 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening. Maybe a good morning if you're in Asia. Welcome to one of the last breakout sessions of the Open Simulator Community Conference 2013. I'm standing in for the moderator and I have to say I'm really, really delighted and actually kind of honored to introduce somebody who was just here before or maybe you know her very well or have heard her speak in some of the other sessions. But nevertheless, it's really great to introduce Maria. She's the editor and publisher of HyperGrid Business, which I'm sure many of you. It's one of my favorite websites online to figure out what is going on. Not just in the Open Sim metaverse, but also just in virtual worlds in general. And I have to say as the business track leader and part of the conference planning team, she has been an absolute joy and delight to work with. Seemingly knows absolutely everybody in the metaverse. I think there may be no one more connected than Maria. So she's here today to talk with us about the growth of Open Sim from 2009 to today. And I'm really looking forward to her presentation. So take it away, Maria. Thank you very much, Chris, for stopping and moderating this. I really appreciate it. Before I get started, I want people to know that they can ask questions in local chat and on the use stream stream. And if I don't get around to your question, then the presentation, just ask it again. I may have missed it if it went by. So I'm going to give this talk about the numbers about the HyperGrid. There have been a lot of talks about, you know, the people's ideas and impressions and plans and so forth. So I'm going to try to put some concrete measures in as much as possible to what's going on in Open Sim and in the HyperGrid, which is a subset of Open Sim. So there are some significant difficulties in keeping track of Open Sim growth. There is no centralized list of who has installed Open Sim. There's no automatic built-in reporting. There's nothing like that. There is no single place where you can get an Open Sim download, and it's counted. The Open Sim downloads and versions of Open Sim are available from multiple places. Some of those places keep download statistics. Sometimes many don't or have them turned on and off at various times. There's no list of HyperGrid-enabled destinations anywhere. There's no centralized registry of HyperGrid grids. There's behind the firewall grids can be totally invisible. You can be running these grids and nobody else besides you knows that it's running. If you wait for people to register their own grids, you can wait until you die because people do not do it. The Open Simulator Wiki website has a list of grids that people can add their own grids. There's a couple of dozen grids on there. That's a tiny, tiny little fraction of all the grids that are out there. So where do we get our data? So first of all, we collect our data from Google Alerts, from searching Google for keywords that often come up on web pages that are about Open Sim grids. And we've got a whole bunch of them, and we're constantly trying to improve them to get new grids as they pop up. Obviously, this is not a perfect solution. It doesn't pick up grids in many of the foreign languages. In order for a grid to come up on Google, somebody has to link to that grid. And many grids just don't have inbound links for their websites. Many don't even have domains for their websites. Their grid is an IP address, which is just a string of numbers followed by a port number. So we also looked at listings on Metaverse, Inc., Open Simulator, Org, and the Hypergrids, which are three places where grids register themselves. And we hope we can catch some that way. We look at download reports from OpenSimulator.org, DivaDistro, Simana Stick, New World Studio will occasionally tell us their download numbers. There's other places we can get OpenSim downloads. Some grids have their own versions of OpenSim that they allow people to download. We have no way of keeping track of those. We also get tips from our readers. I want to thank them very much when they find out about a new grid and send me a heads up. I really appreciate it. And also, some grid owners email me to tell me that they have a new grid popping up. And my address is right there. And I'm really appreciative of that as well. But most don't. They have other things to worry about. They've got the whole security, stability, scalability, users, they have to find merchants, they have to set up their currencies. There's so much stuff that they're dealing with that the last thing that they want to do is also think about, you know, signing up for various directories. I mean, they figured they'll do that later because it's not urgent. And then they never get around to it. So with all those caveats, you know, so my numbers are not perfect. They're not even close to perfect. So with all those caveats, here's my best guess. Nobody knows how many grids are. So my best guess is right now, in my database, I have been tracking 700 grids since the middle of 2009. Some of them are already gone. But that's the total number of grids that where I visited them or I visited their website or one of my researchers has visited their website or the grid or has pulled up their grid info page. So these are publicly accessible grids. And to me what this means is that the public can create accounts and log in directly or they can hypergrid teleport in or both. It doesn't have to be public all the time. So some grids may have open houses on the weekends and close their doors during