Now Its Getting Weird…
NCT Marketing (pvt) is a marketing consulting company in South Korea, whose experts are given hip sounding English names like Rosie (aka Hyun-Jung Park), Ryan (aka Yun-Ho Maeng), and B.I.G (aka Challenger, the office pup) and cool quotes on the website (still under construction) such as “Users leave clues”, “Talk is Cheap. Show me the data.”, and “When I smell it, I challenge myself endlessly, run endlessly” (B.I.G’s quote). They list companies such as Heineken (HEIA.NA), Hyundai Card (005380.KS), and Save the Children (pvt) as clients, and map out a playbook complete with “AI”, Neural Network”, and what they call their “Get Shit Done” (Their words) attitude, with the company’s NCT moniker meaning “Notorious Challenge Tribe”.
But what really caught our attention is something they have created called “Second Seoul”, which is a virtual real estate transaction platform, where subscribers that are qualified can purchase Seoul real estate in the virtual world, aka the Meta-Verse. The transactions are made using NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) with the first 69,300 virtual tiles (see Fig. 4) selling out in 24 hours. An addition 50,000 tiles were added, with the site having to limit the number of applications to 100 for each real estate tile, and we note that the site has not yet officially opened (expected in December), at which point the first 100 applicants will be granted virtual real estate equal to 18 pyeong (equal to ~648 ft2), with the next 900 subscribers having to go through a lottery for ownership.
NBT Marketing is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of a company called NBT (236810.KS) that is known for its ‘Cash Slide’ app that provides cash back on purchases made through the application, in addition to those credit cards might provide, but marketing seems a bit less lucrative than selling real estate in a virtual world. Of course, using NFTs ‘guarantees’ your ownership of your little chunk of Korean real estate, even though it exists only in the Metaverse, but “Second Seoul” is chump change when compared to Earth 2 (pvt), which divides the globe into 10m x 10m chunks and offers them for sale, virtually of course. You can buy a tile (100 m2) down near Battery Park for $63,971 or in Greenland for $1.13 and you can trade those properties as values change. That said, even if you own that spot in virtual Battery Park, we doubt the authorities would see fit to let you build a nice house or even sit for more than an few hours in the real world, but Earth2 does give anyone who refers the site a 5% commission, so bloggers love to promote it, even though they get paid in virtual (Earth2) currency, which is easy to put in but hard to get out, a technique championed by these fellows.
But what really caught our attention is something they have created called “Second Seoul”, which is a virtual real estate transaction platform, where subscribers that are qualified can purchase Seoul real estate in the virtual world, aka the Meta-Verse. The transactions are made using NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) with the first 69,300 virtual tiles (see Fig. 4) selling out in 24 hours. An addition 50,000 tiles were added, with the site having to limit the number of applications to 100 for each real estate tile, and we note that the site has not yet officially opened (expected in December), at which point the first 100 applicants will be granted virtual real estate equal to 18 pyeong (equal to ~648 ft2), with the next 900 subscribers having to go through a lottery for ownership.
NBT Marketing is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of a company called NBT (236810.KS) that is known for its ‘Cash Slide’ app that provides cash back on purchases made through the application, in addition to those credit cards might provide, but marketing seems a bit less lucrative than selling real estate in a virtual world. Of course, using NFTs ‘guarantees’ your ownership of your little chunk of Korean real estate, even though it exists only in the Metaverse, but “Second Seoul” is chump change when compared to Earth 2 (pvt), which divides the globe into 10m x 10m chunks and offers them for sale, virtually of course. You can buy a tile (100 m2) down near Battery Park for $63,971 or in Greenland for $1.13 and you can trade those properties as values change. That said, even if you own that spot in virtual Battery Park, we doubt the authorities would see fit to let you build a nice house or even sit for more than an few hours in the real world, but Earth2 does give anyone who refers the site a 5% commission, so bloggers love to promote it, even though they get paid in virtual (Earth2) currency, which is easy to put in but hard to get out, a technique championed by these fellows.
