 Hello everyone and welcome to the 11 o'clock a.m. to 1130 a.m. session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce a presentation called State of the Open Simulator Community. Our speaker is Maria Corolo. Maria is a published author and covers artificial intelligence for CIO Magazine and Cybersecurity for CSO Online. She is also the editor of HyperGrid Business since 2009. During her 20 years as a journalist she's run a business news bureau in Shanghai, covered wars in the former Soviet Union, and wrote about local politics for the Chicago Tribute. But none of that prepared her for covering Open Simulator, which has been both intensely frustrating and infinitely enjoyable. She'll talk to us about that today. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag OSCC21. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Thank you very much for that introduction. Hey everybody, you probably all know me because like you just heard I've been in Open Sim since 2009 and pretty much every month we produce a stats report. Every year we do annual surveys and we collect data from a bunch of other sources and I'm going to be going through all of that really, really fast right now. So normally I speak too fast, but today I'm going to use that to my benefit. So first of all, here's my email address is Maria at hypergridbusiness.com. If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to email me. So absolutely feel free to do that. So we hit record high numbers in number of grids, the land area of OpenSim's public grids, and the active users. Do keep in mind that all I track is the public grids, grids that publicize themselves, that are listed in OpenSim World, that have websites that are out there and attracting public visitors. This does not include many of the private dream grids. It does not include many of the private Kitely grids. This doesn't include any of the behind firewall grids run by schools, universities, private companies, does not include any of the grids run on home computers by people using them for staging, manufacturing, production, creativity, or just playing around. So the dark universe could be several times larger than the known universe. So keep that in mind. These are stats only to the public grids. So first of all, the total number of grids that were active this year was 483. These are all the grids that were up and accessible to the public sometime this year. I publish a monthly list of grids that are online that month that is on this slide. And this number is a record high. The number of active users, also a record high users. It doesn't mean that there are 40,000 different people in OpenSim. So if a user has an account on two grids or hyper grid teleports to two grids, they will show up as two different users. So keep that in mind that there is going to be some duplication of users in OpenSim. But that duplication has always been the case. So the record high number is definitely true. And again, it does not include the private grids. So schools have large number of students on their grids, not counted here, for example. All right, nearly all the active users on the public grids are on the hyper grid. The closed grids are hard to get to. And they have been losing traction dramatically over the past seven years. The only significant grid of any size that's closed, not on a hyper grid, is TagWorld. And they haven't released their active user numbers in the past few months. But they wouldn't make much of a difference on this chart since it's just one grid. Nearly all the land area is also on a hyper grid. And Tag does release their land area. So public grids tend to be, hyper grid-enabled grids tend to offer things like variable size regions that compete on price. Average region price is around $15 right now. So and of course you can teleport everywhere. So I mean, you can see where the clear direction that things are going here. I did a sentiment survey last week. These are brand new fresh numbers that nobody has seen yet. People are pretty much optimistic about the future of OpenSim. So some people are in the middle, but the majority of people are very optimistic about OpenSim's future. And nearly everybody who responded to the survey plans to be more active in OpenSim next year, which I guess makes sense because they bother to respond to the survey. A lot of people are satisfied with OpenSim's technical developments. But as you can see, there's a significant chunk of people, 16% who are not. People are pretty generally distributed about the OpenSim ecosystem. This is content, user base. The question about virtual reality surprised me. A lot of people did not think that virtual reality was important to OpenSim's future at all. So that was an unexpected, very unexpected to me because I'm a big fan of VR. And that could be an indication that people who want VR have moved on to VR platforms and that people who like desktop-based virtual worlds are the ones staying in OpenSim. I asked people about the biggest challenges of OpenSim and the single biggest challenge that people cited was too few developers, followed by stagnant user base, followed by a lack of technical innovation, and they were worried about the future of voice support. And there's going to be some people talking about voice here, Melanie Thielcler mentioned voice in this morning's developer panel, at least Laxton is also working on a new voice project. So that's top concern. People are also concerned about content protection and a lack of marketing and outreach that people saw for OpenSim to grow is the fact that it's so low cost and the fact that it's hyper connected, that people can own their own grids and that there's unlimited creativity on the platform. And I agree with all those. I think those are