Hello everyone. In what has become an annual event aimed at VR/AR/metaverse developers and creators, Meta held its Connect conference last week.

For today, we will keep the discussion to what was announced and some big picture takeaways.

Meta Connect 2023

Thanks to the Apple Vision Pro unveiling at WWDC in June, there was a greater level of intrigue surrounding this year’s Meta Connect versus previous years. Ho hum product events from Amazon and Microsoft earlier in the month opened the tech news cycle a bit for Meta last week. Offsetting those positive developments, Meta previously announced its Meta Quest 3 headset on June 1st. That removed quite bit of suspense from last week’s Connect keynote. (A video of the keynote is available here via YouTube).

Mark Zuckerberg handled the first 45 minutes of the keynote. It’s become rare to see one person (CEO/founder) present so much of a tech keynote without speaker breaks or interruptions. Ken Segall and Om Malik must have been happy (check out the daily update from last Wednesday for the full story). From a theatrical perspective, Meta is no Apple. Instead of a high production video, Meta relied on its pre-pandemic keynote template that other Big Tech companies have fallen back on as well.

Meta Connect 2023 revolved around three topics:

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