So the entire objective here, and this is actually a preliminary stage to the real Metaverse, is to generate both fees and information, while you feel that you are now a real estate mogul, owning a portfolio of lucrative locations across the globe for the purpose of eventually building a virtual world that mimics those locations. But we have questions about such ownership. Does it mean that another person cannot build a virtual world that looks exactly like the location you own, or can a user add a little nuance that makes it different from your ‘wholly-owned’ chunk of the virtual world? If I want to use or live-in your virtual chunk, do I have to pay rent? When will users actually build out their ‘plots’? Can they leave them undeveloped and if so can I build a virtual store on their property?
Before we go trying to find answers to these and the hundreds of other questions that the Metaverse brings up, we feel it is important to stay grounded in that the Metaverse is just a collection of AR/VR oriented websites. Instead of being projected on a flat screen, such as a monitor or smartphone, the Metaverse world is seen through AR or VR displays. The fun and fantastic worlds seen when Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg plays his Metaverse promotional video are being seen on a flat screen, so the only difference is that with AR/VR you are immersed in the image. What you do in the virtual world would be similar to your search history, and the data that is collected in the Metaverse is similar to what is collected when you visit websites today, only it looks more realistic (or unrealistic), making it stickier than a flat screen image.
Does it solve some of the problems created by social media? No, it actually will make them worse, keeping users on-line in an environment more closely tailored to their likes and dislikes. Its good for companies that want to sell you stuff, especially if that stuff is particular to a type of user, it is definitely good for companies that make a living selling user data, and it will be good for those that like to speculate, as you no longer need a warehouse to hold the tons of virtual stuff you have acquired, but it is not good for those that are already metaphorically joined to their phones, checking for Tweets, likes, or hits on a minute by minute basis.
While those on the profit motivation side will say it will be good for users, allowing them to scour the globe for stores they would be unable to visit or exploring virtual worlds that they would never see, the Metaverse is not being created to help humanity and bring us together, as social media was originally said to do, but to open a new path toward garnering the attention of users and keeping them on-line longer (generating user data) or spending more (generating sales). When pressure on social media companies becomes the stuff of governmental inquiry, the smart folks at those companies understand that they need to move to another platform, and what could be better than a virtual world that is far too complicated and removed from reality for most to understand, giving those building the Metaverse years more of data to sell. Today’s word of the day is obfuscation. Don’t worry about that bad stuff, look at the shiny new stuff over here…
Before we go trying to find answers to these and the hundreds of other questions that the Metaverse brings up, we feel it is important to stay grounded in that the Metaverse is just a collection of AR/VR oriented websites. Instead of being projected on a flat screen, such as a monitor or smartphone, the Metaverse world is seen through AR or VR displays. The fun and fantastic worlds seen when Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg plays his Metaverse promotional video are being seen on a flat screen, so the only difference is that with AR/VR you are immersed in the image. What you do in the virtual world would be similar to your search history, and the data that is collected in the Metaverse is similar to what is collected when you visit websites today, only it looks more realistic (or unrealistic), making it stickier than a flat screen image.
Does it solve some of the problems created by social media? No, it actually will make them worse, keeping users on-line in an environment more closely tailored to their likes and dislikes. Its good for companies that want to sell you stuff, especially if that stuff is particular to a type of user, it is definitely good for companies that make a living selling user data, and it will be good for those that like to speculate, as you no longer need a warehouse to hold the tons of virtual stuff you have acquired, but it is not good for those that are already metaphorically joined to their phones, checking for Tweets, likes, or hits on a minute by minute basis.
While those on the profit motivation side will say it will be good for users, allowing them to scour the globe for stores they would be unable to visit or exploring virtual worlds that they would never see, the Metaverse is not being created to help humanity and bring us together, as social media was originally said to do, but to open a new path toward garnering the attention of users and keeping them on-line longer (generating user data) or spending more (generating sales). When pressure on social media companies becomes the stuff of governmental inquiry, the smart folks at those companies understand that they need to move to another platform, and what could be better than a virtual world that is far too complicated and removed from reality for most to understand, giving those building the Metaverse years more of data to sell. Today’s word of the day is obfuscation. Don’t worry about that bad stuff, look at the shiny new stuff over here…
Second Seoul Virtual Real Estate Map - Source: ETN
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