 Hello everyone and welcome to the 9 o'clock breakout session of the Open Simulator Community Conference 2014. As a reminder to our in-world and web audiences you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org and you can post your questions in local chat. On the U-String chat or tweet your comments using the hashtag O-S-C-C-14. This hour we are happy to introduce Maria Korolov who will be presenting Hypergrid Growth Trends. Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business and of the Hypercut Director of Hypergrid Destinations. She has been a war correspondent, ran a news bureau in Shanghai and covered business and technology for national magazines for over 15 years. But the emerging metaverse is the most exciting thing she's ever covered. Welcome Maria Korolov. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate being allowed to speak here today on what is my all-time favorite topic. My email address is Maria at hypergridbusiness.com. Please email me if you have any questions or anything else that's if it doesn't get covered in this session. I love hearing from people. So my talk today is about the growth of OpenSTEM. I'm sure everyone here knows for themselves that's growing this conference itself I believe is twice as big as last year's. But I've got a little bit of hard data there to to to back up those gut feelings that I have. So first of all the active user numbers is currently what the best gauge that we have for what's happening on the public OpenSTEM grids. I've been tracking these since 2010. As you can see it's pretty much a straight linear growth. There's occasional peaks and valleys, the big valley in the middle in January 2012. That was a month when in-worlds didn't get their numbers to me and I'll talk later about why that makes such a big impact. We're not yet seeing the takeoff point of the hockey stick curve. I personally do believe that it will be coming and I'll talk about why later. But I believe that the positive trend up is an excellent sign especially when compared to a second life's user numbers. And I also want to point out that this is active users only on the several hundred public grids that I personally know about. There is no way right now in OpenSTEM to discover all the grids out there. There's no way to track it. There's no way to count them up. I call that the dark metaverse and we don't know what the size of that metaverse is. Region counts are really up. So as we're going from 10,000 users to 20,000 active users approaching 30,000 active users now, the number of regions has already passed 50,000. The reason is because OpenSTEM regions are extremely inexpensive. You can run one for free on a home computer. Prices for regions, if you get a good deal, could be down as low as $3 a month for a full-sized region equivalent of a second life region. So this is a hundredth of the cost of second life regions and it's a major attraction for OpenSTEM. You can have as much land as you want for your group, for your creativity, for your school, for your company. The land area of OpenSTEM right now is about twice as big as that of second life. It's bigger than Hong Kong, bigger than New York City, bigger than Yosemite Park, and we're approaching Rhode Island when we convert the meters to square miles. Another indication that interest in OpenSTEM is up and is starting to grow faster than a linear trend is the readership of hyper-good business over the past year. This is an export of data from Google Analytics, untouched data, and since hyper-good business, I mean, we'll occasionally write something about Unity 3D or about a hardware headset, so you'll get an occasional spike of people coming in for that particular article. But for the most part, my readers know that the bulk of the coverage is OpenSTEM related, and so the readers who keep coming back every month, that's what they're looking for, and it's been growing. So this past year has been a great year for our readership, and I want to thank everyone who has been reading the publication and who's been sending me tips and information and corrections and advice and helping me out in so many different ways. I in particular like to thank Lawrence Pierce here, who's taken over the moderation of the comments, which has been a great burden off my shoulders because no matter how you moderate, half of the people are going to be extremely mad at you, and now they're all mad at him, and I'm extremely, extremely grateful for that. Thank you. Thank you, Lawrence. The other interesting sign that indicates hyper-good growth is the download numbers for the four major distributions. So I collect numbers from OpenSimulator.org, from the ZivaDistro, from New World Studio, and from Sim on a Stick. So these are the four big ones. I do not collect numbers for the individual region installer of OS Grid. So if you think that these numbers are high because people are downloading OpenSim to run their OS Grid regions, or were when OS Grid was up, they're downloading it directly from the OS Grid website, separate distribution. I'm not tracking that. So as you can see from this graph, thousands of people are downloading versions of OpenSim every month. This is monthly numbers. So I personally know of hundreds of Grids. People are downloading the software thousands of times, and for every download, you can set up multiple Grids. So if you're a vendor, you would download the software once, optimize it for your users, and then install it for all your customers. If you're a school, you download it once, then install it for all your teachers, put it on a Sim on a stick, hand out the USB to everybody. So in that sense, these numbers would be