the week when school's in session. But at least to some degree, they have to be open to the public. Then I add them to my public grid directory. I do not add grids that are totally closed, that are totally private that nobody can get to. The only exception I ever made was Enerhex's Enclave Harbor. And the reason I did was because she really, she really, really wanted her grid to be in our statistics. So I added it in even though it was a closed private grid and nobody else can get to it. But for the most part, I have trouble enough keeping up with the public grids without trying to index the private ones as well. Especially since for most private grids, there isn't even any way to find them. If you have a grid that's on your own computer or on your own company server that's only accessible by IQ or by your employees, there is no way for anybody on the outside to know that this grid exists. There's really no way for me to know that that grid exists. So in my database right now, I have 284 active publicly accessible open sim grids. This is the number of grids up and alive today that have been online at least once over the course of the previous month. So for grids been down for a while, a market is suspended or closed. So this is a little graph showing the growth of these open sim grids. When I started out, there were just a handful of them. There was just OS grid and Franco grid and the German grid for us grid. And now there's 284 grids. The line isn't smooth, it goes up and down. New releases of open sim that are easier make people create more grids. The diva distro made a lot easier for people to create small mini grids. New world studio also made it easier for people to create small mini grids. So did it sim on a stick. And so you start out with a small grid, eventually you turn it into a full grid. It's an easy entry path for people who may not be big open sim developers on their own. So again, I'm just reminding you that I'm not counting any of the private grids. This is not a total number of open sim grids out there. Of those 284 grids, at least 165 of them are on the hypergrid. This means that the grid publishes a hypergrid address. It's listed in a hypergrid directory somewhere. Or I am able to pull it up. I have a tool that I have on my grid where I can get the online status of any other region on the hypergrid. And I can see if a region is up or not. And these grids have come up as up there on the hypergrid. For the others, 43 are definitely closed. And the other 77, I don't know if they're closed or not. I haven't been able to check. Douglas just asked if there's a penalty for not joining the hypergrid. Yes, I will charge you a fine personally. No, no. Just as if you put up a website and you have it on the Internet or you have it on the public Internet, really it's what you need it for. Some people need grids to be internal for their own internal use. Some people need grids to be public facing for the public to use. I believe eventually big companies will have both kinds of grids just like they today have both kinds of websites. They have intranet websites for their employees to use internally and they have the extranet public websites for the marketing and their customers and everything else. So I believe the same thing will happen with the open stem is that you're going to have some grids, be private, be closed, schools, companies. If you have really high end content, for example, World of Warcraft is not on the Internet. You have to download a special viewer to log in, create special accounts. It's not a public website like Farmville is for example. Because it has unique content, it has a proprietary platform. So I think that role playing games with proprietary content will stay closed for a while. School grids, company corporate grids will stay private for a while and it's totally up to them. There's no penalties either way, definitely not for me. Absolutely healthcare industry. You want to have internal private grids. You want to have grids where patients couldn't access their own stuff and then you want to have some private grids where people can get directions to your hospital or get a map of your hospital. Whatever the public's facing stuff you're going to do, maybe have promotional seminars or how-to things, whatever you do. So I made a little chart here of grids that are on a hypergrid versus grids that are closed. Now this is the public grids, hypergrid versus closed, not private grids. Obviously for the private grids probably most or all of them are not hypergrid enabled. That's by definition if they were on a hypergrid, they would be a public grid. So as you can see from the green bar, there are more hypergrid enabled grids than there are closed open sim public grids. So I'll give you the reasons why closed grids have a good reason to stay closed. Some of them want to protect content. Some of them want to protect their users. But now closed grids have less than half as many regions as the hypergrid enabled grids. One reason for that is because closed grids tend to be commercial grids. They sell land, so their land is more expensive than land on the open grids, on the hypergrid enabled grids. But they have 36 percent more active users, possibly because as a commercial grid they have money to spend on marketing, they have money to spend on content, and they have money to spend on community builders and community managers. So here's a little chart. On the left you see the land comparison. The green bar is twice as high as the red bar. That's a number of regions on hypergrid grids