I've only hung out in Decentraland a few times. One of the times was to check out a
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I've only hung out in Decentraland a few times. One of the times was to check out a
Here are some other figures. In 2019, about $54 billion was spent on virtual/digital goods. These are things like game skins. This is compared to $42 billion at movie theaters and $30 billion on recorded music. So things that are purely digital (and have a very low marginal cost) are already a huge deal and people are spending a lot of money on them. Last year, the market cap of NFTs also surpassed $40 billion. The naysayers will tell you that you can just "right-click, save as" instead of spending any crypto on NFT images, but clearly something broader is underway.
JP Morgan is of the opinion that it is only a matter of time before the metaverse infiltrates every sector of the economy in some way, shape, or form. Would you agree?
Image: Decrypt
This is based on proprietary data (2015) from JPMorgan Chase and is surely not perfect. But it’s still an interesting approximation.
At the top of the list is New York with 36% of all retail sales going to small businesses. And at the bottom of the list – keep in mind that this list only has 15 cities – is Columbus with 23% of retail sales.
One of the overarching findings was that urban centers tend to see 10-15% more retail sales going to small and medium sized businesses compared to the suburbs.
Intuitively, this makes sense to me. Space is a precious commodity in urban centers and that may naturally privilege the small operator. There’s also the question of consumer preference among urbanites.
If you’re interested, you can download the full report from JPMorgan Chase, here.
Coworking spaces are big business.
One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)
If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.
All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.
But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.
Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a Vornado Realty presentation. They are working with WeWork to deliver their new WeLive concept in Crystal City, Virginia.
It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:
The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future.
This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces.
The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).
That was a fun project to work on.
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