[vos-d] blog mention of VOS

[Ken Taylor]

Peter Amstutz wrote:
> Regarding the last point (the funding, not the crushing), I am currently
> working on writing up development and design plans and working towards
> the actual proposal we will present to potential funding sources.  If
> anyone has any special experience writing proposals or working with
> investors, please contact me.  Since we're going for a distinctly
> nontraditional business model (open source, open development, community
> involvement early and as much as possible) some of this is uncharted
> territory...
>

I work at a startup, but I don't really pay too much attention to the VCs or
the business strategy, and I certainly have never written a business plan.
Besides, we're a bit more of a traditional startup model - have new
technology, patent it, make product, sell product, make money, pay VCs.
Funding VOS is going to be a bit different.

But in case you care, here are my thoughts on the issue. The VCs are going
to want to know [at least] two things - how is VOS going to make money, and
why is it different from anything else out there. It's really important for
startups to have some edge - something that no one else is doing.

As for making money... you can't really sell the software, as it's open
source. I mean, you can sell distributions of it, but you're not going to
profit much off of that. I can think of a few ways Interreality.org can make
some revenue:
-        Support. If some big customers decide to adopt VOS, they'll
probably want a support structure. You can take the "red hat enterprise
linux" model here and dedicate programmers and a support team to helping out
other companies who want to set up and maintain a VOS server. They may even
need custom plugins written for them, or have specific features they need to
go into newer versions of VOS. Your intimate relationship with the core VOS
libraries will make you the best choice for these support services, and this
is probably the best bet for revenue over time. Big companies especially
really like the comfort that comes with a well-supported product, and often
will choose a well-supported (though perhaps shoddy and expensive) product
over a high-quality, free, yet completely unsupported one. If you can have a
high-quality product that is also officially supported - all the beter!
Another possible line of revenue is to publish books about programming in
the VOS environment, A3DL, supporting a VOS server, etc... (O'Reilly?)
-        Hosting. Interreality.org could set up a server farm and provide
online space for people to host their own worlds, and charge (or use
advertising support) for different levels of hosting. Kinda like the
"geocities" of the metaverse. Obviously other companies can set up hosting,
as well, so there's less of a distinction from competitors, here, except
that you guys really know the technology and can tweak it to make your
servers run the best - and you can be the first up and get a good solid
user-base running to help keep business through network effects.
-        Portal. The "yahoo" of the metaverse. Not only hosting sites and
content, but you could serve as the starting point to go and visit any other
VOS-based content on the internet, and to serve as a basic place for news,
information, games, shopping, community, or whatever else people do on
portal sites these days. As other people set up their own VOS servers you
would link to them to help expand the "interreality metaverse." Primary
revenue here would probably be through advertising... but hey, maybe google
would want to buy your portal so they can continue their quest to be the
one-portal-for-everything-on-the-internet-ever - and getting google to buy
you certainly isn't a bad revenue model ;)
-        Content creation. You could also have services to design and
implement virtual worlds/objects/etc for clients. Again, your close
relationship to the technology and early start will help differentiate you,
but this might be the riskiest revenue path and most open to competition.
-        Donations. They can't hurt :)

Of course, for *any* of this to make money, people will have to want to use
VOS, and you'll need a solid product and good user base to start with. So a
big question you have to address is... why VOS, and why not some other
multi-user shared-space technology? How exactly are you going to "crush" the
huge foothold that second-life has at the moment?

Well I like to think of it as an analogy - right now second-life is king.
And services like second-life, there, and active worlds are much like the
proprietary online service providers of the early 90s. Back then, AOL was
king, and prodigy and compuserve held solid places in the market as well.
But then came the web - an open, decentralized system that anyone could
serve content on. For a while, the proprietary ISPs and the web were
side-by-side, but eventually the web overtook everything and the ISPs had to
re-factor their services to work within it.

VOS is kinda like the web ("Web 3.0"? Maybe. I'm not sure I like these
buzzwords... but some VCs might!). It's slated to be an open, decentralized
technology through which anyone can publish content and which not any one
company controls. My prediction is that the "AOL" that is second-life will
never really go away, but eventually the proprietary, closed, separated
systems will have to move aside and make room for an open, decentralized,
interconnected metaverse platform. And what you need to do is convince some
VCs that VOS is going to be that platform ;)

(Of course, there's another huge part of all this that I haven't covered,
and that's convincing the VCs that not only does your technology have
potential, but that you're going to be able to properly manage the project:
That you'll be able to keep the technology development on track, hire people
and set up the logistics required to roll out all the services through which
you hope to make money, and of course estimate how much it's all gonna cost.
This is all something that I really don't know much about, and will probably
be a huge challenge to figure out!)

So in conclusion, your business plan should look something like this:
Step 1) Create an open platform for the online metaverse
Step 2) ???
Step 3) PROFIT!

-Ken