Facebook Rebranded As Meta, To Focus At Building "Metaverse"

Facebook has been rebranded as Meta

Facebook Inc is now known as Meta, the corporate mentioned on Thursday, in a rebrand that focuses on its ambitions constructing the "metaverse," a shared digital setting that it bets would be the subsequent massive computing platform.

The rebrand comes because the world's largest social media firm battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market energy, algorithmic selections and the policing of abuses on its platforms.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, talking on the firm's live-streamed digital and augmented actuality convention, mentioned the brand new title mirrored its ambitions to construct the metaverse, reasonably than its namesake social media service.

The metaverse, a time period first coined in a dystopian novel three many years in the past and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, refers broadly to the concept of a shared digital setting which might be accessed by individuals utilizing completely different units.

"Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future," mentioned Zuckerberg.

The firm, which has invested closely in augmented and digital actuality, mentioned the change would deliver collectively its completely different apps and applied sciences beneath one new model. It mentioned it could not change its company construction.

The tech big, which stories about 2.9 billion month-to-month customers, has confronted growing scrutiny lately from world lawmakers and regulators.

In the most recent controversy, whistleblower and former Facebook worker Frances Haugen leaked paperwork which she mentioned confirmed the corporate selected revenue over person security. Zuckerberg earlier this week mentioned the paperwork have been getting used to color a "false picture."

The firm mentioned in a weblog publish that it intends to begin buying and selling beneath the brand new inventory ticker it has reserved, MVRS, on Dec. 1. On Thursday, it unveiled a brand new signal at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, changing its thumbs-up "Like" brand with a blue infinity {shape}.

Facebook mentioned this week that its {hardware} division Facebook Reality Labs, which is accountable for AR and VR efforts, would grow to be a separate reporting unit and that its funding in it could scale back this 12 months's complete working revenue by about $10 billion. The unit will now be known as Reality Labs, its head Andrew "Boz" Bosworth tweeted on Thursday.

Zuckerberg mentioned the brand new title additionally displays that over time, customers won't want to make use of Facebook to make use of the corporate's different companies.

This 12 months, the corporate created a product crew centered on the metaverse and it not too long ago introduced plans to rent 10,000 staff in Europe over the following 5 years to work on the hassle.