just huge benefits of OpenSim. Then a couple of months ago, I did an OpenSim grid survey. So this is a survey of people about how they felt about their own grids. So they weren't comparing one grid to another, they were telling us how they felt about their own grid. And 93% of people would absolutely recommend their grid to other people, which is aligned with other surveys that I've seen. People who are in OpenSim tend to love being here. OS grid was home to the most respondents, followed by Avitron, DigiWorlds, Altered Metaverse, Kitely Craft, Enchanted and Discovery. This is one of those survey questions that I used to double check responses from other sources like my stats report and other things that I'm seeing about grid traffic and usability. And then another double check question is the next one, where people go in OpenSim and OS grid is the most popular grid for people to visit, whether they live on there or not, but DigiWorlds and Kitely, then Altered Metaverse, then Avitron, Avitworlds and Metropolis. The previous slide here is the average person has been to five different grids in OpenSim, or at least five grids that they can remember off the top of their head. So some people responded by saying that they couldn't even remember all the grids that they visited, or that they visited all the grids, or that they visited dozens of grids, which didn't really come through in the stats because they couldn't give me an exact number. All right, so let's move on to Hyperica stats. Fred Bakutsen mentioned this in an earlier presentation today. And there are more than 5,000 grids being tracked by Hyperica, by the directory, more than 4,000 of them are dream grids, and online right now are nearly 400 grids. And he gave a lot more information about the dream grid distribution and the Hyperica directory, and we add those numbers in every month in our stats report as well. I also got fresh new stats from the Kitely market with some details there. The HyperGrid market currently delivers to 527 different grids. So they can deliver to grids that are HyperGrid enabled, that's pretty much by default, but they can also deliver to grids that are not HyperGrid enabled, but are closed. And the reason is because grid owners can set up their access so deliveries can happen. And the way that this works is that you go into the Kitely market, you go on the website, you buy the product, you pay via PayPal or you pay with Kitely credits, you select the avatar you want to deliver to, and it makes the delivery directly into your avatar's inventory. It is really cool, I use it all the time, it's the largest source of commercial content in OpenSim that is legally fully licensed, so it's a really, really great thing to have, and I highly recommend it. So Elon Touchner, who runs Kitely market, also provides stats on what percentage of the product listings on the Kitely market can be exported to other grids and which ones can't. So as you can see from this chart, which is from all the way from 2014 when they first enabled HyperGrid deliveries, all the growth on a HyperGrid, all the growth on a Kitely market has been on a HyperGrid. So despite what you hear or don't hear about creators being worried about selling to the HyperGrid, the data is pretty clear. Creators are embracing the HyperGrid for sales, they want to give people a legitimate place to legally buy content and get it easily delivered to their avatars. So there's a risk of content theft when you do that, but there's a risk of content theft when you sell in Second Life as well. There is no protection when you're on a HyperGrid except for high-end scripted content. My recommendation is if you do sell high-end scripted content, put as much of the scripting server side as you can, if this is important to your business model, because people can't steal server side scripts no matter how many God powers they have. And everything else can be stolen just as easily in world with copy bots. So staying on a closed grid doesn't really give any additional protection for 99 plus percent of creators. But being on a HyperGrid does give you a market of people who are interested and willing to pay for content. And clearly, people do see that. So the Kitely Market has brought in over $300,000 in revenues, Elon told me this week. And the top 10 merchants have all had more than $5,000 in sales. And the top 50 merchants have all had more than $1,000 in sales on the Kitely Market. In terms of how people are paying, it is 6% of people pay via PayPal with U.S. dollars, and 14% pay with Kitely credits. So if you're selling content on the Kitely Market, you can price it either way. If you're pricing it in U.S. dollars, you're not going to be losing too many customers. And here are the categories that are the best sellers on the Kitely Market. These are the things that people pay the most money for. Landscaping and plants are 23% of the total. Structures are 17%. Building components are 15%. And after that is avatar appearance, clothing and vehicles. I myself spent all my money on hair. But I can see if you're, especially if you're a corporate user with a budget or a school user with a budget, you're going to be spending money on landscaping and structures and building components. And finally, Kitely Market deliveries, obviously Kitely users all use the Kitely Market. But 65% of all Kitely Market deliveries go to other grids. And Ilan has told me which of those grids get the most deliveries to always grid users with the most active, which makes sense because they're the biggest grid with the most users. And then after that, it's DigiWorlds and then Dream Nation. So Dream Nation is one of the closed. So that confirms kind of where people who spend money are living. And a lot of people who