Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well. Meta Platforms.
Speaker 1: The company is formally known as Facebook. I think it
Speaker 1: was a big deal obviously when it changed its name
Speaker 1: from Facebook to meta Platforms, signaling that it was going
Speaker 1: all in on the metaverse. But what is what exactly
Speaker 1: is the metaverse? For a lot of people, it's still
Speaker 1: a really new concept. Somebody who knows a ton about
Speaker 1: the meta versus David Taylor, who's chief operating officer and
Speaker 1: token architect at next Earth. Next Earth is a metaverse
Speaker 1: platform that calls itself the third largest metaverse. It has
Speaker 1: virtual landowners. It's got two and thirty thousand registered users.
Speaker 1: David It joins us via zoom from Hungary. David, how
Speaker 1: are you. I'm good? Thank you so much. We're just
Speaker 1: about to close up. Eased their holiday here. Oh well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking the time and joining us.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about how how did you
Speaker 1: become the third largest metaverse out there right now? And
Speaker 1: what does it mean to be the third largest? Is
Speaker 1: the central and bigger? I mean, he's bigger out there
Speaker 1: at this point. Well, it depends on what you're looking at,
Speaker 1: but when we're looking at the revenue growth and user growth,
Speaker 1: we are actually um or disurpassing the second. But obviously
Speaker 1: the trio of this market is us, the central End
Speaker 1: and Sandbox, and there are a couple of others are
Speaker 1: out there in the web three space, but we're certainly
Speaker 1: the first and only Earth based mataverse that is on
Speaker 1: the blockchain. We'll talk a little bit about what people
Speaker 1: get when they become a member of Next Earth, when
Speaker 1: they become a landowner in Next Earth, because I gotta
Speaker 1: tell you, I think it's fair to say a lot
Speaker 1: of people listening right now, or a portion of people
Speaker 1: listening right now, might say to themselves, why would I
Speaker 1: actually pay money for something that is called land but
Speaker 1: only exists in the metaverse right now? I think that
Speaker 1: there are two answers to that question. The first question
Speaker 1: is what is the mataverse it self? Because I think
Speaker 1: that's what confuses many people, and the way we're looking
Speaker 1: at it is the metaverse is a virtual space right
Speaker 1: where consumers can interact with digital digital environment, with services
Speaker 1: and each other. So in other words, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like an Internet, but it also has a spatial dimension.
Speaker 1: And once you add the spatial dimension to the Internet,
Speaker 1: the whole term and concept of virtual land and virtual
Speaker 1: real estate starts making sense. So, um, the way you will,
Speaker 1: I would like to put it to our users, and
Speaker 1: this is what we'll give virtual land utility is that
Speaker 1: in a in a web environment that also has a
Speaker 1: spatial dimensional spatial web. In a sense, virtual land is
Speaker 1: basically the new Facebook page for small businesses. I'm curious.
Speaker 1: There's there's kind of been two narratives of the of
Speaker 1: the metaverse when it comes to the creation of it.
Speaker 1: You have, um, we're going to use prominent names here,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna we have Metal platforms are formerly known as
Speaker 1: Facebook's vision of it, which is you go to inside
Speaker 1: the metaverse, you're able to buy a T shirt, um,
Speaker 1: go to concert virtually and then where you know that
Speaker 1: concert t shirt to work the next day and and
Speaker 1: that kind of becomes your your metaverse life very much
Speaker 1: as much a social platform similar to likes of Facebook, Instagram, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Then you have the other version, which I think Microsoft
Speaker 1: kind of came out with, which is this is more
Speaker 1: of a work platform, a remote work platform where you
Speaker 1: use the metaverse to communicate with work colleagues. Which one
Speaker 1: is the right metaverse? Ha ha, that's a pretty good question,
Speaker 1: and the answer is neither and both. The metaverse is
Speaker 1: a new industry that is currently being born out of
Speaker 1: Web two and the metaverse is technically a merger of
Speaker 1: three core industries. One would be social media, the second
Speaker 1: would be gaming and gamification and all that comes with it,
Speaker 1: and the third is finance. And that's why you can
Speaker 1: start seeing companies like Facebook or meta um competing with
Speaker 1: the companies like Big Games with Fortnite like that that
Speaker 1: couldn't have happened in years ago. David, when you when
Speaker 1: you want to go back to something that you said
Speaker 1: a little earlier, the idea of having a Facebook page
Speaker 1: in the metaverse, the idea of small business having a
Speaker 1: piece of land is like having a Facebook page in
Speaker 1: the world that we know Web two point. Now, how
Speaker 1: do you know which which horse to bet on? Here?
