metaverse

Yahaha raises $40M more for its user-generated, low-code immersive gaming platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in China, Gaming, metaverse, Startups, yahahaNo Comments

Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform founded by a group of Chinese gaming vets, made a splash in January when it announced a cumulative $50 million in funding ahead of its alpha launch in April. Now, with 100,000 creators and hundreds of thousands of players, it’s raised a further $40 million to continue building out its product — specifically to bring in monetization features and more social hooks — as well as to hire more talent and for business development. Yahaha is describing this as an extension to its previous round, specifically a “Series A+.” We are asking for an updated valuation, but for some context, when it announced funding 11 months ago, I was told that the valuation was a “few hundred million” (so in the wide range of $300-500 million). The raise and valuation both stand out against a backdrop of slim fundraising, especially for consumer startups. Yahaha styles itself as a dual-headquartered company, but its investors in this latest raise are all out of China and greater Asia. Singapore’s Temasek and Chinese internet giant Alibaba are co-leading this investment, with another Chinese company, 37 Interactive Entertainment, also participating. Previously the company had raised funding from 5Y Capital, HillHouse, Coatue, ZhenFund, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, BiliBili and Xiaomi. The company said it now has more than 150 employees, with offices in Helsinki, Seoul and Shanghai. LinkedIn, which shut down operations in China last year, notes that about half of the company’s employees registered on its platform identify as based out of Shanghai. “Metaverse” as a concept has seen a lot of hype, especially earlier this year — spearheaded in no small part by one of the biggest consumer internet businesses of our time, Facebook, rebranding itself as “Meta” and going all-in on the concept. A lot of that has not come to much so far, one big bellwether being Meta itself knocking back an own-goal in its own efforts. However, most universally agree that gaming has been one of the few highlights, with gamers willing to pay for and use hardware and software to improve the immersive-ness of their experiences. Yahaha is tapping into that opportunity and coupling it with another couple of big trends. User-generated content has long been a popular aspect of gaming and entertainment overall, but more recently it’s taken on a more sophisticated, businesslike aspect: people who in the past might have created media for fun have now become “creators” who see business opportunities in building content and and using it to connect with audiences. Not all of those creators — not many of them at all, in fact — are “technical”, so that is leading to attention (and funding) for companies that are building platforms to help creators create and spin up their business opportunities without a lot of heavy technical lifting. And that’s where Yahaha comes in. The company’s founders — Chris Zhu (CEO), Pengfei Zhang (COO) and Hao Min (CTO) — all worked together as engineers at cross-platform gaming engine Unity — indeed Yahaha has been described to me as being built in partnership with Unity — and their low-code platform aims to do all that heavy lifting behind the scenes. With an eye to creators and the businesses they are building, the new features the product will be getting will include more “monetization modules” and other commercial developments, said Zhu. “We’ve seen fantastic growth in YAHAHA throughout the Early Alpha stage, and with over 100,000 creators signing up to make content with us, we are building on a strong foundation,” Zhu said in a statement. “This round of funding signifies the next step we are taking with YAHAHA, opening up more creator experiences monetization modules. We are also continuing to pioneer by investing in key areas of the community and by building relationships with brands that share our values, aligning ourselves with experts in the fields of game development, 3D asset creation and more. With YAHAHA, we’re not just ushering in the next generation of entertainment, we’re supporting the next generation of creators and giving them the tools and the integrated virtual world platform they need to make great content. There is a litany of opportunities that await us in the virtual world, and we want to be on the cutting edge of it with YAHAHA. To do this, it’s imperative we continue investing in our team and in the community that got us to where we are right now.” The big questions will be whether those noodling around in the early version will stay with Yahaha as monetization comes in, whether that monetization works, whether games are entertaining enough to get players to engage, and of course whether metaverse establishes itself as a permanent fixture in the market, rather than a passing stage, as gamers progress to the next level.

Roblox stock drops on widening losses in Q3, but other growth metrics remain strong • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Gaming, metaverse, Q3 earnings, RobloxNo Comments

One of the big players in the “metaverse” space, gaming platform Roblox, saw its stock tumble by over 15% in pre-market trading on Wednesday after reporting a wider-than-anticipated loss in its third-quarter earnings. The company, which caters to a younger demographic with its virtual world gaming platform, reported a loss of $297.8 million, or 50 cents per share, when analysts had forecast a loss of 32 cents a share. Roblox revenue grew 2% year-over-year to $517.7 million in the quarter, but Wall Street tends to focus on another figure called bookings, which represents both the revenue plus the change in deferred revenue during the period and other non-cash adjustments. As the company has previously explained, bookings are equal to the amount of virtual currency, which Roblox calls “Robux,” that’s purchased by its users during a time period — something that Roblox says provides a timelier indication of trends. In Q3, Roblox bookings were up by 10% year-over-year to $701.7 million, above the $686 million analysts expected. Daily active users were also up by 24% from the year-ago period to reach 58.8 million, but average bookings per daily active user fell 11% to $11.94. While Roblox beat estimates on several key metrics, the stock dropped as Wall Street reacted to Roblox’s larger-than-anticipated loss. Despite this setback, many remain more bullish on Roblox in the long-term as a key metaverse player — perhaps even more so than Meta, which is spending billions trying to catch up. There are signs that Roblox is managing to grow and retain its users, even as many among its user base are now aging up. For instance, the company in Q3 noted its fastest year-over-year growth in daily active users is among those ages 17 to 24 — a cohort that grew by 41%. Though there aren’t as many users in that demographic, they monetize better than Roblox’s younger players and now represent 22% of Roblox’s daily active users. More broadly, Roblox’s daily active users over the age of 13 grew by 34% year-over-year and accounted for 54% of all daily active users, the company said. This is up from 38.7% in Q3 2019. In addition, the gaming company said that core markets like the U.S. and Canada are above peak-Covid levels — a time when Roblox, like many other gaming and entertainment companies, had seen sizable growth and activity as pandemic lockdowns kept people at home with nothing to do. Meanwhile, Western Europe and East Asia are now Roblox’s fastest-growing markets, which also monetize better than some others outside the U.S., like Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Though it may be hard for Roblox to reach pandemic levels of engagement in the post-Covid era, the company said its September 2022 engagement was nearly 20% higher than in September 2019, pre-Covid. This figure is down 6% from the Covid-impacted time of September 2020, however, but suggests growth has normalized. Monetization (bookings divided by engagement hours) was in line with peak Covid time frames, and 12% higher than in September 2019. Roblox also touted its developer traction, noting there are now 1520 developers building for Roblox who had achieved over 100,000 hours of engagement, up 54% year-over-year as of September 2022. And there were 532 developers that had generated over a million hours of engagement, up 47%. The top 1,000 experiences at the end of the quarter accounted for 85% of Robux earnings and engagement hours, compared with 90% a year ago. “We are delivering strong growth across our core operating metrics, powered by a growing developer community creating high- quality experiences that appeal to a broad, global audience,” said David Baszucki, Chief Executive Officer of Roblox, in a statement. “We are creating innovative technologies to enable deeper forms of immersion, communication and expression to further enhance the value of the platform.” The company said it will continue to invest in its growth including by hiring, expanding the platform, building new tools and experiences, in international growth, and in its older users. Roblox stock is trading at $34.98 as of the time of writing, down by 10.83%.

Meta slashes expenses on reduced hiring and capex investments • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in CAPEX, expenses, Facebook, meta, metaverse, SocialNo Comments