spend money live in the lowest grid, despite the fact that it's a free open source, free to connect kind of platform. All right. So here's my contact information again. And here is the direct link to Shin is also on hyper good business in various places. And I'm also going to be posting a report on Monday with more details about the OpenSim sentiment survey that I ran this past week. And so I'm told that we're running out of time and that I should start taking questions. So if anyone has questions for me, this is the time to speak up. If not, I can talk about some of the other results from the OpenSim survey that we had about the grids early at this fall. So let's see. People were asking about teleporting to Metropolis. As far as I know, yes, I have it marked as a hyper good enabled grid. And I hear that somebody's working on another market for OpenSim. That's cool. We've had several grid owners and developers try to have competing markets to the Kytli market. And the Kytli market single biggest lack is that they do not currently support free content. I mean, that makes sense. They're a commercial grid. They cost the money to do the transfers a membership on the Kytli grid because you have to the upload having a Kytli avatar. So you have those that those objects that you have in Kytli, you can add them to your store list. And of course, you need to have your Kytli account in order to accept money. So and like I said, they don't have any free listings. I believe that there is definitely a market opportunity for an online market that involves free content, free legal content, please, thank you very much. And so if somebody does want to set up a competing market with strong content protections and free content, then I think there's definitely a market opportunity there. And I would love to write about it on on hypergrid business, so people complain about prices. Yes, so some of the items are like a buck or two bucks each. But if you pay with Kytli credits, you will often that a lot of stuff is a lot additional questions in there. I want to highlight some of the grids that did really well in our 12th annual open soon grid survey. Wow, I can't believe we've been doing this for 12 years. So every year, somebody writes in a writing candidate for a grid with over 300 grids. I can't like list all the grids as options in every question. So I mean, it would be impossible to scroll through. So I just provide the defaults of the top dozen or so grids by traffic based on our monthly stats report. But every year there's at least one grid with passionate users who write in their name. And this year, Wildwood Bayou, Utopia Sky and Enchanted Grid were all write in grids. So and Wildwood Bayou did extremely well overall. It's a lot easier to do well in the surveys if you're small grid, because users can get individual attention from the grid owners because it's a small grid, it's a closed community, people feel very supported. So the numbers do go down over time as the grid gets bigger and scales up. So this is a great, this survey is a great opportunity for small up and coming grids to show off how well they're doing. And in technology, Kitely came out on top in this year's survey. Kitely is unique among the grids, not just because of their huge investment into infrastructure into the Kitely market, but into the payment system, but also in the fact that they have on demand cloud based regions. So what that means is that when a region is being used, it's active and running. And when nobody's on a region, it basically goes to sleep. And so it doesn't waste any resources. So Kitely has been working on activating the regions as fast as possible. So they can load right back up again. And this allows them to provide really super high end premium quality hosting for $15 a month and less if you buy like in bulk per region. So why would buy you, we had Scott and Dorina's world came out behind. And for community, why would buy you had a perfect score followed by Enchanted and Avatron. And a lot of people wrote about how much they loved the grids that they're on. Especially the small, warm community that they've got. So, so, yes, so that's the state of the open sim community here and can also do this kind of going to sleep and somebody in the comments mentioned a dream grid does that is not dream grid dream nation does that as well. So no dream grid, sorry, not dream nation. So yes, that is like if open sim is going to scale up and ever get to the point where it's got millions of users, then definitely it's going to need to have that kind of instant on and off capability because otherwise keeping regions up and running all the time with everything all the content on it and weather and everything being simulated 24 seven is the cluttered resource intensive and wasteful and expensive. But if we can get prices down low enough so that maybe we can get free at supported regions like the geo cities for open Sam, I think that'd be really cool. And I personally, we also want to see a web viewer to make access easier. And I personally also do want to see VR support because I'm a big fan of VR. All right, so so that is the state of the open some community from where I see it. If you have any questions or anything else, email me that kind of information. OK, wonderful information, Maria. Thank you for an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference dot open simulator dot org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. Following this session is a meal break and the next session will begin at 12 30 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled the new open source and interoperability. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo to region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience.