Kitely – Page 5 – Ciaran Laval

December 14, 2013December 14, 2013

Kitely Announces New Pricing Plans

It’s a matter of out with the old and in with the new as Kitely announces new pricing plans for their virtual world offerings.

Going – The USD$35 a month Gold Plan that gave users 20 free time based regions and unlimited access.

Going – The USD$20 a month Silver Plan that gave users 10 free time based regions and 120 hours access to time based regions. Access to fixed price regions doesn’t deduct time from a time based plan.

Gone – The USD$5 a month Bronze Plan that gave users 2 free time based regions and 30 hours access to time based regions.

Incoming – The USD$19.95 Premium Account which gives users 5 free time based regions and no restrictions on time spent in time based regions, your own or anyone else’s. This will replace the Gold and Silver plans. The Bronze plan is disappearing completely and people on the Bronze plan will be put on the regular account plan, which will replace the current free based plan. The details on the new regular account plan are not detailed anywhere I can see.

However there’s a grandfathered perk on offer for Gold and Silver plans which means if you’re using one of these plans at the end of the year you can stay on those plans and receive added perks. For example the Silver Plan will no longer have the 120 hours restriction, you’ll have unlimited access to time based regions as well as still being able to have 10 time based regions instead of 5 for the Premium Account.

The Gold plan, which has always had unlimited access to time based regions will boost the number of free time based regions you can have from the current 20 free time based regions to 30 free time based regions.

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November 19, 2013

Why Don’t Amazon, Paypal or Linden Lab offer Virtual Currency Exchanges To Other Business?

One of the issues regarding Cloud Party is the inability to cash out. This is understandable as content creators are more likely to be tempted to engage if they can find financial reward. Cloud Party do allow you to pay for services such as island rentals using Cloud Party coins, so there is a degree of economic movement but it stays firmly within Cloud Party.

Kitely on the other hand allow people to list items on their marketplace with the option of a Paypal payment as well as Kitely credits. There’s no cashing out from Kitely but paypal payments are a way of a merchant getting cold hard cash. Again, like Cloud Party, the inworld currency can be used to pay for services.

However what people would really like to be able to do is to sell Cloud Party coins or Kitely credits in the same manner as Linden Dollars can be bought and sold. The beauty of this solution is that it adds an added level of consumer confidence, because when they make a purchase, they are doing so with an inworld currency, they aren’t handing over details to a stranger in a virtual land. That’s the beauty of the virtual currency.

Recent legislation in the USA has given platform providers the heebie jeebies about users selling virtual currencies, hence why they aren’t that widely available. However you would think that someone would seize the opportunity to tap into this market, be that Paypal, Amazon or even Linden Lab.

Now I’m sure plenty of companies would like the idea of selling virtual currencies to consumers, the part they aren’t so keen on is allowing users to sell that virtual currency. Linden Lab of course do this with the Lindex, so why can’t they expand this to offering a service to other companies?

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November 6, 2013November 6, 2013

I Got Two Turntables And A Microphone

I downloaded a Sinclair Spectrum emulator for the android the other week. After the initial buzz of seeing all those old game titles from the eighties my interest waned. The android is a bit clunky for such games, many games don’t work and time has not been kind to many of them. However it was a thrill at first. When I had a Speccy as a kid, so did lots of my school friends. We’d share games (piracy as my teacher scolded us, so don’t try that at home). We’d go to each others houses, we’d have fun not only due to the games but because there was also a social aspect.

I left the Speccy behind many moons ago, as I did the Commodore Amiga after that, and I have been looking to see if there’s a legal Amiga emulator but will most likely go through the same cycle as I did with the Speccy emulator, thrill, then flat and no social side to keep the interest.

As it’s my blog I can draw comparisons between the Speccy and Second Life, a bit of a stretch it may be but I can draw them. The Speccy was not the height of technology on release, there were better products around but the Speccy caught the imagination. Therefore software developers were alerted to it and stretched the Speccy to limits beyond what many thought it was capable of, Lords Of Midnight springs to mind here. The Speccy had the people and of all the ingredients that make a product a success, that is arguably the most important one.

Roll forward many years and Second Life is simply where it’s at in virtual world terms. Cloud Party has some very impressive concepts going for it. I like their royalty system on content sales whereby if you sell an asset with royalties enabled, if someone else then sells another asset whilst using your asset as part of the build, you’ll receive a royalty payment. Cloud Party has also had materials for quite a while now. Another impressive apsect of Cloud Party is that objects are not the only limiting factor in a build. In Cloud Party you can have x amount of objects, or x amount triangles or x amount of bandwidth, whichever you hit first will strike the build limit. This is a well considered concept as objects are far from the only issue when it comes to performance.

Kitely has some impressive offerings, such as putting sims to sleep when not in use due to using a cloud based system. Kitely is also not only cheaper than Second Life, but for those who may only spend a few hours a month there they have a time based billing option and under any plan you get at least one free sim to play around with.

Inworldz is also cheaper than Second Life, Jim Tarber and the team are also moving in directions Second Life isn’t, as can be seen in the Inworldz Techblog where they inform visitors they’re implementing physX and project Thoosa, which is aimed at making everything run faster and more efficiently. Inworldz has also implemented Qarl’s mesh deformer project.

However despite these advances in other virtual worlds, Second Life still has that magical community ingredient and what makes this all the more impressive is that Second Life still has the community despite the fact that Linden Lab have been actively distancing themselves from the Second Life community for a few years now.

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October 22, 2013

TOS Debate – It’s A Cyn

The TOS debate goes on, there’s an epic three hour (TLDL) video of a legal panel meeting inworld, which you can view here: http://youtu.be/jifM2n4ttSE. Now if that’s too daunting for you, Bixyl Shuftan comes to the rescue with a summary of the meeting (although Bixyl does point out that the video really helps to understand the details).

Personally I feel that the TOS oversteps the mark and really, Linden Lab should explain to their users where this is headed because the new TOS makes very uncomfortable reading. However when concerns like this are raised others see opportunities. Kitely have already done this with a blog post explaining their more friendly sounding TOS when it comes to content creators.

Now into the fray comes Cloud Party. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes posts information regarding a blog post from Cloud Party’s Cyn Skyberg. Cyn Skyberg used to go by the name of Cyn Linden and parade around Second Life as a pirate with a peg leg whilst being a fearless leader of the support team, she also had a taste for eels …… oh wait, that was the band, The Eels! I’m not making this up! More of that later, for now, the blog post from Cyn states:

“In short, our TOS states “Cloud Party does not claim any ownership right in any Member content”.

Photos, textures, materials, objects, models, scripts and all other content uploaded to our platform are owned solely by the user. We do reserve the right to use them for shameless promotion of the platform via marketing, but the content you create is, and always will be, yours. In fact, there is a “download original” button for everything you put into the service, so you can grab it whenever you like.”

The devil of course is in the detail and below the cut I’ll go into more detail about the detail, unless you’re already below the cut, then the detail will be right below this sentence!

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January 21, 2013

Kitely Market Has Early Bird Offers

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.

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