undercounting OpenSim distributions. There's also overcounting involved in this chart. If you see that there's a lot of spikes here, usually when a new distribution comes out, people are downloading the new version so they can update their grid. So that is some of the spikes that you see on this graph. So my favorite part of OpenSim is the HyperGrid. This is what really, really got me excited about this platform. I write about all the major virtual reality platforms, the enterprise ones, the online one, the ones that run in a browser, the various open source alternatives. OpenSim is currently the only one that has the HyperGrid, and the HyperGrid is growing. Now, this is a chart that shows where the users are. The red area is the closed grids. The blue area is the HyperGrid enabled grids. The yellow little bits in the middle are the ones where I didn't know what kind of grid that was, and I hadn't checked yet. It takes quite a bit of effort to figure out if a grid is HyperGrid enabled or not, and some grids keep switching, so sometimes I just don't even know. So as you can see, the users prefer the closed grids slightly to the HyperGrid grids, but there's a reason for that, and the reason is this next slide. This is because of in-worlds. In-worlds last month had 8,300 even active users. The HyperGrid as a whole had 8,710 users, so in-worlds by itself had almost as many users as the entire HyperGrid. In-worlds, for those who don't know, is the biggest commercial grid in OpenSim by the number of users. Since social networks are winner-take-all systems, you want to go where people are. Merchants want to go where their customers are. Partygoers want to go where the big parties are. Performers want to go where the audiences are, so a grid draws people into itself, and eventually, unless the grid has a very strong niche orientation that is able to attract people just to itself for a particular reason, people are going to go to the bigger grid, especially if they have to create a new avatar every time, with a new set of friends, a new inventory, new groups, it is difficult to maintain an active avatar. I personally maintain two, one from my personal grid and one for OSGrid. Again, hopefully OSGrid will will be back up soon. I'm not going to maintain 200 different avatars. I will pick just the one, two, or three grids I spend the most time on, and this is a problem for closed grids, because you need a separate avatar for each closed grid. On the hypergrid, one avatar works for all these grids, so that you don't need to maintain separate identities. You have one avatar, one set of groups, one set of friends, one inventory, and it all can travel across more than 150 different grids. So if you are a merchant or a party plan or a performer, you can look at this chart and say, I can be in worlds where I get access to 8,300 people, I can be on a hypergrid where I get access to 8,700 people, or I can be in one of these other small closed grids in this little red slice where I have access to a couple of thousand people or a few hundred people or a few dozen people at the most. And this is a problem for closed commercial grids that are not in worlds, and one of the reasons why over this past few months we have seen grid after grid switch on hypergrid connectivity. By switching on hypergrid connectivity they allow their users to travel to all the other grids, to attend parties, to go shopping, to socialize with their friends, and allows people from all the other grids to teleport in. In the past, the fear has been that content will then leave the grid. Well, we now have content filtering so that individual grids can say only certain kinds of content could travel. Unkindly, for example, if you were in either our content session yesterday or in a kind least own presentation, you may have heard that only content that you've created or content that you bought that has the copy and transfer permissions, or content that you bought on a kindly market that specifically allows hypergrid access that only that content can travel and leave the grid. A spell scape, another grid which recently turned on hypergrid connectivity, it's a magic themed grid based in the UK. They have a system where only full perm content can travel to other grids. Everything else stays on their own grid. And this is, I believe, an excellent compromise moving forward because the creators can choose will they maybe charge a little bit extra for their content and allow their customers to take it elsewhere and risk the possibility of their customers copying the content or distributing it illegally, or would they rather that the content stay local on just that grid. The choice, I believe, should be up to the creators. And the filtering options do just that. They put the choice in the hands of the people who create the content. This chart compares the number of regions on the hypergrid with a number of regions on the closed grid. And there's two main reasons why the hypergrid enabled regions are growing so much faster than the ones on the closed grid. First of all, there's a significant price differential. The closed grids do not want you to attach a free home based region to their grid. It undermines their business model. It undermines their security because when you attach your own region, you own the database for the region and all the content on it, regardless of what the problems might be. It also undermines their business model because it's free. And most commercial grids charge a premium for their regions. The regions cost between $40 and $60 a month typically on the big commercial grids. Because the big commercial grids offer additional services, they offer unique