Speaker 1: How do you know which platform to bet on? Because
Speaker 1: I know this is supposed to be decentralized and you're
Speaker 1: supposed to be able to take stuff from one world
Speaker 1: to another world. But if you're buying land in next Earth,
Speaker 1: what happens if the central land is that has the
Speaker 1: customers that your small business wants to reach. So here
Speaker 1: is where our strategy differs from all the other Web
Speaker 1: three and also all the other Web two platforms, because
Speaker 1: we are not betting on any metavers We're betting on
Speaker 1: the platform of the metaverse itself. We are aiming to
Speaker 1: become the middlewere layer of the mataverse itself, which means
Speaker 1: that new metaverse projects will be born out from Fortune
Speaker 1: five hundred companies, from other Web three and blockchain and
Speaker 1: decentralized projects, and we actually want to help them create
Speaker 1: their own mataverse projects. We want to integrate with Sandbox
Speaker 1: and with the central and make all of them interoperable.
Speaker 1: And this is why we have decided that as next Earth,
Speaker 1: we are going to build as a platform as a
Speaker 1: service where through our suite of API, s our landowners
Speaker 1: can actually access a myriad of different services from other
Speaker 1: metaverses as well. What do the what do the services
Speaker 1: look like? So you already mentioned a couple of them,
Speaker 1: but what we can see as that obviously that the
Speaker 1: low hanging fruit would be about entertainment, concert experiences or
Speaker 1: other art galories in the mataverse. The whole sort of
Speaker 1: gaming and three D aspect is coming into the metaverse
Speaker 1: is a low hanging fruit and another quick opportunity to
Speaker 1: win over new consumers would be coming from fashion or education.
Speaker 1: We're already in talks with an education company that has
Speaker 1: about over a hundred thousand educators within their network who
Speaker 1: are working and collaborating with each other, and they are
Speaker 1: coming to the metavers and guess what they're going to
Speaker 1: be building their own metaverse solution using our own middlewhere
Speaker 1: layer talk to us a little bit about demographics here.
Speaker 1: Because you mentioned education, you mentioned kind of an uh
Speaker 1: more social experience. We've also talked about the work experience.
Speaker 1: Those are very different demographics. When I think about uh say,
Speaker 1: someone going to the concert for the first time, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking a twelve or thirteen year old teenage girl, right.
Speaker 1: I think I was about my age when I went
Speaker 1: to the first concert. Twelve their team, okay, yeah, with
Speaker 1: a parent earlier with a parent, yeah, so twelve or
Speaker 1: third teams, whereas for work is maybe twenty two right
Speaker 1: when you graduate from college um and education can be
Speaker 1: anywhere from pre K to graduate school. What is the
Speaker 1: age demographic that the metaverse is targeting not necessarily about
Speaker 1: just the age demographic, but if you look at how
Speaker 1: the Internet itself people from a sort of small community
Speaker 1: of hackers trying to do stuff on the Internet, to
Speaker 1: a bunch of you know, millennials doing innovative stuff to actually,
Speaker 1: uh me having conversations with my grandmother over Facebook, and
Speaker 1: she is actually a lot more proficient in using Facebook
Speaker 1: these days than I am. H That's that's the exact
Speaker 1: same evolution that we're going to witness with the metavers
Speaker 1: because just like in two thousand there were Internet companies
Speaker 1: and normal companies, and today there are just companies and
Speaker 1: every single one of those companies are on the Internet,
Speaker 1: the same thing will happen with the metaverse. Today is
Speaker 1: just a bunch of hackers from the crypto community space,
Speaker 1: or or from the from from the likes of UH,
Speaker 1: from from the uh the boiler rooms of Matter or Microsoft.
Speaker 1: But then in ten years we're going to have entire families, businesses,
Speaker 1: business chains operating within the mattervers and in fifteen twenty
Speaker 1: years they're just gonna be businesses and being manavers is
Speaker 1: actually gonna be quite the commodity. And who knows, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll be doing this interview from the metaverse next Time.
Speaker 1: David Taylor, chief operating officer and token architect at Next Earth,
Speaker 1: joining us via Zume from Hungary