Good Day! This is my weekly newsletter, with a dose of insights into the future. The topic of this newsletter is the exponential times we live in, hence the title of f(x) = e^x, which is the (natural) exponential function.

Recently, I launched my new concept The Digital Speaker and you can now book me as an avatar or hologram. Also, my tech trend prediction for 2021 is out, read it here!

7 Consumer Brands Reinventing Marketing in the Metaverse

My latest article:

The metaverse will be a unique place where the digital and physical worlds meet. In this ‘phygical’ environment, people can wander around to be with friends, attend events, visit new locations and buy (digital) goods and services. The immersive internet will result in a new form of digital commerce: iCommerce

iCommerce can be seen as the activity of experiencing and buying digital products on the immersive internet, and it will completely change how we interact with brands. The metaverse will affect all industries, but the companies that can benefit the most from the metaverse are global consumer brands.

Due to its nature, the immersive internet will enable prolonged engagement with brands as long as these experiences are unique, creative and social, resulting in increased brand loyalty for those brands venturing into the metaverse first.

Three Useful Nuggets of Information

My weekly tips from around the web to get you thinking.

1. Is Deepmind going after Boston Dynamics?

DeepMind takes the next step in robotics research. The company has acquired the rigid-body physics simulator MuJoCo and has made it freely available to the research community. Their objective is to reduce the costs of robotics research. (VentureBeat)

2. What if China owns the metaverse?

If the metaverse will be the successor to the internet, who builds it, and how, will determine the future of the economy and society as a whole. What if China is building its own metaverse and what if it outcompetes the rest, just like with AI? (TechCrunch)

3. Our physical motions will be used to serve ads.

Zuckerberg has always used Facebook to exploit data to manipulate human behaviour. That's Facebook's business model. With the arrival of Meta (which means 'dead', by the way, in Hebrew), he will follow the same path for the metaverse and use physical motion data to serve ads. (Vice)

How fast is a trillion times per second?

Researchers created a new optical switch that can switch between its two states a trillion times a second, which is up to 1,000 times faster than today’s leading commercial transistors. (Singularity)