versus the closed grids. And there's the red bar is higher for the active numbers of users versus for the hypergrid enabled ones. Now you might ask what about the 77 grids that I don't know if they're hypergrid enabled or not. I've lumped them into the closed ones. And really, those 77 are really tiny grids. The reason I don't know anything about them is because they're so small. And they really did not make a significant difference to these statistics. The graph looks the same. Even if you squint really closely, the graph can look the same. I think a difference of about 100 users and a couple of dozen regions. So not a significant difference there. So I also categorized the grids. Earlier this morning, I took my database and I sorted out the grids based by what type of grid they were. So the largest category by 0.3% difference is the commercial grids. These are grids like in-worlds, avanation, third rock, spot on 3D. This is the grids that charge money for their land. So they're smaller in land size, but they're bigger and active users. Then, almost a full quarter, 24.4% of grids are education grids. They're grids either run by schools or run for schools or are training-related grids. And education, as you can see, is a major, major use case of OpenSIM. And educators are one of the biggest user groups of OpenSIM among the biggest category of readers for hypergrid business as well. Next, 23% is personal grids and 15% are group grids. And I have a really hard time determining what's a personal grid, what's a group grid. Like if you have a grid that's just on your computer for yourself, that's really clearly a personal grid. If you and a few buddies get together and you create a role-playing grid that you kind of share among yourselves and you're all using it, I kind of qualify that as a group grid. But it's a really fuzzy area. 6% of grids seem to be non-profit grids. And another similar amount are corporate grids. And by corporate grids, I mean that they're company grids used by companies either for internal training or to interface with the public or with their customers or to have their little offices. Often these are OpenSIM consulting companies that have grids set up so that they can show off their things. John Bouchaud, for example, had a grid up for his architecture projects, virtual architecture. So this is a question I've been asking myself quite a bit. Why isn't OpenSIM growing as fast as the world Wide Web did? To me, it seems obvious that the immersive advantages offered by virtual world technology are just astounding and that eventually we're all going to be living in this virtual world space and in the matrix kind of thing. And that the same thing that the World Wide Web did for information that's a lot easier to convey information from one person to another that the virtual worlds are going to do for experiences that will be conveying experiences to one another, shared experiences, conference such as this one, training experiences, learning experience, gaming experiences, any kind of experiential communications will be happening in a 3D environment. And I believe this will eventually be huge. It will be very powerful. It will transform society as we know it. And so why isn't it happening yet? And I think one reason is that the World Wide Web was born at a time when three huge events happened. One event was that we switched from the DOS operating system to the Microsoft Windows operating system. Instead of typing in our commands, we were using a mouse, we were using a graphical user interface. In effect, we went from a 1D to a 2D computing environment. This trained people in how to use 2D, whereas before it was all very command line oriented. Then AOL spent a massive amount of money to convince people to buy dial up modems, learn how they work, install the AOL software, and then keep dialing up until they can get a line and get online. Huge, astoundingly difficult learning curve. I can't imagine how anybody would voluntarily do that. But by spending 300 million dollars, by putting AOL CD in every serial box and every checkout counter, some of you who are as old as I am will probably remember that you couldn't get away from these disks. They were everywhere. They blanketed the planet with their little floppies and then their CDs. And the third thing that happened was that Netscape came out with an easy to use web browser that people could use. So you had simultaneously a web browsing technology that was accessible to people. You had a population that was trained in using 2D, trained by Apple and Microsoft. And then you had a population that knew how to go online because of AOL's massive marketing efforts. We don't have those things today. In OpenSim, we don't have immersive 3D on our desktops where everybody's learning how to use 3D for everything. We have immersive 3D in video games, Call of Duty, I believe last year outsold pretty much any other media, including movies and books and everything else. So we're used to 3D in games. And back in the worldwide web days, we got 2D in games before we got it in our operating system as well. We had Pac-Man. We had Pong earlier than we had Windows. So I think that if we get an immersive 3D environment for our average computer user, then they will learn how to use 3D. And it would take away the, oh, it's just the game kind of feeling to it. Now, I remember when people told me that they were never going to use a mouse, that it's a toy, that they're never going to use Windows. It's just for kids, that they were never going to use a Mac, that it's too game-like. Same things they're saying about 3D today. It's game-like. It's for kids. They're never going to use it. Well, you know, I remember how well it turned out for them back then. I don't think anybody is still using Line Interface except for really die-hard Linux users like my daughter. We haven't had any AOL-style marketing campaigns. Second Life was supposed to be the big hope, but they let the media dominate their marketing message. I work for the media, so I can say this. The media is not your friend. We love the latest greatest thing, and if it's not the latest greatest anymore, we totally forget about it. That's why it's called the news, because it's new. We love things that are unusual. We don't like good news stories, because nobody reads them. Nobody wants to know about something good happening to somebody else. We all want to know about something horrible happening to somebody else, because it's instinct. If something horrible is happening to somebody else, it could happen to us. We need to be prepared. There's a human instinct to look for things that are new, to look for things that are difficult or dangerous or scary, and that news media is all about that. You can't let the news media do your marketing for you, because they were going to look for the sensationalistic things. They're going to look for the sex. They're going to look for the violence. They're going to look for the dangerous stuff, and then they're going to go away and look for something else. Yes, it's a warning. If your grid has sex and violence and scandal on it, I want to be there first in line to know about it, because people love that stuff, and especially when you have a dry subject like technology, anything that peps it up, it's nice. Yes, it's good. It's all good. Second Life did not own its marketing. It did not spend enough money on marketing. It did not follow through on its marketing. It didn't capitalize on the media attention when it had it, and it dropped the ball. Maybe somebody else will come along and do it with a bigger budget. Is mainstream adoption going to happen? I am 100% certain that it's going to happen. The question is, there's two questions. One is, when is it going to happen? Is it going to happen soon enough that we don't all go out of business and die of old age waiting for it? The second question is, what technology platform is it going to be on when it happens? Are we betting on a right horse? I don't know the answers to these, but I can make some guesses. One guess. Again, this is because I'm in the media and I love the latest, hottest, greatest thing is the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift is a set of 3D glasses that you put on, and the whole world is inside those glasses. Unlike previous virtual reality headsets, the Oculus Rift wraps around, so you don't feel like you're looking through a pair of binoculars, but you actually feel like you're inside the virtual world, and the Oculus Rift is really responsive. When you move your head, the image changes, so you actually feel like you're looking around at a virtual world. It's the first usable one that's come out so far. Everybody's all over it. 20,000 headsets have already been bought by developers who are using it to build games. OpenSim seems like a logical platform for an easy way to develop content for the Oculus Rift. If you want people to use the Oculus Rift to visit your world, you're not going to learn how to use 3D modeling software, CAD, CAM platforms, or Unreal engines, and so forth. You can use something like OpenSim. I had a demo of New World Studio yesterday, which is ridiculously easy to use. You have your own virtual world, you put it on a hyper grid, anybody can come and visit. I think that this would be a really nice thing for anybody looking to create an experience that other people can share that don't have the big budgets of the video game development studios. Now, you're still going to have the big budget development studios making the big budget games with Unreal engines and everything else, but there's a lot more people out there without those budgets. This is a possible path for OpenSim growing mainstream. We already have a viewer for Oculus Rift-compatible viewer for OpenSim, which is seriously making me think hard about buying a developer's kit of the Oculus Rift. Another thing that could happen is that Apple, Google, Microsoft, or some other company can do the same calculation that I'm doing now and say 3D is the next type of evolution. Let's jump up there and do something. Maybe Xerox PARC coming out with something with a usable 3D interface for their computer. Now, the bonus of that is people going out buying desktops again because you want a high-powered computer with high-powered graphics and a big screen to see it on. This is a possible win-win for them in a way to leapfrog over their competition. It may well become devastating for OpenSim, or it may develop in parallel to OpenSim. For example, Microsoft has its own Microsoft server for websites that is also used in addition to Apache, in addition to the Sun server. They coexist. The open source and the proprietary servers coexist because people can still use the same viewers to access any of the webpages hosted on any of these servers. OpenSim might coexist with proprietary virtual world platforms or it might get totally subsumed by something that comes out. That's one thing I'm worried about is that Microsoft will come out with an operating platform that dominates so fast and so quickly, or Google does or whoever, and it's a proprietary