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Virtual Worlds - I love them. Ever since I read Snow Crash in 1992 I was obsessed. When Second Life came around I signed right up. For a while I was a content creator in world, building, texturing, scripting, sculpting and more. I made real money from my work in Second Life and I found the work I did there enhanced my skills overall as an artist. For an artist the ability to interact with my creations was addictive and immensely satisfying.
Then at some point during the various regime changes over at Second Life the in-world economy and social atmosphere seemed to radically change. Land prices increased while sales went down. Two things that to a part time builder such as myself made maintaining SL as a hobby rather difficult. I kept an eye on the Virtual World options that were cropping up over the years, anxious to find a substitute with better pricing, updated technology but with that feeling we had in the early days of Second Life. We were pixel revolutionaries, virtual pioneers working together to create something special.
I'm happy to say I feel I finally found my new home in a Virtual Worlds company called Kitely.
While originally based on OpenSim technology for virtual worlds, Kitely has added their own optimizations which makes their user experience low lag. (Something that is the bane of every avatar in Second Life's existence)
Kitely also takes a unique approach to pricing. Recognizing that while Second Life might be free to play - that's only because the content creators and landowners are footing that bill for everyone with the large fees they pay monthly for basically, the privilege of entertaining and providing content for everyone with free accounts.
Kitely's basic account includes a free island, that's right a free virtual world of your own. This is a feature that is unbelievable to me when compared to Second Life's $300.00 a month fee for owning the same amount of pixel property on their servers. Free land also encourages commerce in Kitely. After all, all that empty space needs to be filled with something.
With weekly meetings open to the public Kitely has an open and transparent management model that reminds me of the early days of SL. Of course they also have community forums and an active blog. But, one of the many things that separates Kitely from all the other virtual worlds currently offering themselves as Second Life alternatives, is the level of professionalism. This is a real company, run by a dedicated staff that is serious about what they do. Kitely has all the signs of being up for the job and around for a long time. (As opposed to a myriad of other virtual worlds and open sim projects that seem run by a staff more focused on gossip and cliques then professionalism. Worse some have shut down taking their customers money with them.)
I recently caught up with Ilan Tochner, co-founder and CEO of Kitely and he was good enough to share some detailed information with me regarding Kitely's present, and its future.
__GeekMom: Can you explain a little in layman's terms why the way Kitely works is better than other virtual worlds? __
Ilan Tochner: Most virtual worlds stay up 24/7, even if there's no one in them. This is very wasteful due to the cost of keeping the servers running. At Kitely we provide virtual worlds on demand: our servers run in the cloud, and we only start them when someone enters a virtual world. This gives us several major benefits: first, our costs are low, and we pass on these cost savings to our customers. Second, we allow creating many unique virtual worlds. For example, some of our customers are teachers and they let each of their students create their own virtual world. This would be impossible with traditional always-on worlds. Third, we give each virtual world a lot of resources so that it runs with great performance whenever it's active. And finally, we don't use unnecessary resources, thus helping to save the planet :)
Our virtual worlds are based on a standard technology called OpenSim. However, we have added many proprietary optimizations which makes our version faster and more feature-rich than standard OpenSim. For example, we replaced OpenSim's inventory and asset services with our own cloud-based systems, which improve performance significantly. We also added a feature called Advanced Megaregions, which allows creating very large virtual worlds that have no lag when moving between different regions (parts) of the world.
Our website has a very easy-to-use user interface, so it takes just minutes to create your first world. Due to the on-demand nature of our system you can easily create worlds at any time: there are no setup costs or delays.
__GM: What exciting new upcoming features will Kitely be implementing soon? __
IT: We are now working on a marketplace for virtual items such as clothes, buildings, and objects that can be placed in virtual worlds. We're very excited about this project because it will make it extremely easy to buy and sell items. We looked at existing virtual-world marketplaces when we designed our market, and we found that they're very limited in functionality and often lack many of the features that big e-commerce sites such as Amazon have. This makes it slow and difficult to find items. Our market will make it easy to find items using features such as attributes and full-text search, and it will be fast and beautiful. We've already got some well-known content creators that are preparing items to sell in this marketplace.
GM: What kind of monetization plans do you have for the future?
IT: We plan to open the Kitely Market in June. Once that happens you'll be able to sell digital goods to other Kitely users. Afterwards we intend to open the market to users of other virtual worlds as well. Our sellers will have the choice of selling their content using either our virtual currency (Kitely Credits), which can be used only inside our service, or using real money which will be deposited to their PayPal account automatically.
We're currently offering a promotion for content creators who upload content to the upcoming marketplace before it opens; for more information see our Virtual Worlds Market early-bird promotion.
GM: Kitely seems kid friendly. Is this by design?
IT: We had decided early on to make sure that kids can use Kitely safely, without being subjected to the adult content that is common in most virtual worlds that support user-generated content. Each user and virtual world have a maturity rating, and we don't allow users to see virtual worlds that aren't appropriate for them. This means that kids will only see kid-friendly virtual worlds. We have simple tools on our website that let you choose who may enter the worlds that you create.
To set your child's maturity rating, login to their account; go to the Settings page; and attempt to change the account's maturity rating to Adult. This won't actually succeed: you will be asked to enter your child's date of birth, and when the date of birth shows that your child is under 13 they will be locked into the "General" maturity rating. This maturity rating can't be changed by them later (it can only be changed by contacting us).
