We realize Mother’s Day can be a difficult and complicated day for some, so please feel free to skip reading if this is a sensitive topic for you. Thank you. 

While Mother’s Day has evolved to be a day of celebration and appreciation by way of brunch, flowers, cards and (if you’re lucky) some downtime for moms, the origination of Mother’s Day in the U.S. stems back to social and political concerns that impacted women in the early 1900s. Now, there is a growing movement for Mother’s Day to go beyond the Hallmark Holiday, recognize the sacrifices mothers make for their children and celebrate the collective power of mothers supporting other mothers. I am very happy to see this shift, with deeper and more meaningful conversations being had year-round, and certainly around Mother’s Day, about how society can better support moms of all types.

Welcome to Part 2 of our primer on all things Metaverse. In case you missed it, the first part of Allison+Partners’ guide to entering the metaverse is here. We already covered the origins, what people can (and will) do there and the basics of business in the metaverse. Now we address the trillion-dollar questions: 

Thirty years after Neal Stephenson coined the word "metaverse" in the sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the term has spread everywhere. What used to be relegated to conversations among engineers and cutting-edge tech companies has finally busted into the consumer mindshare (finally, for those of us that have been watching this happen for years now - remember Google Glass?).  Today, every business leader is obliged to embrace the metaverse, even without fully understanding what it means.

Watching the figure skating events at the Winter Olympics always brings me back to my childhood days of crack-of-dawn training sessions, the joy at finally landing that Axel I worked so hard to perfect, and the nerves and excitement of competition. Growing up, I was the only kid in my school who figure skated. Yet throughout my career in PR, I’ve had the pleasure of working with at least a dozen former skaters, coaches and judges. So, what attracts a high number of figure skaters to the communications industry, and how do we apply the lessons we learned on the ice to our jobs?

For years, CES served as a January temperature check for the technology industry, spotlighting innovations likely to be hot in the months to come. Yet as technology publications dutifully published their lists of CES 2022's biggest themes – the metaverse, futuristic cars, new TVs, remote work solutions and NFTs – they conspicuously left one huge trend undiscussed: the growing incomprehensibility of this year's top innovations to mainstream consumers.

I knew CES would be extremely different than the many times I attended in the past. Leading up to the world’s largest technology show, companies and reporters shifted to virtual attendance in droves due to concerns over the COVID-19 Omicron variant. Flying out to Las Vegas on a full flight, I was not quite sure what to expect.

Identifying technology and a technology brand or company used to be easy. There was really one question to ask: Does your primary product plug into a wall? If so, that was technology. In the late ‘90s, the question evolved a bit: Does your main product plug into a wall OR operate primarily on the internet? If so, that was technology.