platform that offers everything that OpenSim does and because of the marketing might they just wipe out all competition. The way the Internet Explorer at first wiped out the Netscape browser just by coming pre-installed on every computer. Yeah, that's something that I'm worried about because I prefer the open source free-for-all worldwide web approach as opposed to the closed Windows Office kind of closed and proprietary environment approach of Apple and Microsoft. That goes in with the first one. There are two separate things that a 3D desktop and a 3D virtual world server don't necessarily have to be connected. Microsoft could come out with a 3D desktop and somebody else could come up with a 3D virtual world server. And vice versa. It may well be that Google will come out with a virtual world desktop that's tied to their viewer and they might make an open source if they do, so that's a possibility. And a long shot, and this is kind of what I think a lot of people are hoping for, is that OpenSim's organic growth, which is an inflection point as people hear about major deployments and killer apps. So for example, we might see some weight loss clubs or role-playing grids or book clubs or whatever being set up in OpenSim. They bring in new users to OpenSim who haven't been in OpenSim before. The new users go, oh, this is so cool. I want one of these for myself. And eventually, the viral growth will get to the point that we're seeing a significant impact. And that happened on the worldwide web where they had originally some academics, some crazy people putting up websites, and other people saw them and were like, oh, I want to do this. Let me learn how to run an HTTP server and I'll set this up. And then at a certain point, you wound up having things where people could set up their own websites or their own blogs without having to run servers and they just exploded from there. So that might happen. And it still could. And this is one reason why I'm tracking the hypergroup growth numbers is to see if we're getting close to this infection point. And right now, no, it still seems to be like moderate steady growth. All right. So I've been talking a lot and I have, I've seen a lot of discussions coming across in local chat, which means that the people seeing it online aren't seeing it. So if there's a question that you'd like me to answer, and I've missed it, or I do miss it, please just ask it again. So somebody was asking about Google Lively. And yeah, Google Lively wasn't really virtual server. It was more like an early version of what was it called? Remember that website that was super popular for a while where everybody could get a free website? City pages? Geo cities? Geo cities. I knew it was city something. Yeah, Geo cities. Yeah, made a big boom. I guess they couldn't figure out how to actually make money out of it and, you know, fold it eventually or was bought up by somebody. Yeah, so Geo cities. You know, everybody gets a page. So with Google Lively, you know, everybody get a page, that the problem was that Geo cities was a subset of the worldwide web. So you already had a lot of worldwide web users who were looking for things to see on the web. Google Lively was a separate product. It wasn't part of any bigger metaverse. You weren't already people out there looking for stuff to look at. And they were like, oh, look, all these Google Lively worlds are popping up. Right now, all the worlds are disconnected. The open sub-hype grid is the only one where you can have different worlds connected to one another. If somebody does come up with a virtual world server where you can own your own world and also you can get your world hosted by somebody else too, that's going to be the big transformative one. So let's see. What else are people asking? I'm looking at the wrong things. Maria, we did get a comment from Ustream about the fact that when you talk about commercial grids, making the point that there's a difference between selling land and renting land, do you know if there are commercial grids that are actually selling servers? They're selling land more than just renting it? Or are they all using the second life model? They're not all using the second life model, but they basically are because you can't, in any practical sense, you cannot actually sell land permanently. You can sell somebody's server. Reaction grid had a product for a while where you could call them up and order a server and they would deliver the appliance to you. There was a box that was already set up with open sim and you would plug it in and you would have your grid. So that's nothing, it's the closest that came to actually sale of land. But yeah, everybody else is renting out land, they're either renting it by the month or by the minute or by the hour, but some people charge membership fees and then the land is free and included. And I think that's going to be happening more often as land prices drop, but in one way or another the commercial grids are in the land business. Okay, so somebody says that everybody should have your own grid. If you're an organization of any size and you're facing a choice between renting land and somebody else's grid and having your own grid, I strongly, strongly recommend having your own grid. It's as easy as renting land. There's a number of open sim hosting vendors. In fact, if you Google open sim hosting vendors, my hybrid business page will come up. There's a lot of companies that do it extremely well, extremely fast. They get the grid up for you in running as little as minutes if you don't need