Meta’s body blow layoff announcement will see the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp making its first-ever major layoffs as a company, cutting 11,000 employees, 13% of its total; predictably investors are responding favorably, bumping the stock up by over 5% in pre-market trading. While the dust settles and we start to get an idea of how specific departments, products and regions are being impacted, Meta’s also released some updated financials for 2023 that detail billions shaved off of its expenses estimates on the back of reduced hiring and less capex spending in areas like metaverse. In an 8-K filing today, the company confirmed it will reduce hiring next year, shaving off between $1 billion and $2 billion off its 2023 total expenses range as a result. Overall expenses for 2023 are now estimated at between $94 billion and $100 billion, versus its previous range of $96 billion to $101 billion. “The updated range reflects our plan to add fewer employees in 2023 than we previously expected as we are significantly slowing our hiring trajectory through the beginning of 2023,” Meta said, expanding on words from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his open letter, which referred to a “hiring freeze” in Q1. (The expenses figure includes $2 billion in charges due to reduced office facilities, which Meta had previously disclosed.) Meta also noted in the 8-K that it is narrowing capital expenditures for 2023 by $2 billion at the top end. Capex estimates are now between $34 billion and $37 billion, versus $34 billion and $39 billion previously. Meta doesn’t detail here which areas will be hit by those cuts — capex can include any number of things such as data centers and network infrastructure, as well as Meta’s costly “metaverse” effort — but it does note that the latter of these is not looking very bright. “We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,” Meta said. Again, it doesn’t specify numbers, but Reality Labs (the division that houses the metaverse operation) accounted for $285 million in revenues in Q3, just 1% of the company’s total for that period. The company’s ambitions to grow metaverse and other new lines of business have been a big pull on Facebook’s balance sheet. For context, in 2020, the company sunk $15.72 billion into capex, a figure that ticked up in 2021 to $19.24 billion. In 2022, capex looks to be even more outsized against a stark backdrop of sluggish revenue due to declining returns on its core advertising business: Meta estimated in Q3 that 2022 capex would be in the range of $32 billion and $33 billion. “In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient,” Zuckerberg wrote in his note today. “We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency.” Revenue ranges previously provided by Meta for Q4 revenue — between $30 billion and $32.5 billion — are unchanged, it said in the 8-K filing today, as are the ranges it provided for overall expenses in 2022, which are between between $85 billion and $87 billion.

StretchSense built an actually comfortable hand-motion capture glove • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Gaming, metaverse, New Zealand, Robotics & AI, Social, Virtual realityNo Comments

New Zealand-based StretchSense, a maker of hand motion capture technology, believes virtual and augmented reality are going to replace the smartphone as the dominant way we interact with digital worlds and each other. And when that happens, we’ll need natural ways be immersed in those spaces, which means being able to touch and control virtual stuff with your hands. The startup has built a glove that captures the intricate motions of human hands, along with the software that then translates those movements into an animation. Currently, StretchSense’s tech is used by more than 200 gaming and visual effects studios worldwide to create realistic hand gestures for everything from sign language videos to cinematic fight scenes to virtual health and safety training. In fact, it was recently used to make Snoop Dogg’s ‘Crip Ya Enthusiasm‘ music video. Benjamin O’Brien, co-founder and CEO of StretchSense, told ZebethMedia he thinks StretchSense can “be the future of human machine interface for virtual worlds by building garments, not devices.” StretchSenses’s glove is made using the startup’s proprietary stretchable sensor technology that precisely measures the human form. Before it’s been sewn into the glove, the stretchy material looks and feels like elastic rubber with some light black lines running through. Those black lines are referred to as a stretchable capacitor — a capacitor is the same type of sensor used on the screens of smartphones to measure the amount of energy the screen is storing based on where you put your finger down, which is how it works out what you’re touching. In StretchSense’s case, when the material stretches with hand movements, the amount of energy it can store increases. “If you can measure the amount of energy that this can store, you can then work out its geometry very, very, very accurately,” said O’Brien. I tried the glove on myself during a demo in Auckland and can admit that it was indeed a comfortable fit, which O’Brien says isn’t always a given in the hand motion capture world. “The really core advantage is that we actually make garments, not devices. And by that we mean we make garments that are comfortable to wear, that don’t interfere with movement, that don’t break easily, and don’t have hard, lumpy bits of plastic,” said O’Brien. “And so the way we were able to beat out the competition in the motion capture space, if you look at any competitive product, it’s got all these lumpy bits of plastic all over and interferes moving the hand, it breaks easily. And it’s based on technology that just doesn’t naturally conform to the body.” StretchSense closed a $7.6 million Series A investment Thursday, led by Scotland-based Par Equity with participation by existing StretchSense investors GD1, the NZ-based venture capital firm, and Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national economic development agency. The startup intends to use the funds to grow out its center of excellence in Edinburgh which is focused on AI and spatial computing and will work on machine learning problems to constantly improve the product — things like making a finer and more accurate capture of details, lowering the threshold of the uncanny valley in animations, and transitioning from a 2D screen to a 3D virtual world. The startup is also working on developing a haptic glove which it will launch into VR training next that will stimulate both touch and motion in virtual worlds. “We want to be the future of how people control and influence and touch virtual worlds, but you have to ground that in realistic business models,” said O’Brien. “And so realistic business model number one was content creation for gaming and movie studios. Number two for us would be VR training. And that’s all about solving the retraining crisis where you have people with shorter and shorter careers, but the complexity of those jobs is increasing. So you’ve got this issue where you actually need to be able to train people really quickly and often in time-critical, safety critical situations where there’s money or lives at stake.” Once StretchSense has built a viable business in the VR training sense, the startup hopes to use a next iteration of that tech to move into the VR gaming and experience space. “We want to create tools that the creators of the metaverse will use to build amazing virtual spaces and experiences,” said O’Brien.

Zebra Labs raises $5M to help Chinese celebrities enter the metaverse • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in China, Media & Entertainment, metaverse, MusicNo Comments

In June, Chinese pop-punk singer Wowkie Zhang released a music video where he encounters a virtual character in a hyper-colored, animated world that is reminiscent of Pixar films. The avatar, sporting Gen-Z-styled silver hair, a yellow and black oversize sweat, and baggy pants, makes hip-hop moves to Zhang’s catchy, light-hearted tune. The virtual character isn’t a one-off creation; instead, Zebra Labs, which produced the video, is turning him into a piece of reusable intellectual property that can be bought as NFTs on marketplaces and appear in other virtual occasions like video games. The startup is waiting for the bull market to return to launch the NFT project, Scarlett Li, founder and CEO of Zebra Labs, tells ZebethMedia. The aim of Zebra Labs is to “create intellectual property that’s deeply integrated with content” and “run virtual idols like celebrities,” says Li. Some of the avatars it creates are based on real-life stars, while others are original characters. To generate revenues, Zebra Labs cultivates an audience for its idols through short films, images, and social posts and in turn monetizes the fan base. It also licenses its virtual idols to partners for a fee. NFT, which is already being widely used in authenticating IP rights, can be used to better engage fans, reckons Li, who previously helped organize some of China’s largest music festivals. “When you reach 30 years old, you lose interest to explore music, so a virtual environment can jumpstart visualization [of music] again.” NFTs also give emerging musicians a more direct avenue for income. In China, music distribution is in the grip of music streaming giants owned by Tencent and NetEase. These platforms tend to allocate user traffic to musicians already with a lot of fans, “so to live well as a musician, you need to have a million followers,” says Li. “NFTs can change that.” As a veteran of music festivals, Li is excited about the prospect of online concerts. She’s benchmarking against Ariana Grande’s Fornite concert, in which the singer descends into a colorful island in her virtual manifestation with a shimmering silver dress and a glowing white ponytail. Zebra Labs is in talks with several gaming firms to launch virtual concerts for Chinese artists inside a Minecraft-like game and a metaverse platform by 2023, Li says. Zebra Labs recently raised $5 million to advance its metaverse vision. The funding came from the Chinese gaming firm NetDragon and the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo. Onboarding a Japanese investor, according to Li, can help the startup learn from the country’s long history of IP management, which is exemplified by the success of virtual idols like Hatsune Miku. The company is also backed by SOSV, the VC firm known for its network of accelerators. Following its collaboration with Wowkie Zhang’s music video, which has garnered some 40 million clicks across an array of online channels, Zebra Labs has five other artists in the pipeline. It’s also planning to release a digital twin of Zhang by the first quarter of 2023.

Meta is in trouble • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Mark Zuckerberg, meta, metaverse, SocialNo Comments

