Korean DAAS-provider (Decentralisation As A Service) is taking the headache of setting up crypto currencies into something that is more seamless and acceptable as a package rather than baggage. Bad Hair Day The marriage of my mum’s fave hair dye brand (L’Oreal) and her favourite social media platform (Meta) is gonna take the (drugstore) world by storm. This time we know they’re serious because they’ve added French Business School HEC Paris to create a startup acceleration programme dedicated to creativity in the metaverse. Yeah, it makes total sense. In all seriousness, they want to do something interesting. I get it, I feel it. They want to bring together young talent and they want to create creative synergy and energy; and that is laudable, I'm sure. But I'm not entirely sure it’s not just because they own various beauty brands such as Yves Saint Laurent, Lancôme, Mugler, Armani, etc, that young people are necessarily going to fall into web3, NFT and the metaverse creative swell by virtue of going to the Perfume Shop (other cut-price fragrance stores are available). But they have started using web3 language so we must listen. In the end, this feels a little like the LVMH accelerator and if you remember how awkward that virtual conversation was at this year’s VivaTech event, you should have some idea about how little young people care for watching stale old CEOs trying to harness technology. Why the Long Face? My mum will be pleased that WhatsApp thinks that it's moving into the metaverse by doing something really super exciting. Avatars. AVATARS. By the way, for folks just tuning in, it’s 2022. The Metaverse for everyone's information is already way more than a bunch of avatars. But I can see what they're doing here. They want to be able to take on Ready Player Me, but if so why don't they just buy in Ready Player Me? That’s what RPM is for, it’s RPM’s business model. It seems absolutely stupid that WhatsApp believes overhauling avatars will be suddenly the hot new thing to enable people to get closer to the metaverse. Please, Dad, I love you but you have to stop writing Meta’s updates for them. That’s enough Metaverse for this week.