The Next Big Thing after Mobile Internet By CoinQuora

Well before CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced the name change of Facebook (NASDAQ:) to Meta, some of the largest and most innovative tech companies in the world already saw that the metaverse was the next big thing coming.

When the iPhone was invented by Apple (NASDAQ:) in 2007, it began a movement that brought most of the world onto the internet. Or more specifically, it brought the internet to most of the world. It wasn’t the first smartphone – in fact, the very first mobile phone with internet capability was produced by Nokia (NYSE:) in 1996.

However, after it was invented, a dynamic worldwide shift occurred. For starters, it was such an advancement over similar products on the market that three massive legacy mobile phone manufacturers saw their market share destroyed – Blackberry (TSX:), Nokia, and Motorola (NYSE:). Apple’s first foray into mobile internet created such a massive first-mover advantage that within less than a decade all three conglomerates either closed down or sold off their mobile phone divisions.

Now just 14 years later, the mobile phone has replaced the computer as the primary means of logging onto the internet. As reported by Perficient (NASDAQ:), in the United States in 2020, 61% of website visits were done on a mobile device, as compared to 57% in 2019. Globally the trend is even stronger, with 68.1% of visits to websites in 2020 being done on mobile phones versus 63.3%. In entire swaths of the developing world, desktop computers are a rarity but owning a cell phone is very common.

All signs point to the fact that the metaverse will, in fact, lead the next global transformation

The Metaverse

First of all, what the heck is a or the metaverse? The Oxford Dictionary defines a metaverse as a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.

“Metaverse” combines the words meta, meaning beyond, more comprehensive or transcending, and the word universe. A metaverse is generally considered to be a virtual 3D world using the technologies of virtual reality and augmented reality.

Hollywood portrayals of a metaverse have included a very dark portrayal in the Matrix, where mankind is enslaved in it. And in a chilling and potentially realistic metaverse called “the Oasis” in Ready Player One, one sees a renewed hope because of the metaverse.

While such technologies have been around since the early 1990s, and in some form have existed in video games such as Second Life launched in 2003, the idea of the metaverse has taken on a whole new meaning with the advent of blockchain technology.

With the rise of massive centralized social media companies and tech giants like Facebook, Twitter (NYSE:), Google (NASDAQ:), Apple and Microsoft (NASDAQ:), along with the rapid adoption of cryptocurrency and the advent of decentralized Web 3.0 networks, the environment is a perfect storm for the creation of many metaverses…