A day after weighing in with its third quarter earnings report, Meta is flailing. The company formerly known as Facebook was in trouble Thursday after uninspiring numbers and an apparent lack of faith in Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision sent its shares plunging by 25%. At the time of writing, Meta was trading around $98, down from $130 on Wednesday. Other tech stocks are in a similar boat broadly. A challenging economic climate and a war that’s worsened geopolitical tensions have sent many tech valuations back to Earth, but Meta’s fall —and the message it sends about the company’s future — is really something. Meta’s stock price is now worth almost a quarter of the all-time high of around $380 that the company recorded late last summer. Image Credits: companiesmarketcap.com Thursday’s situation saw Meta hit a low that its shares haven’t touched since 2016 — well before Zuckerberg’s big and possibly doomed pivot toward a virtual social platform to succeed Facebook. A run of high profile doubts, both internal and external, about Meta’s metaverse probably isn’t helping either. This week, Palmer Luckey — the VR visionary founder of Oculus, the hardware that powers Meta’s headsets — slammed Horizon Worlds as a poor product that isn’t fun. “It is terrible today, but it could be amazing in the future,” he said. The company reported losing over $9 billion this year so far on its Reality Labs division, the home of its aggressive forays into VR hardware and virtual social networking. The company might bounce back, but it might also be reaping what it’s sown for years. Meta managed to sour its billion dollar acquisition of Instagram, a social app that people used to love, by choking the platform with ads at the expense of the user experience. Ironically, in striving to box out the competition and wring as many ad dollars as possible out of the app, Meta accidentally set the stage for the rise of TikTok — an app people don’t hate. Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck. — The Golden Sir (@screaminbutcalm) March 12, 2019 With the Instagram portion of the business not looking so hot lately, Meta has quintupled down on the metaverse without examining if it even knows what users want at all these days. And after changing the name of the company while ruining a perfectly fine word in the process, there are no easy take-backs. Investors seem to be getting the message, or lack thereof. The company is even more of the Mark Zuckerberg show than ever these days — and losing longtime COO and adult-in-the-room Sheryl Sandberg this year probably didn’t help. But if a bet on Meta is a bet on its Zuckerberg’s understanding of where social media trends are going and how to get there first, the once unstoppable advertising beast appears to be shambling in the wrong direction.

Y’all really made Mark Zuckerberg defend himself to investors because of your memes • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Mark Zuckerberg, meta, metaverse, SocialNo Comments

On today’s quarterly earnings call, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive when it comes to the company’s investment in the metaverse. Once again, the company lost over $3 billion dollars to its Reality Labs division this quarter, and Meta’s net income took a big hit. Since rebranding from Facebook to Meta, Zuckerberg’s company has gotten a lot of flack for its complete nosedive into the metaverse. But perhaps one of the most brutal moments came in August, when the CEO posted a selfie in front of a metaverse Eiffel Tower to celebrate the expansion of VR social platform Horizon Worlds into France and Spain. Image Credits: Facebook His selfie looked so bad that it became a meme, which he had to address by posting another mock-up of what avatars will look like in the future. Clearly, Mark took the criticism to heart, as he brought it up again on today’s earnings call when an investor asked if Meta’s progress so far has lived up to his expectations. “I know sometimes when we ship products, there’s a meme where people say, ‘You’re spending all this money and you produce this thing,’” Zuckerberg said. “I think that’s not really the right way to think about it.” He continued, “I think there’s a number of different products and platforms that we’re building, where we think we’re doing leading work that will become… launching consumer products and then eventually mature products at different cadences, different periods of time over the next 5 to 10 years.” Some of these consumer products include… legs. He added that he thinks that the Reality Labs teams are making good progress, and that there’s no indication that suggests that VR and AR won’t be dominant technologies in the future. But he changed the way that he characterized products like Horizon Worlds, describing it as something that Meta is building out in the open and iterating upon in public. “Obviously it has a long way to go before it’s going to be what we aspire for it to be,” Zuckerberg said about Horizon Worlds. “We think we’re doing some leading work there, but obviously we need to get that into the product and continue innovating on that.” Still, Zuckerberg continues to project confidence that the billions of dollars Meta is pumping into VR is a good idea. “A lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Zuckerberg said. “But from what I can tell, I think that this is going to be a very important thing, and I think it would be a mistake for us to not focus on any of these areas, which I think are going to be fundamentally important to the future.” Zuckerberg sounds a bit more human than normal when he points out that VR and AR are big opportunities for growth in the tech industry. But Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse — one in which we are constantly strapped into our headsets — remains a bit hard to swallow. The Quest 2 is actually pretty cool piece of technology, and the next consumer grade headset is sure to be even better. Already on the Quest 2, you can play extremely realistic ping pong with friends from across the world and talk to them like they’re standing right next to you! But do we really want to spend our nine-to-five with a giant screen right against our eyeballs? Would we rather hang out in Horizon Worlds than grab IRL coffee with a friend? Not me, at least.