STATE OF THERE

Members of the community, fellow Thereians:

Just a few months ago, I had the privilege to announce that the There Service had been “spun out” as an independent company known as Makena Technologies. Today, at the first post-spin out There Real Life Gathering, I’d like to review our progress since the spin out, and our plans going forward.

On behalf of the Makena staff, I would like to first thank everyone in the community for their patience, support, and encouragement during this transition. As many of you know, starting a new company is quite an adventure, punctuated by what seems like an endless series of administrative details like payroll, benefits, 401-K, real estate, insurance, etc, etc. It is only through your continued support that we have been able to do all this and make significant forward progress at the same time.

On that note, I’d like to remind everyone (as I often have to remind myself) that as much fun as There is, it is a business. And, as a business, one of the important things is the bottom line because, as you all know, if the business isn’t healthy, there wouldn’t be a There for all of us to enjoy. And, to keep the business healthy, we have to charge for stuff, even stuff which we’d like to make free. As much as possible, we try and tailor the charge for something to what it costs us to provide it – that’s where we got resource based pricing, for example.

The point of all this is when you find us charging for something, or charging more than you’d like for something, it’s probably not because we’re greedy, money-grubbing, usurious clods, it’s probably because that’s what it costs us to make this a viable business. Would we like to charge less? Sure. Can we always? No. But, be rest assured that we know that the more people we can get into the world, and get into participating, the better place it is, and we’re very sensitive to price as a barrier, and we’re always trying to make less so.

In fact, if you look at our newest pricing programs, the $9.95 or “Basic Shopper” membership includes $10.00 worth of Therebucks, making it essentially free for the new member. I know this doesn’t address all of your concerns about pricing, but I hope it shows you how we’re thinking about it.  

Before reviewing our progress since the last State of There, I’d like to digress a bit and talk about Makena’s strategy for making There successful. As you can imagine, spinning it out gave us a chance to “start fresh” in many ways, and we’re trying to take full advantage of this opportunity. Like a very few other businesses, There is an almost purely member created and supported world, I’m very comfortable sharing this normally “internal” information with you.

The five key strategies are:


However, there are a very few that have passed muster, and while I can't talk about them now, we believe they're going to be very exciting for both you and There, bringing a new influx of members and sources of revenue to us.

Since the last State of There, we've made significant progress on many fronts.

For me, and I think for you, one of the most exciting fronts has been hiring. In a few short months, we've met all of our hiring goals and put together what we believe is the right team to carry There forward.

Changes to the product, and the service, include:


We normally don’t cover Operations and IT in the State Of There, but this group has been so instrumental to our success I’m going to put an end to that omission.

One of their most impressive accomplishments was physically moving the entire service from one facility to another in one weekend. Considering how challenging some of us find just moving our computers from one room to another, I think you have to agree it was pretty amazing.

As if that wasn’t enough, Operations also had the task of “splitting” the Forterra and Makena networks in two, and building up our own internal “server farm” for office operations.  This was more appropriate than you might think since they also took over all IT responsibilities.

Finally, we also conducted a comprehensive security review and implemented several improvements to our internal and site security.

And they did all this AND STILL kept the service running. Wow.


In customer service, as you can see, we’ve adder Helper_Suzanne, and Helper_Julian to customer support. These additions may make it possible to extend support hours in the future, which we know is an issue for some of you.

We also maintained service levels during this period, answering all email inquiries within 12-24 hours and picking up almost all live help and phone calls with little or no waiting


One of my favorite groups, Community, has made some very exciting progress, starting with “The Return of the Greeters”. As you know, “Greeters” were a key component to the first visit experience, and we were very excited to bring them back.

Speaking of hiring, we also hired a new community manager – Ron Meiners (a.k.a. Random) – who you’ll be hearing from both in-world and during the There Real Life Gathering.
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Events are a big part of what’s fun in There, and the Community Group has, along with you, put on some doozys. Some that come to mind are SuperHero weeks, ThereOceania, The Running of the Buggies, Thereybook Tales, and the There Games. This is in addition to the regular “Aloha Fridays” which brought us events like the Staff Kissing Booth and PAZ building contest.

