Into the Metaverse, The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era, reviewed

Bloomsbury publishing will release “Into the Metaverse: The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era” by Cathy Hackl on Thursday, April 25th of this year. This publication comes loaded with insights for those interested in, or engaging with, digital business through the immersive medium of the metaverse.

Into the Metaverse reviewed

Overall, this well-crafted book comes across as highly structured, engaging, and also insightful in areas related to the metaverse and web3. The author clearly lays out her intent by introducing the role of the “Chief Metaverse Officer”, which is positioned at a senior level in a business.

Before you read the content of this book, I would advise all not familiar with web3 or the metaverse, to review the “Metaverse and Web3 Glossary” at the rear of this book. You will get more from this intriguing read if you do.

The introduction continues with an exploration of tremendous growth in the metaverse, and why its connection with the physical world needs to be a seamless user-experience. The author continues with the importance of creator relationships for business, and why they will underpin the new decentralised reality of the metaverse in a web3 digital construct.

The author then explores metaverse culture, community replacing the influencer, along with business positioning to the community and its importance. All companies should know this before entering the metaverse space, as it often involves radical shifts in organizational structure and implementation to be successful.

After the introductory overview, chapter one dives into what the metaverse is currently, and how science fiction writers back to the 1980s have described the metaverse as it’s known today. Those cited novels harbor cautionary tales about the misuse of digital technology, and ethical corrosions by a single controlling corporation or entity. Addressing this concern has been a Web3 design requirement for some time.

As the chapter progresses, the author does a wonderful job at explaining current technologies supporting the metaverse, along with introducing democratizing features in this new digital paradigm. For example, NFTs allowing creators to manage and sell their own works as products is certainly an attractive possibility to anybody setting out to monetize their works.

The author cleverly stops off at key examples, like Meta’s October 2021 outage of its Oculus servers, which affected the whole metaverse. She then refers to industry experts, who consider Meta’s inaccurate reporting of the outage’s impact as a red flag to how powerful Meta has become in the industry space.

Security and early adopter issues aside, the book actively sells the concept of the metaverse as a business opportunity driven by community, where down-up innovation really works. These opportunities extend during these early days to correct ethical and privacy concerns arriving from web2. The author delivers them in a balanced manner, which resonates in credibility and understanding.

Wrapped up in the technological convergence that supports the metaverse, chapter two explores its first main industry adaptor, which is gaming. Synthetic media is next up in chapter three, where the author explores the gaming influence around digital avatars, events, and interactions, along with the practicalities of building a business in the metaverse.

Chapter four introduces AI and its place in digital brand consistency. The concept of synthetic media applied consistently presents a manual challenge, which AI can help with. This is one application of AI that can increase your chances of metaverse success. Chapter five explores the monetization aspects of the metaverse, which the author integrates into a single storyline from prior chapters.

Chapters six to eight has a focus on digital and content marketing, given the brand consistency required in a real world presence as much as its metaverse counterpart. Chapter nine, “The Metaverse Wars”, is a current exploration of large company competition in the metaverse. It reminds me of the Browser Wars back when Yahoo thought it was a search engine. This chapter updates the reader on where the big picture stuff is currently at.

Chapters ten onwards are forward looking to why collaboration and co-creation are key to crafting a metaverse in a web3 future that is for all, yet not controlled by the few. The ethical and moral implications of why we all need to pay attention carry an incentive to recognise how good or how bad the metaverse can become in times ahead.

Given the shameless abuses wrought on digital users in the web2 era, which includes disinformation, misinformation and a rash of other issues; the author’s call to action should not be just for the budding entrepreneur, or the hopeful content creator. It should involve real people joining the metaverse, and inputting into a technological movement that will shape the future of our children’s children.

By John Mulhall @johnmlhll | [email protected] is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 7 years and also a Founder, Writer, and Engineer with Maolte Technical Solutions Limited. You can learn more about John and his IT services company at https://maolte.ie.

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