By:
On:

Voxelus is planning to expand its virtual reality creation platform with a deal to bring 7,000 3D assets to its marketplace during the second quarter of this year, and 16,000 more during the second half of the year, company co-founder and CEO Martin Repetto told Hypergrid Business. “This is huge news forRead More →

By:
On:

By all indications, the hypergrid is hopping. As of mid-January, 68 percent of all active users, 75 percent of all public OpenSim grids, and 93 percent of all regions were on the hypergrid, and the number of hypergrid events and communities is exploding. The Kitely Market now delivers to moreRead More →

By:
On:

Press release: 3rd Rock Grid to transition to Podex 3rd Rock Grid is going through a number of changes as part of a transition to a new ownership model. One of the changes will be to transition away from directly managing their currency, the Geode, otherwise known as the GO$.Read More →

By:
On:

In this article I want to address the application of the regulations of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) to businesses dealing with virtual currencies. This aspect of regulations is often overlooked or ignored, but the fines are very real. This spring, PayPal was fined $7,658,300 because they allowed transactions with Iranian andRead More →

By:
On:

  New York State Department of Financial Services has recently released a 31 page application for anyone who wants to engage in doing business with virtual currencies. The application is a convoluted and cumbersome to say the least. But most of all it is costly. If the objective was to createRead More →

By:
On:

I’ve written about Bitcoin before, warning that I was worried about volatility and botnets. Bitcoin has been on my mind again, lately, due to a big bubble spurred in part by the Cyprus financial crisis, worries that Linden Dollars might see increased regulation, and a Kaspersky Labs report about botnets beingRead More →

By:
On:

Linden Dollar: Another Virtual Currency Affected by FinCEN. Bitcoin has been in the news recently. But bitcoin is not the only virtual currency. Virtual currencies, in one form or another are here to stay. When U.S. Treasury Department’s enforcement arm, FinCEN, issued its interpretive statement, it recognized this much. TheRead More →

By:
On:

Credit card thieves have figured out a way to steal money from OpenSim grid owners. They take the credit cards, and use them to purchase virtual currency from the grids. Then they turn around and redeem the currency for cash before the card holder notices the theft and complains. TheRead More →

By:
On:

The number of OpenSim grids accepting the multi-grid, hypergrid-enabled Open Metaverse Currency (OMC) has continued to grow in the first half of this year, now at an all-time high of 29 grids. Meanwhile, the number of registered users has tripled since the start of the year. In addition, the totalRead More →

By:
On:

Many people view virtual online currencies; the kind used in online websites such as Second Life for example, as being wholly different from their real life counterparts. Many online games have their own currencies with their own currency conversion rates but until now they have not been viewed in anyRead More →

By:
On:

In the past year, the OMC virtual currency has gained both popularity and usefulness, with both the total currency in circulation and the number of grids it’s available for use on growing. The OMC, or Open Metaverse Currency, is a virtual currency from Austria-based VirWoX  that can be used to buyRead More →

By:
On:

One of the key early decisions to game design or creating a virtual currency platform is designing the price and exchange rate of virtual currency. Unfortunately after it’s been released, it’s also one of the most difficult to change, because the change impacts the userbase and economy of the systemRead More →

By:
On:

Update: I still recommend the OMC currency, which has grown substantially since this article was first written and now used on 30 OpenSim grids. The two other currencies I mentioned — V$ and G$ — have not been getting much traction in OpenSim, and have pretty much faded away. SomeRead More →

By:
On:

CyberCoinBank’s G$ is taking an early lead over the OMC multi-grid currency from Virwox. Although G$ is only accepted on 8 grids, compared to 14 grids for OMC, there is over 63 million G$ (US $210,000) in circulation, compared to just 302,037 OMC (US $1,045). There are several reasons forRead More →

By:
On:

Two more grids have switched to the recently-released hypergrid-enabled OMC (Open Metaverse Currency) from Virwox, FrancoGrid and Avatar Hangout, bringing the total number of grids using the currency to six. The other four grids supporting the currency are Grid4Us, GermanGrid, OpenNeuland, and WilderWesten. Between them, the six grids total overRead More →

By:
On:

[Update: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public OpenSim grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations. Directory indexes more than 100 shopping and freebie store locations.] Is it too early to start doing business in OpenSim? We are certainly not in an age of v-commerce, though we can see itRead More →

By:
On:

This week, ReactionGrid has released its $8,950 Banbury virtual world server, for those who want to physically own their own virtual universe. But for customers willing to let their virtual worlds be managed by someone else, there are also inexpensive hosted options. Today, ReactionGrid runs one public grid, and aRead More →

By:
On:

More than a dozen entrepreneurs got together Thursday night — or Friday morning, depending on their time zone — in OSGrid’s Business Center to discuss entrepreneurship on the emerging 3D Internet, or the hypergrid. Those attending included “Richardus Raymaker,” Jim Siler (“Omar Abdelrahim”), “Vette Chrome”, “RetroDan Dezno”, “Zauber Paracelsus”, “SimRead More →

By:
On:

Unlike Second Life, the open source virtual world platform OpenSim does not have a built-in currency system. To users, this is a significant lack of functionality – but developers see it as a feature. The reason? OpenSim is not a clone of the Second Life game – that multi-user virtualRead More →

By:
On:

When it comes to virtual world real estate and design, DeepThink has been a big player, operating one of the largest continents in Second Life. But in recent months, the Shanghai-based company has been refocusing on OpenSim, the open-source platform that’s rapidly becoming the standard for enterprise virtual worlds. OpenSimRead More →

By:
On:

According to OpenSim core developer Charles Krinke, there are 330 key functions in Second Life – and 300 of them have been fully implemented in OpenSim. Of the remaining 30, half have to do with vehicle physics, he said. These are the functions that allow virtual passengers to ride inRead More →

By:
On:

Everybody knows about the big three of virtual business: sex, gambling, and role-playing. But with the new OpenSim platform and hyperlinks between different virtual worlds, the three-dimension Internet is about to explode as a serious platform. Here are a few ways to take advantage of it.Read More →

By:
On:

According to Ralf Haifisch, a virtual worlds developer, what we’re seeing now is the emergence of a new Internet. And he knows what’s he’s talking about – he was the first one in his part of Germany to run an Internet host there – and sent me a document dating back to 1991 attesting this fact.Read More →

By:
On:

If you want to see how the OpenSim platform works in practice – and who doesn’t want a glipse of the next generation of the Internet? – you might be tempted to come to the OSGrid, the largest public OpenSim deployment that’s out there right now. Don’t. If you want to see a nice, stable OpenSim project, go to the Folk Cafe at Grid4us.Read More →