Kitely » Ciaran Laval

Kitely Market Has Early Bird Offers

Jan 212013

Kitely are currently developing a marketplace for their virtual world, one they hope will also be able to serve other virtual worlds. They have recently blogged some information about how their market will work and they are offering an early bird promotion for merchants to apply for, the details can be found here.

The Kitely market will be different from the Second Life marketplace, for a start there will be listing fees, although I’m unsure how often you have to pay a listing fee, or whether it’s a one off fee. The listing fees are:

Add product: 100 KC
Add variation: 25 KC

KC being Kitely Credits. Now the reason for the variation fee is because variations will be listed under one product, so instead of seeing umpteen different listings for a shirt in different colours, you’ll have a listing with variations.

Kitely are also offering some early bird offers to try and encourage merchants to start setting up shop:

Early-Bird Discounts for All Merchants

There will be a 50% discount on listing fees until the market opens for buyers.

In addition, we will provide a special free world that registered merchants (see below) can use for creating their objects. Since we don’t charge upload fees, this means that even users using the Free Plan will be able to create items without any cost except for the listing fees. This world will only be available until the marketplace opens.

However if you’re an established merchant, you can apply to be a featured merchant and get even better discounts.

2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

Second Life, Social Networking, Virtual Worlds No Responses »

Dec 262012

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.

2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

Kitely Offer Unmetered Regions

Second Life, Virtual Worlds No Responses »

Oct 162012

This much needed rest from Second Life blogging is going to bugger up my end of the year review, I think I’ll just have to raid Inara Pey’s blog and take it from there! So a lot has happened, which I’m not going to cover, much … it’s time to look forward not back but something has been happening over at Kitely.

One of the big criticisms of Kitely was their pricing structure,which was pretty much based upon how long you, or your visitors spent in Kitely. This meant folk with popular venues would baulk at the costs, whereas those who wanted to spend a small amount of time there could get a whole region, or multiple regions at low costs. Swings and roundabouts and all that. However, during my absence Kitely have not only changed their pricing structure, they’ve also introduced a new unmetered option too.

Kitely developer Oren Hurvitz explained the new unmetered option on October 3rd in this blog post. This is in my view a big plus for Kitely and they now offer options for users to work out what deal suits them best, the pricing for unmetered monthly access is as follows:

1 Region $40 per month.
4 Regions $60 per month ($15 per region per month).
9 Regions $80 per month ($8.89 per region per month).
16 Regions $100 per month ($6.25 per region per month).

As you can see, the more regions you pay for, the lower the cost of each region.

Kitely v Second Life And Finding A Happy Medium

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 12 Responses »

Jun 182012

I think it’s fair to say that Kitely’s pricing model rubs some people up the wrong way. People look at the pricing plans and feel that a metered based world is not a good place to socialise, and perhaps they’re right. Kitely’s pricing plans look like this:

Monthly Plan Cost Minutes KC Free Worlds

Free Plan Free 120 0 1

Bronze Plan $5 1200 300 2

Silver Plan $20 5000 1000 10

Gold Plan $50 12000 3000 30

Platinum Plan $100 Unlimited 5000 100

Now compared to Second Life, this looks both great and bad, depending upon which end of the spectrum you’re coming from. Social users on a premium plan of just USD$72 a year can use Second Life unlimited, have a small plot of land, for free you can use Second Life unlimited anyway. However people who like to build, well the Kitely Silver Plan gives you 10 sims, 100,000 prims each sim, costs less a year than sim in Second Life does for a month and there’s no upfront purchase cost. Ok you haven’t got unlimited access on that plan, but it’s still over eighty hours a month.

Ideally, I can see the Kitely model complimenting Second Life, rather than competing with it.

Kitely Adds Teleports And Additional Viewer Support

Virtual Worlds 6 Responses »

Apr 052012

A couple of weeks back I was in Kitely, when CEO Ilan Tochner arrived to say hello to me inworld and we had an informal off the record chat. However, some of those off the record features that Ilan told me about have already been implemented! Oren Hurvitz blogged at the end of March about the new features, including world to world teleports and making the choice of viewer you use a less scary feature.

Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.

The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!

It’s Still All About Tier

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 5 Responses »

Apr 052012

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

Kitely Now Offers Email And Twitter Signup Options

Virtual Worlds 3 Responses »

Mar 022012

Kitely, the Amazon cloud based virtual world running on OpenSim have announced that you can now signup with a Twitter or Email account. This is a welcome development as some people, myself included, refused to signup with a Facebook account … well I don’t have a Facebook account! Not a personal profile anyway, I have a Facebook page.

The details of the changes can be found in this blog post. I have signed up via Twitter and it was an extremely smooth process, I also have two hours access a month and an Island to play with on the free account model, if I find Kitely engaging then I’ll look at the other pricing plans but in terms of trying it out, this is a good model.

Kitely has a pay as you go pricing plan, although you can opt to pay for visitors to your Island if you choose, I don’t think that will be the model most follow, however as I said, on the free account you get two hours a month anyway. Five bucks a month gets you twenty hours a month in Kitely plus a second region, whereas USD$20 gets you around 83 hours a month and 10 regions to play with, USD$50 a month gets you 200 hours a month and 30 regions whereas USD$100 a month gives you unlimited time in Kitely plus a whopping 100 regions to play with. However these are personal minutes, so you can see why for some, the Kitely model isn’t appealing.

Kitely owner Ilan Tochner has updated me in the comments about the pricing model to say that initial minutes are available due to people receiving Kitely Credits on the payment plans, so here’s a correction:

$5 / month = 25 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$20 / month = 100 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$50 / month = 250 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$100 / month = (unlimited Minutes + 5000 KC) / month

However if you want to see a decent use case for Kitely, there’s a post over at Hypergrid Business about an architecht selling his prefab sims.

2011 Reviewed

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 2 Responses »

Dec 302011

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fourth in a series of annual posts, the other three look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab messing around with their blog, meaning links that were working at the time, no longer working. However that just means I get to read them again and catch up, so there is a plus side to that.

2011 brought us viewer improvements, Mesh, lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. On the downside, Linden Lab’s use of the blog to inform us of new features and tools was pretty poor to say the least. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects, so let’s get this rolling.

January

Blue Mars reversed several gears and announced it would become an app for the iPhone and iPad, as is the way with these things, links in the linked article no longer work.

The Grid merger between adult and teen grids was in operation, this doesn’t seem to have caused many complications at all, with the exception of over zealous word filters but we’ll come to that later.

FJ Linden blogged about improvements, including talk of a new group chat system, improved region crossings, web based profiles and announced that the group limit was being raised from twenty five slots to forty two.

I moved my blog back here, after three and a bit years of being a guest blogger on Nobody Fugazi’s Your2ndPlace. Nobody Fugazi had generously allowed a few of us, including Marx Dudek, Arthur Fermi, Sarah Nerd, Jezebel Bailey and Konner McDonnell to blog on his site but as he no longer had a Second Life account and he was pondering what to do with the site, I suggested that he should concentrate on his own projects, none of the others threw anything at me over the suggestion!

New CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble blogged about how he had been getting immersed in Second Life, exploring, building and scripting in his first few weeks and wearing a Toga too! I noted how he had a warm welcome, and also suggested Second Life would benefit from a better system for implementing NPC’s.

SL Marketplace changed its ratings system to match the three inworld maturity ratings of General, Moderate and Adult and promptly annoyed merchants because of how over zealous the word filter for automatically changing the maturity rating of a listing was, this one runs and runs.

Inara Pey reported that Esbee Linden was leaving, courtesy of Daniel Voyager reporting it! Daniel changed his blog during the year so old links don’t work.

Kitely has potential but Second Life is still the Daddy

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 4 Responses »

Mar 302011

Kitely, an Opensim based virtual world provider, has been talked about by Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid Business and Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. The system, running from Amazon’s cloud services has some interesting concepts and some great potential, it’s also far from ready for prime time and very new.

Interesting points to note are that sims can go to sleep when not in use, rather quickly I’m told, this is an important concept because the billing policy of Kitely is per visitor minute, rather than a flat fee. That’s an interesting way of doing things. Logins are managed via Facebook connect, this for me is an absolute dealbreaker and no amount of saying lots of people use Facebook connect will change my mind, when that’s the only login choice in town, I simply choose not to engage. I’ve currently got Facebook blocked on my firewall, if I have a need to use it I’ll unblock it.

However plenty of folk are happy as Larry to use Facebook connect and therefore, Kitely is worthy of discussion, plus it’s a virtual world and I’m interested in them, and it’s my blog, so neener neener.