[vos-d] blog mention of VOS

[Peter Amstutz]

Ken -- as Reed said, you've pretty much nailed our planned revenue 
model, but it's good to see you come up with the same ideas, meaning 
they arn't too exotic (and thus will appeal to potential investors.)

On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 01:50:54PM -0800, Ken Taylor wrote:

> 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?

Having a solid product is absolutely the biggest step, which is 
precisely why we're seeking funding to support full time development.  I 
have been working on some demos for s4, and it was interesting to come 
back after not working on it for a while and refresh my mind as to what 
does work well and what doesn't.

Interestingly, a lot of VOS development has been driven by what makes 
the 3D browser easy to implement.  Since the non-threaded s3 Ter'Angreal 
would often go nonresponsive for many seconds due to I/O waiting, s4 
introduced threading, including asynchronous callbacks that could happen 
in any thread.  As it turns out, the threading model in s4, while fine 
for the server process, was disasterously bad for Ter'Angreal stability.  
The upcoming s5 will address concurrency again with a new model that 
should prove much easier to use.  Our greatest advantage, fundamentally, 
is that we've gone through a a number of iterations of design and 
implementation already, and so we bring a lot of experience to the table 
in connecting our ideas about the architechture to actual implementation 
issues that crop up when you sit down to write a real user-facing 
application.

Being free software is our other big advantage, since that narrows down 
the field of serious competition to Verse and Croquet.  Second Life 
doesn't count unless/until Linden Labs releases their server software, 
or people start running their own servers based on OpenSim in large 
numbers, which would effectively constitute a major fork of the Second 
Life platform.

> 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.

That's precisely the analogy I've been using, and I think it's pretty 
accurate.

> 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 ;)

People have coined the term "Web 3.D"...  But except for the actual 
Web3D (VRML/X3D) efforts, when you start to dig into aspects of the web 
that really made it successful I don't know of any technology besides 
VOS that really survives the Web analogy.  (VRML would have been great 
had they addressed multiuser issues a lot sooner, and not created 
something so topheavy that it requires months of effort to do anything 
more complicated that import/export static meshes.)

Announcements of new 3D virtual worlds seem to be coming weekly if not 
daily, so my hope is the odds are good that we'll be able to find some 
investor who's palms are itchy to get in on the 3D market ;-)

I actually have been strongly advised to avoid venture capital at this 
stage, and instead have been working connections with people who are 
interested in funding free software development.

> (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!)

Very true.  Well, I hope that I can at least point to active community 
here on our little mailing list to show that people are really 
interested in this, and that we've managed to create a small but stable 
community.

> 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!

Actually, the real plan is get funding for s5 development (Step 1).  The 
goal would be to the point where we have a minimal platform that is 
usable by moderately technical people (say the average Linux geek) to 
make their own interactive spaces without requiring a whole C++ build 
environment or the exchange of many long support emails.  At that point, 
we will start to build a real, long-lasting end user community.  That 
will get us to Step 2, which is to go for more significant investment 
funds and build a company that can capitalize on the platform more 
directly.  Then we sell VOS services far and wide, show up on the covers 
of magazines, and hopefully make it to Step 3 :-)

[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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