a fancy customized grid. You own the whole grid. You can make a backup of the whole grid. You're in charge of who the users are. You can turn on hyper grid and turn it off. You can make backups of all the regions, backups of all the inventories, backups of all the asset servers. You can duplicate it. You can have a copy of it set up for every department in your school or company. It is totally in your own control. The difference between owning your own grid and renting land on somebody else's grid is like having a website versus having a page on Facebook. Facebook could close down your page at any time or change the rules for your page or do something screwy to your page. When you have a website and you get upset with your hosting provider, you just move to a different web host. With an open sim grid, if you have your own grid and you get upset with your hosting provider, you just make a download the entire grid, which you should be doing regularly anyway for your backups, and move it to a different hosting provider. There are several excellent ones I recommend, including Dreamland Universe. I've been recommending Zatamex. I'm recommending Simhost. There are providers in the UK and Europe as well that are more local for people who are based over there. There are providers working in various different languages. You can have local support in your language. The open sim companies will usually give you land at a lower cost than if you connect it to a grid with more control with full backups. I cannot recommend this more. You can still have a region on a closed grid. Even though a big proponent of open sim, I would recommend if you're an enterprise and you're going to be putting up a region on a closed grid somewhere for marketing purposes, Second Life is still the best because if you're using it for marketing, Second Life is going to have more users than anybody else. If you're going to use it for networking, for meeting with other people in your industry, you're more likely to meet them all in Second Life than in any one particular grid in open sim. The only exceptions are that there are some grids specifically for educators, Jokadia grid being the biggest of them, where if you want to network with educators, you still want to have backups and you want to have education-friendly content, Jokadia is a good place to go and never ends. The land prices are pretty low. All right, so let's see. Someone needs to create an open sim farvel. I am so surprised that nobody has done a farming game in open sim yet. Breedables are huge in Second Life. It would seem that it would be a great business model for an open sim grid and a way to attract users to open sim from outside the virtual world community, from farmville people, upgrade to a farm where you can ride your horses and your cow can roam the ranges. It would be a fun thing to do. You can round up your cows and stuff. I think that would be a lot of fun and probably somebody is working on it actually and it's about to go live any minute. I'm seeing a lot of new grid ideas popping up. Although a lot of those are duplicates, the world virtual isn't like 50 different grid titles. Everybody has a little mini clone of Second Life. We do all the social stuff. Focus on something. Nobody is going to come to your grid if it's just a clone of Second Life but smaller, cheaper, and without any people. Make it special, liven it up somehow. Okay, so Oculus Rift making you sick? Well, they're working on that. Part of the reason is the interface. This is something the open sim will have to deal with as well. With the Oculus Rift, you want things to be as realistic as possible. If you're standing still, then you're walking. You need a period of acceleration between the time you're standing still and the time you're walking. Most video games only have three speeds, zero walking and running without any acceleration periods in between. This makes people feel sick. Another thing that makes people feel sick is when you have static elements in the user interface, sidebars, things that title screens, things that you can't move, right? So they're just in front of you. You're in a world that's moving around when you move your head and then all of a sudden you have something that doesn't move and it makes you queasy. It's like being on a ship and you could feel it moving but it doesn't look like it's moving. It looks like it's standing still. So that makes people really queasy. Then another thing that makes people queasy with Oculus Rift and this is something that's going to be harder for them to deal with is the fact that your eyes aren't converging on something in a far distance because everything is actually right in front of you. So the focal lens thing in your eyeballs isn't working just like it is quite in real life. So that disturbs some people but the user interface elements are huge for this. One final element is that some things make you sick in the Oculus Rift because they will make you sick in real life. If you're the kind of person who gets sick on real roller coasters, you're going to get sick on a virtual one because the same things are going to be happening. So Teleplace. I liked Teleplace. It was one of the proprietary platforms like Protosphere. The company had some business issues and it closed down and it's now open quack and I'm having trouble finding out what's happening in it. But it's a nice platform. It's not as usable. Most of the enterprise-focused virtual world platforms like Teleplace, like Protosphere, they're missing the virtual world aspects that make it