Kitely — the low-cost, cloud-based OpenSim grid — is planning to launch an online content marketplace, and is looking for content creators to provide input about what features they would like to see.
Discussions began at in-world meetings on November 28 and December 4, and have since continued online, on the Kitely users forum.
Content creators have been asked to suggest possible categories and subcategories for objects, and what types of information about content would be useful for merchants and buyers.
“Our goal is to improve upon the Second Life Marketplace,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “Content creators have already told us various ways in which they believe this can be achieved.”
One major difference is that Kitely allows users to copy or download entire regions, in the form of OAR files. In addition, Kitely plans to offer hypergrid connectivity in the future, allowing users to teleport to other grids. Some content creators may be fine with having their content leave the grid, while others are not.
To deal with this, Kitely marketplace merchants will be able to sell their content with export permissions, or without.
“Content creators will be able to sell content at different prices for items with and without this export permission — or not offer this option at all if they wish to make the content Kitely-specific,” Tochner said. “Content creators and buyers can have the best of both world. The same content protection you get with a closed grid while maintaining the ability to export OAR files and, in the future, export items via the hypergrid.”
The marketplace will start getting rolled out in the “next couple of months,” he said. But details are still being worked out, he added.
“And the full functionality won’t be available all at once,” he said. “We will deploy things in stages.”
Those interested in learning more about the marketplace can also come to the regular Kitely Mentor Group meetings, he said, which are every Wednesday afternoon at 1 p.m. SLT on the Kitely Beach region.
Merchants looking to get a head start can start uploading their content to Kitely today, he added, using Imprudence, Angstrom, or Second Inventory.
Each user gets six free hours of use the first month they sign up, plus one free region capable of holding up to 100,000 prims. They get two free hours each month after that.
In other Kitely news, grid regions will now load faster, co-founder and VP of R&D Oren Hurvitz announced today.
“The improvements we rolled out today make Kitely perform significantly better than regular OpenSim,” said Tochner. “Worlds start faster, assets appear more quickly, and lag after login has almost been eliminated.  It’s even more impressive when the viewer cache has been cleared beforehand so you can see how much better assets are streamed in Kitely than in Second Life and regular OpenSim. This is very big news from a usability point of view.”
This improvement will go into effect the second time a region is started after the upgrade goes into effect, he added.
In addition, Angstrom has been added as a supported viewer, Hurvitz announced.
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