Morning Tea #2: Boring Metaverse, gm, $45m for Scooters

The Boring Metaverse

The Metaverse used to be fun — massively, insufferably overhyped — but fun. Fortnite managed something extremely nerdy and cool. Roblox is making kids kinda rich. Fun. Facebook launched Horizon, still kinda fun.

Then Facebook announced Workrooms. It just makes you want to sell your phone and move into the woods. Surely the worst part of remote working is the attempts to make it less like remote working — the unnecessary Zoom calls, the online conferences, the tools, the endless tools. Workrooms is an attempt to recreate, as much as possible, the office experience in the virtual world. Unfortunately, that is impossible since the best thing about being in an office is it being real life.

I for one, like the outdoors, people, and real things. I spend a lot of time Extremely Online and writing software but it’s balanced by real-life — running, (decaf) coffee in the park, cycling somewhere, meeting people at the pub and getting pooed on by a bird. I like the idea of entering a virtual world to have fun or do occasional work things (a mega virtual trading rig a la Minority Report), but I do not want to dress my virtual avatar in NFTs each morning before going about my entirely mundane-but-virtual day. I need my senses to be properly engaged, to slow down the ticking clock of my short life with new meaningful experiences that are not beamed into my eyes from a few inches away. I want to go outside — I’m pasty enough as it is.

gm

Having recently been Extremely Online (so you don’t have to), this one is fresh. If you Google ‘gm’ you’ll instead come across a far less important car company.

On Thursday, gm tweeted ‘gm’. On Friday, gm released an app that lets you say ‘gm’. Today the test flight went live.

It means ‘good morning’. It is the latest in a number of apps released since Yo that lets you send a simple limited message. Its launch demonstrates a mastery of social media hype generation (more than 5k followers in 5 days) and timing (everyone has pandemic brain).

Apparently, VCs are on the prowl but gm has made itself tantalisingly unattainable.

I’m sure they’ll eventually (maybe already have) raise at some eye-watering valuation with absolutely outrageous memo nuggets like ‘gm owns the first interaction of the day’. I just hope this wonderful example of well-executed whimsy doesn’t go the way of all those that came before.

Voi Raised Another $45m

It appears that the micromobility cash-burning contest is having a second wind. Voi, which claims to be Europe’s largest micromobility company by no disclosed metric, recently raised another bunch of money to put more coral scooters next to blue and green scooters, each one differentiated by requiring different colour apps to operate in exactly the same way.

Micromobility, or walking as it used to be known, is excellent. Anything that encourages people in cities to drive less (EVs most definitely included) should be applauded. But do we really need a boring price war (14p vs 15p per minute — boring) followed by a price-gouging monopoly? Are dockless bikes and scooters really a profitable model otherwise?

The solution, despite what idiot London thinks, is privately owned scooters — put a hole in the chassis for D-locks and you have obsoleted an industry. Privately owned e-bikes, pushbikes, Brompton bikes, rollerblades, skateboards, Renault Twizys. Some pathways for them to get around would be a bonus — why not use the (now immediately empty) roads?

For those spontaneous one-way trips, there’s always a Boris bike, a tube, a bus, and, if God smiles upon us, a state-subsidised Sadiq scooter waiting to spirit us away.

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