engaging, the user inventories, the ability to change avatar infinitely, the lack of user created content. OpenSim is such a great platform because you can create things in it while you're standing in it. Most of the enterprise platforms, the content has to be created externally, has to be brought in. With OpenSim, you're changing your own appearance. You're changing the world around you right inside from inside the world in an interactive way. And that is very, very powerful. It's one of the things that drew me to OpenSim. All right, so OpenSim being taken seriously. I think that this is going to continue until we have a 3D-based operating system for regular standard computers. And I don't know when that's going to happen. Or until we get a lot of non-game environments for things like the Oculus Rift. But right now, I have Google search for Oculus Rift. I watch all their videos. There's the architecture demonstrations that Jan Bouchard has been posting for the Oculus Rift. And there's some virtual therapy applications that are starting to come out. But for the most part, 99% of the stuff that's out there for the Oculus Rift is all gaming oriented. It's very exciting, but it's gaming. So until we start to see a shift to more business and enterprise uses, it's going to be a tough sell. And we're just going to have to deal with it. We're just going to have to be prepared for the fact that it's a tough sell and be ready to work around it. Why is this platform Alpha? Crystal Lopez, who is the inventor of the Hypergrid, was saying in local chat that the reason OpenSim is called Alpha is because of Justin Clark Casey. And he's a core developer of OpenSim, and he heads up the Overt Foundation, which handles licensing for OpenSim. And I've asked him this several times already. There's so many companies making a business on top of OpenSim. Last week, I talked to a company that was selling OpenSim-based projects for up to six figures a pop. So deployments in the hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars for OpenSim-based deployments of enterprise projects. And I've written about a little bit about this in the past. For the most part, the clients are not interested in talking to the media. I'm always trying to get more case studies, more use cases out of these folks. But it is out there. There are companies that are selling it successfully. They're going after specific niche industries like healthcare, like oil companies. It is happening. And we really need to, I'm with Diva on this, we really need to lose the Alpha label. A lot of software out there is a lot more buggy than OpenSim is, and is being used commercially and successfully. The fact that there's still a bug left in it does not mean that it's still Alpha. And it's definitely not Alpha. I personally think that even Beta is pushing it because we have grids. We have deployments. We have companies using it. We have successful businesses running on OpenSim. And it's a marketing nightmare to have the Alpha label associated with it. Okay. So my tracking of OpenSim growth and grids is constantly being pointed to by virtual world bloggers as the authority and statistics for OpenSim. Thank you, Lani. I appreciate your kind words. Have you considered a cooperative project to help these grid entities or other OpenSim users with mini grids to voluntarily opt in to track the statistics or cooperate with the OpenSim devs? I've asked them repeatedly. And the answer is, oh, sure. We could do that. Yeah. And that's it. This is something that I'm extremely anxious for. But there's not a lot of... First of all, OpenSim developers don't need this because they're volunteers. They're doing stuff that matters to them. So somebody working for a large enterprise will say Intel is working on scalability in distributed scene graph. Somebody interested in commercial platforms is going to work on the currency systems or content protection or whatever stuff that's particularly interested to them. Nobody has a vested stake in making it easier to collect statistics because what if the statistics make them look bad? They want to be total control of it. They don't want it to happen automatically. Now, unless it happens automatically, nobody divulges the numbers because they're worried about, well, what if numbers make you look bad? Or they don't have time to set it up for whatever reason. There's self-reporting. It just takes time. It takes effort. And it comes with risk. It might make you look bad. And by not reporting anything, people think they're avoiding the risk of looking bad. So it's kind of a lose-lose scenario as far as people are looking to track numbers. So there are already systems built in. So, for example, the DivaDistro has an automatic a thing you can choose to be reported to the Metaverse Inc. search engine. There's many of the systems for the web front ends for open SIM grids, including Wi-Fi, have grid statistics in there somewhere, which I really appreciate. It makes my life possible, even possible to track this. But nothing universal, nothing consistent. Ariel Popstar asked, do you think commercial grids are the ones pushing development of open SIM? I think they're responsible for a quarter of the pushing of development of open SIM, which is why we have such things as content protection. Educators are pushing a quarter of development of open SIM, which is why we also have backups and user controls, and why we have Creative Commons license content for people to share. And then we have personal users responsible for a quarter of the use of open SIM, and they