Horizons Newsletter – week 36 // 2021
Horizons is a bi-monthly Dasym Research initiative to show you how the Dasym themes have been in the news. We publish the Horizons on our website and as an email newsletter. If you wish to receive the email, please contact Investor Relations.
Do you have a question about the digitalization of consumer’s daily lives? As a research-driven investment company, we want to be relevant to you, so please provide us with your questions and remarks. Your feedback will help us to drive our research agenda.
A step closer towards the metaverse?
Where some expect virtual reality to be a game-changer, others think it should be judged based on its actual performance rather than its ‘sci-fi action adventure’-potential. While sales of VR devices had been disappointing for a long time, they jumped 52.4 percent YoY in the first quarter of this year. This increase was almost single-handedly driven by Facebook’s new Oculus. Since last month, owners of the Oculus Quest 2 headset can use their device to experience a test version of the Horizon virtual conference room launched by Facebook. This virtual workroom supports up to 50 people in one call, 16 of whom can be in full virtual reality as an avatar. The other 34 people will join by video call. The launch follows the layout of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to transform Facebook from a social media network into a metaverse company in the next five years. The term “metaverse” is used to describe the vision whereby the internet will evolve into a virtual world. This vision may seem a long way off, but the introduction of Horizon shows VR has more professional applications than just fun and games.
Broaden your horizon?
In this section we share content that may be of interest to you:I
- Widespread deployment of electric robotaxis could exacerbate energy consumption and emissions instead of reducing them, a new study finds.
- New software applications are cleverly mapping audio to transport users to another space. PairPlay for example, is an iOS app that guides you through imagined scenarios within your home.
- Google is the latest company to announce that it wants to develop its own chips. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, Baidu and Alibaba are all racing to build their own semiconductors to power their cloud services and electronic products.
The increasing relevance of digital identities
Digital identities, or the means with which we prove who we are in an online context, are becoming more important than ever. This trend is spurred on by the pandemic, as working and studying from home became mainstream since 2020, governments introduced vaccine certificates and digital currencies became more common. Handling these digital identities with care is key to prevent invasion of privacy, fraud and theft. The increasing prominence of digital identities is reflected in recent M&A activity in the Identity Access Management (IAM) market. For instance, Dutch companies iWelcome and Onegini merged into OneWelcome, creating Europe’s biggest digital identity provider. Last March, Okta acquired Auth0 for $6.5 billion in the dominant American IAM market. Since 2017, the market for IAM increased from $8.82 billion to $13.92 billion. While forecasts differ depending on the source, Stealthlabs estimates the market will reach $24.1 billion by 2025. The exact size of the future market for digital identity providers remains to be seen, but it is clear that ensuring trustworthy digital identities will be core to further digitalization processes.