content and unique events. So they expect people to pay a little bit extra for the support they get, for the value that they get on those grids. On the open grids, on the hypergrid enabled grids, more of these grids are likely to allow open access for people to connect free regions. This includes grids like Metropolis and OS grid and Franco grid and the new Tangle OS grid. Anybody can connect a free region to these grids. It also allows people to buy regions from third party vendors and connect those regions to those grids. Those vendors are Zeta Max, Dreamland Metaverse, Oliveira, MA Rentals, the new company CloudServe. Many of these vendors are competing on price and service, so you get excellent quality of a region for an excellent price. And the lower prices are obviously very attractive to a certain percentage of the population who would rather have more land than some of the additional support that they might get on a closed grid. And the other reason why it's going fast is because if you're a creator and you are building an entire region for yourself or for your role playing group or for your museum, you want to be able to make a backup of the entire region. And the open grids, the hypergrid enabled grids are more likely to allow you to make a full and complete backup of your region. If you're a school, you want to be able to save your entire classrooms. If you're a company, you want to save your meeting space for the next time the conference runs. If you're an individual creator and you build something really cool, you want to save a copy of it so you don't lose it in case something happens. The open grids are much more likely to allow you to save your entire regions. And all the third party vendors I mentioned, CloudServe, Zatamex, Dreamland, Oliveira, they actually make that part of their service so you can get as many backups to your local hard drive of your entire region as you like. So one of the reasons that I picked OpenSim for my area of coverage is because I believe that OpenSim has the best chance right now of becoming the beginning of the metaverse. Something better might come along. I have not yet seen any indications that anybody's working on something better than OpenSim for being a metaverse platform. Now there are technologies that better serve a particular niche or have a particular feature or have a particular facial animation, but as anybody knows who's been in the technology space for a while, it is not the best technology that wins. It's the best ecosystem that wins. But before we get into the ecosystem, I would like to mention that OpenSim right now is the only platform with the hypergrid technology. You can travel from one region to another. You can make friends on the other region. You can send instant messages to the other region. You can deliver content to people on other regions as the kindly market is doing. You can belong to groups from multiple regions. And this is fully federated. It's fully distributed. The grids don't have to have any kind of central authority that says, you know, your avatars are here or your address is this. Every grid is completely 100% independent from every other grid in the hypergrid. This is like websites. If I have a website and you have a website, people can travel from one website, from my website to yours, even if the two of us have never met and in fact, even if we're bitter enemies. The same thing is on the hypergrid. People can travel as long as the grids on a hypergrid, people can travel from grid to grid to grid. Unless you're specifically blocked personally by that website or by that grid owner, you can visit that grid. Now, some grids do block inbound hypergrid teleports that will say, oh, for example, a group of schools might say will only allow travel to other grids in our school district. Or a big grid might say we got a lot of griefers from this griefer grid here, so we'll close off access to hypergrid travel from those other grids. So there is some restrictions you can place for security. But you don't have to do anything special to allow people to come in. You don't have to negotiate connections with anybody else. Unless you put up walls, everything is automatically connected to everything else. No centralized person controls the hypergrid. There is nobody keeping a list of hypergrid addresses. There is nobody keeping a list of your avatars or your inventory. Every grid is doing that by itself. And I think this is an amazing feature of OpenSim. And yesterday, when I heard Philip Rosdale say, well, we need this centralized services so you can have a single avatar travel between different worlds, I thought to myself, we already have that. And when he said, and you want to be able to bring your inventory from one world to another, I thought to myself, hey, we already have that too. So I'm not sure how it will work in practice. The high fidelity may have an alternative that works as well as the hypergrid works. We'll see. But right now, I haven't seen any indications that their option is going to be better than ours. So moving on to the ecosystem, we have a variety of different types of grids in OpenSim. We have nonprofit grids. We have school grids. We have personal grids. We have groups run by people who get together and decide to have a grid for their own row playing activities or for their writer's group or for their religious group. We have giant social grids. We have closed grids and open grids, corporate meeting grids, every kind of grid you can imagine somebody out there has set up a grid for it or is working on setting one up. Most other platforms tend to focus on a particular niche. They are used just for the social stuff or they are used just for business meetings or they are used just by schools or they are used just by pharmaceutical companies to design new drug interactions. And the fact that their niche makes them very effective in their particular area because they can serve those particular customers. However, we in OpenSim have a platform that is more like the World Wide Web. It's a fundamental underlying platform that's maybe not the best in any particular aspect but is good enough for a very wide range of uses for people who want something a little bit more custom, a little bit more better, a lot of other proprietary solutions out there. But for somebody who wants a basic platform for the metaverse that's an all purpose platform. That's a platform that can be applied in many different settings. Right now OpenSim is farther ahead than anybody else out there. Another way the OpenSim ecosystem is in my mind very inspiring is the number of different vendors we have providing services. Now these are just a few of the top vendors providing OpenSim hosting. They're also vendors providing design, consulting, anything you need for a grid for your OpenSim installation. There's companies out there who will provide that service for you at all different price levels from extremely extremely low to to the extremely extremely high and serving all kinds of target audiences. And this this ecosystem of vendors who are also by the way contributing fixes back to OpenSim on a regular basis and I applaud them for doing this helps make OpenSim extremely robust. If one of these vendors goes out of business you take your grid to another vendor, you take your regions to another vendor and I write about this a lot a grid gets upset with its service provider, it moves to a different service provider. Well you cannot do that with a proprietary platform. With a proprietary platform if you manage your vendor if their prices are too high if their services are too low you cannot just pick everything up and move it. You have to rebuild from scratch. You might be able to move your mesh content over but you'll still have to arrange it all in your build. You'll have to rewrite all your scripts all your interactions. It is a difficult difficult process to move between different vendors. In OpenSim you can download an entire grid and move it with all its inventories its users its website everything move it from one vendor to another. And this is an amazing amazing feature of OpenSim. I don't know of any metaverse platform out there right now that has this many vendors in in all these different price levels and business categories. OpenSim is also unique among open source project in the variety of developers who work on this code and and I hear the complaints oh the drama the conflicts everyone has a different direction they want to go in but this also comes back to the strength and the diversity the robustness of the OpenSim platform that entrepreneurs academics government agencies private companies and individual hobbyists who believe in the metaverse and are donating their time purely out of the goodness of their hearts and of the spirit of their imaginations to this project. I cover a lot of open source technology and my day job and most open source projects tend to be much much more nichey they serve a particular audience their developers are usually they're a subset of their own users they're they're much more focused what sometimes better organized as a result more streamlined maybe more efficient but OpenSim because of its breadth of its developer base I think that is one of the things that contributes to making OpenSim such a robust platform for a generic virtual world use that the metaverse requires and similarly we have all different kinds of users in OpenSim now this is based on a readership survey in hyper good business we have educators we have designers we have nonprofits developers individuals academics government officials with the military we have a large breadth of people who use OpenSim for all different kinds of purposes everything you can imagine doing with the virtual world somebody is doing that with OpenSim so looking forward another study another survey I did this summer was about features that people want in OpenSim so since this is just came out recently I figure posted up here if you're a developer sitting in this audience looking for a fun project to do these are the some of the things that people really care about they want better vehicles they want better search they want some beginner guides written for OpenSim and I guess I can do a little bit of that since I'm supposed to be writing about OpenSim there's some people who want better content protection the hop to protocol people want to be able to type in an address into their browser or give an address to somebody and the browser will automatically launch an in-world viewer and take them to that location and so right now this is difficult to do or or take you to the login screen for that particular grid which you know would be at least the place to start so I would love to see that there's people who want more encryption want a more formal structure for OpenSim development and who want address bar teleports instead of going to map to type in your address you can just paste the hyper good address up in the top of your screen thank you Maria it's 9 30 thank you for your presentation Maria really enjoyed it sorry I had to cut you off but we want to leave time for questions if you're watching this presentation live please type your question at the local chat into the use stream or in twitter under the hashtag O S C C 14 my first question for Maria is we've noticed a trend and wondered if you have done anything to explore it it seems like there's an inverse relationship between the growth of land in a grid and the growth of participants in other words it seems like density of users to land mass is a factor in greater success of grids have you tracked this trend at all and do you see any such relationship if so any recommendations for grids about how they might suppress region growth or otherwise increase population density yes I have tracked this relationship numerous times every time somebody brings it up and there is no relationship here I will give you an example say you have a grid that has one region and that has a giant party on that region every week during the that party you will have a very high population density now say that same grid adds a hundred regions of open park space around that party area park space where nobody ever goes the grid has just lowered its population density a hundred fold but it has not changed the value of that party and if anything the value of the grid as a whole has improved because party goers can now go into this park if they feel like it so I have done this correlation of density versus traffic every time somebody has asked me about it and there is no correlation there is no way to get a value or a density figure for a grid that is in any way meaningful now there are some grids that are throwing up land uselessly maybe because they plan to have a project there or maybe because they just want to get their numbers up and so people point to that and say oh here's a grid with a lot of wasted land they're a bad grid they've just lowered their density therefore you can see an example of how a grid lowers its density and they're doing it for a bad reason but those are just like individual cases there is no correlation across the board and the fact that a grid is trying to ramp up its number land area with empty regions has nothing to do with how valuable its active regions actually are now if it's trying to do this maybe it has a problem you know with its active regions but that's a separate issue and it doesn't show up in the statistics before you go to the next question I wanted to address these last two slides that I had up that literally last two slides of the thing people have been saying that the reason virtual worlds aren't going to go anywhere and virtual reality isn't going to go anywhere is because it takes too much work that we're all iPhone users and tablets we want instant gratification we want quick and easy games we don't have the patience to learn this new technology I want to point out that last year the top movie was one of the top movies Iron Man with 1.2 billion over the course of the whole year Grand Theft Auto brought a billion in and its first weekend it made 2 billion over the course of the year this is a game that takes hours or days to play very immersive very complicated people are willing to put in the time and moreover the video game industry now dwarfs the book industry the movie industry or the music industry people are putting their money where their interests are and people are interested in immersive storytelling people are interested in these kind of long-form games and and so I think that games are a precursor of the future as a whole and right now when people are spending 50 bucks or 60 bucks for a game they're spending it for a great game for an immersive game for a 3d game for an open world game for a for a game that looks a lot like what we think of as virtual worlds and virtual reality and again you can email me maybe at hybridbusiness.com and all these slides are available online okay next question excellent actually yes I'm a big gamer myself so I fully agree with you there next question from the audience is I would like to start my own grid do you have any advice uh yes I've seen a lot of grids started by technologists who think that technology is the key to the successful grid nobody cares about the technology uh in survey after survey every year we ask about a grid's technologies and people don't even notice if a grid has built its own infrastructure they people notice support people notice events when something crashes they notice it but otherwise they're not paying any attention some of the grids with the best ratings and technology were just using off the shelf open sim from one of the hosting vendors you don't have to be a technologist to run an open sim grid what you do need to be is you need to be a marketer you need to be a community organizer you need to be an event planner so if you're starting a new grid what I recommend is do not start with a technology start with a community find a community that needs a grid and create a grid for that community that could be a community in second life that's paying too much for land that could be a community or somewhere on the internet that could use a world to to play in that could be a community that you know in real life a book club or or or religious organization that can use a virtual world to meet and start with a community and build the world for them do not start with the technology and expect people to come people do not come there are so many wonderful grids out there and online platforms for all sorts of features and and marketplaces and other stuff that people have built and nobody comes so start with a community and build the grid from there that's my advice excellent thank you another question from the audience whatever happened to the hypergrid atrepreneur group uh yes so uh a few years ago we had a group that met monthly on the hypergrid and uh real world stuff happened and I got too busy to run it and then we did the hypergrid rebuild on the hyperport and all the gates were broken for months we finally finished with a rebuild we're putting up all the gates now and um I'm gonna announce this like right now we're starting up the hypergrid entrepreneur group again if you are somebody who wants to uh take advantage of the opportunity right now to create a company in in the in the metaverse and you want to network with other entrepreneurs to find partners uh to find advice and support uh email me uh I will I'll put the group back up I'll probably add it to google plus I'll write an article about on a hypergrid business and we're going to get started again with meetings excellent another question for audience where did you get the data for these slides okay uh some of it is hypergrid business research some of the statistics available online and research papers if you email me with anything particular you'd like to know I can get all that's to you in fact I can give you the raw data um I have no problem sharing any of that excellent thank you another question for audience I want to join women in the virtual reality the website is having problems yeah I've been getting a lot of emails uh about that uh so uh we tried fixing the website uh yesterday I spent a bunch of time on it Karen spent a bunch of time on it uh really email me and we'll get you in uh we'll send you the pack manually and everything else we're we're still working on the website problems sorry about that of course it had to go down this weekend of course thank you uh do you think the opium has a critical critical masters his vibe thank you for asking that question um we are actually having a panel discussion later on this afternoon about uh at at 1 p.m. pacific in this very region about that very issue uh but I would love to address that myself since I have the stage here now and I'll only be moderating later on tonight uh right now of any platform out there critical mass is uh is uh the the most available in open sim compared to anywhere else is it enough um I don't know if Facebook came out or google came out tomorrow with a platform that had that everything that open sim has a fully distributed hyper grid um open source uh full backups of inventories and regions and grids uh if somebody came out with something like that and pushed it hard through all their channels like say you know facebook getting everybody into it or google getting everybody into it by force right or apple coming out with something so amazing that's built into all their devices uh so everybody already has it or or one of the like remisoni playstation uh coming out with something that's built in for their for their hardware so they have that jump start of of every of a deployment base then yeah then uh then we're we might have problems because we only have a few you know looks like a few thousand grids running on open sim and if somebody comes in with a distribution of millions of people on the first day then um it's going to be problematic the will they do it uh I mean the microsoft tried to do it for the for the web um and they failed I personally think that an open source project like ours that's fully uh built from the ground up by the community without any kind of major corporate uh backing that's fully neutral and fully independent has some advantages and we're growing slowly um if if growth rate picks up because it will take time for these giants to do anything then we have a window of opportunity um how things will turn out I think it's just really way too early to tell but I think of of anybody out there right now we have the strongest chance of making it well something better come along too soon to say excellent thank you we have time for one more question before we wrap it up you seem to be writing all about the same people on your hypergrid business how can other grids get some coverage uh the reason that certain people get in print every month is because they send me email announcements virtual highway for example every two weeks like clockwork sends me a press release about stuff going on on their grid and then they follow up if a story doesn't run the next day or the day after that they will email me and they'll say what happened did you get our announcement is it gonna run and then if I don't respond to that they'll follow up again um I do occasionally lose emails and that's happened with a couple of grids that send me information and I just just lost the emails uh so that does happen and I'm apologize for that please follow up I do not mind if people follow up um the other thing I do is every every a couple of weeks I send out an email to every single grid owner I have contact information for asking them for news most do not respond so that's like the first thing you can do is just simply respond to me and tell me what's going on send me press releases send me announcements send me articles um advice columns uh anything like that uh really I very rarely turn something down only if it's like really inappropriate for our audience or maybe libelous or you know something like that but for the most part I run 99 of the stuff that comes in uh so please send it to me and uh and bug me if it doesn't go up immediately if it doesn't go up chances are I lost it so please please follow up I do not mind being bugged excellent thank you Maria Karla for a terrific presentation as a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org in this room the next session will be for dialogue concentra and open sim for real-time planning in four swedish cities with krister lindstrom thank you again to our speaker and to the audience we'll be back shortly with 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