want easy installations, and they're responsible for encouraging the creation of things like the DivaDistro, like Siministec, like New World Studio. And all of these groups are also developers. Open SIM is a really unique open-source project, and I cover a lot of open-source software, and so I noticed this. It really stands out because of the wide variety of contributors. There are people contributing code for whom it's their job. They work at Intel or they work at IBM. There's people who are contributing code because they want to donate back to the community because it helps their own commercial grids out, because it helps their own school grids out. And I also want to make a plug here for donating code. If you are a commercial grid, and you invent a cool, cool way to do something, and you keep it private, which you can. It's totally within your right to keep it private, and you can use it as a selling point for your grid. If it's a really necessary feature that a lot of people want, the open SIM developers will develop an open-source version of that feature. And now you have a different, incompatible way to do that same thing out there that's different from the way your grid does it. Now you can ditch your own code and adopt the public code, which means you've wasted all that work, and you don't get any credit for having done it, and your users might get annoyed because things change, or you keep your own proprietary code and build on top of that, which means now you're diverging from mainline open SIM, which makes it every day, makes it more and more difficult for you to go back and bring in all the advances that the rest of the open SIM community is making. The open SIM community is a huge community, not just the 284 public grids that I know about, but the 107,000 downloads of open SIM are out there, the educators, the government users, the private users, the corporate users, they're all contributing some stuff. You, as a small commercial grid, cannot compete against all those users who are working for free and donating code to open SIM. A grid that uses the public code gets all that work for free. You're paying, you're having to pay to redo all that work, so your grid has higher overhead than your competitors. You're behind your competitors because you can't keep up with all the features that the open SIM community is releasing. My suggestion is if you create a cool new piece of code, get some use out of it, market it, et cetera, but as soon as you can't donate it and get the public relations plug and the marketing boost from being a good corporate citizen and donating the code, that way it becomes part of the mainstream open SIM, and you don't have to throw out the stuff that you've built. I think people are hinting at me that my time is close to running out, so I'm going to bring this to close. If anybody wants to contact me and ask follow-up questions, there's my email address right there. You could even call me on the phone. People call me on the phone in the middle of the night to complain that I don't treat their grids right, that I'm an enemy of their grid. Everybody thinks I'm an enemy of their grid personally. Really, really, no. I'm not a personal enemy of all the different grids out there. I don't have a personal vested stake. I may disagree with your occasional policy here or there, but I have avatars in all the grids because I visit them, but I don't have a personal home on any of the grids. I don't have a lot of friends on any particular grid. I have my own grid. Yes, people do call me. They're in Europe. They don't realize I'm asleep. They only call with complaints. Nobody ever calls me to say something nice. Well, that's okay. They email me if they say something nice. I do appreciate that. I'm not making any money from hybrid business yet, but I do have hopes that eventually the metaverse will expand and explode and people who buy ads will actually be paying real money for them. I have a strong, strong interest in open-sume growth and development, and I want to promote that very much. Well, thank you so much, Marie, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that will be continuing to read the hybrid grid far into the future, hopefully, with all of your great reporting. And thanks for...Maria gave many presentations, so please give her a huge round of applause because she was also a track leader and wrangled a bunch of speakers, so she really deserves a huge thank you. And I also want to say a huge thank you to everyone in the audience, everyone who was a speaker, a presenter, a volunteer, a staff member. I don't know how you guys feel, but this went, I think, better than many of us hoped. And I think this has been a really great experience altogether. I'm sure there's lots of things we can improve next time around, but we hope you really enjoyed the conference and all of the great presentations. Everything will be archived. You can go to our website at conference.opensimulator.org. And almost all of the sessions, if there are a couple that we missed, we'll probably get those archives up soon, but all of the sessions from the conference should be archived, both on Ustream, and we hope to get those posted to YouTube as well soon. So you'll have plenty of options to rewatch and embed in your own websites and much more. There are a couple of social events that are scheduled for after this last session, so please do go party, have fun. And I guess we will see you guys next year at the next Open Simulator Community Conference. Have a great afternoon or evening wherever you are.