Somewhere around the last week of October, roughly over 2.9 billion users of Facebook, including those technologically clueless, were introduced to the term Meta. Mark Zuckerberg said how Meta was a better representation of what his company is working towards.
"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. Over time, I hope that we are seen as metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and identify on what we're building toward," and by the same measure to the tech term Metaverse.
That wasn't, though, the only tech buzzword that defined 2021. Thanks to Tesla, FSD Beta became a part of the daily tech lexicon. Moving on, NFT, DAO, Web3, Social audio, Altcoin, Stonks, GameFi, FSD Beta, all had their share of limelight and tech industry's attention.
Metaverse
Broadly described as shared immersive digital environment, Metaverse is the future that all tech companies foresee at the moment. Some CEOs have even pegged it as the next big thing after mobile internet. Put in the simplest, shortest and the most basic form, Metaverse is like a virtual world where people will meet, discuss, interact, buy property, do business and much more like in the real world.
Zuckerberg brought the attention of the masses to the term but metaverse has already been seen and explored in sci-fi movies. It's day-to-day life run in virtual space and virtual economy running parallel to the real world.
FSD Beta
It's been only a couple of days since Tesla released new Full Self Driving Beta Update (10.7) with Elon Musk promising 10.8 version and 'holiday fun' coming soon. The self-driving software, constantly being tested by Tesla owners, has been increasingly making its way into drawing room conversations. The software, as by now most people know, enables the vehicle to drive by itself to a destination entered in the car's navigation system. However, the responsibility lies with the driver as the driver needs to be vigilant and alert enough to take control at all times.
NFT
Short for Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs are a form of digital asset. The non-interchangeable unit of data is stored on blockchain, but what really drove them to mainstream popularity was when in the March of 2021, the digital collage of images by artist Beeple sold for $69.3 million at a Christie's auction. Easily that became the most expensive piece of NFT, also the most cited and made them explode in popularity.
If that didn't clear things up about the millions involved in non-fungible tokens, then the fact that Twiter co-founder Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet, "just setting up my twtrr," might. Reportedly, the tweet was sold for $2.9 million.
Web3
Internet has changed everything and entirely, while at it. While the world has adapted and evolved itself around it, the web itself has undergone a complete overhaul, divided into stages called Web1, Web2 and Web3.
Web3 alters the internet as it is known today, primarily in terms of decentralisation. Accordingly, in Web3, applications are not built or deployed on a single server. Rather the Web3 applications are run on blockchains, decentralised networks.
Social audio
We all know the power of a few characters shared over social media. Imagine extending that to human voice and all the voices coming together via just one app. The rise of audio became one of the most aggressive social media trend of 2021. A trend only set to get bigger and impact entertainment in the year to come.
Clubhouse, the by invitation-only, drop-in audio chat application grew exponentially once Elon Musk made an appearance in an audio room to then maximum limit of 5000 people in February of 2021. While Clubhouse remains the pioneer, several other apps broke on the field, like Cappuccino, Quilt, Stereo, Spoon, including Twitter Spaces which was launched in November 2020.