It’s probably no coincidence that “Community” sounds like “Communication” since that is its most important job. We’ve done a lot of work in that area: Continued to expand the use of ThereCare, published the There Fun Times, improved our communication with the MAB, and continued to improve our process for communicating about new features and functionality.

The Community Group brokered the sponsorship of some new member-created “landmarks” in the world: ThereOrleans, The Bay Area Boat System, and of course the Olympic Village

Last, but not least, you, and the Community drove the Hurricane Katrina Relief effort, which to date has collect T$5,204,091, or $2,891.16. And, as promised, Makena Technologies and The Maya Foundation will match your generous contributions with a donation of $5,782.32, for a total contribution of 8,673.48. We couldn’t be more proud of your generosity and support!

Wow! Lots of stuff!

In the coming months, we’ve got lots of plans.

Before I go into that, let me remind you that one of the 5 high level strategies was to “Opportunistically explore partnerships”. As you can imagine, as much as we’d like to keep you informed, we can’t always talk about our new partners before we launch,

Sometimes, we need to develop new features for these partners, which, again, we can’t talk about before we launch. Whenever we can, we try to make these new features work well for everyone, so even if we can’t talk about it, we actually doing development for There at large.

That’s why over the next few months, you may see us go longer than usual between releases, or release features we haven’t discussed in advance. Don’t worry, it won’t be “Avatars must eat to survive”, or anything like that.


This month, we introduced the first major change to “land management” in There since Portazones. Real Estate, or “Neighborhoods” bring the real-life concepts of land ownership, land development, and neighborhoods to There.

 We introduced two models: Developments where the lots are laid out ahead of time, and “neighborhoods” where owners can drop lots where they will. We believe that, over time, this new land model will lead to exciting new communities in There.

Real estate gives you, our members, an entirely new market “in World”. Instead of, or in addition to, making and selling developer goods, you can become a “land developer” – buying lots, developing them, and either renting them our or reselling them. We’re very excited to have introduced what we think is another important component of the There economy.

As we’ve said, this is the first cut of real estate, and over time you can expect to see better tools for selling, buying, and managing land, along with potential changes to lot sizes and pricing.  


Many people have suggested that our ranking system for sports such as racing, hover boarding, etc could use work. I’m happy to announce that our next release will include a major upgrade to the ratings system, starting with buggy racing.

The upgrade includes a new ranking algorithm which rewards players who continue to play, and penalizes players who don’t.

We also collect and store much more comprehensive racing information, so you’ll have a “scorecard” like ability to review past races, and the performance history of your competitors. Think of it as “Churchill Downs meets Hoverboards”.

When There was first developed, it used a technology known is “XSL” to render it’s web pages. Although XSL has a number of technological advantages for us, it was not (at the time) compatible with any browser other than Internet Explorer. Since then, browsers like Mozilla and Firefox have become more robust, more secure, and are growing in popularity. In addition, newer technologies like RSS, CSS, and AJAX have matured, giving people more ways to access the web and the information in it.

I’m very excited to announce what we call our web site “modernization” program, which will start off by making the There website work correctly with Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Initially, the in-world browser will continue to be IE, but all of the pages – shopping, auctions, profiles, etc – will finally be available to other browsers. We are also embarking on a program to make There, actually There and the things you’ve created for it – more accessible on the web, so that more people will get to see all the great stuff you have created.

We’re also planning some other improvements to the web interface, which I won’t go into now, but we’re pretty sure you’ll like them.

The biggest driver of There’s economy are the sales of developer goods – the goods produced by our members, for our members. As you may recall, the developer program was started in the summer of 2004 and it’s popularity has been quite satisfying to all of us.

In fact, since inception, almost 900,000 auctions of developer items have been held, garnering over 1.3 million  bids. As you know, these sales include the best, wildest, and whackiest items, ranging from Alien Spacecraft to Unicorns to virtual wedding bands.

But, as you know, the development and maintain of our commerce system has not kept pace with your enthusiasm (actually, I think, given my background, I think that “not kept pace” is probably too polite a way to put it).

Since the economy – actually your economy – is so important to us, we’re planning on a major revamp to shopping. When I say “shopping”, I mean all kinds of shopping, including what we now call “auctions”. As you know, right now, auctions really means “Developer sales that I have to keep renewing”, or, “Sorry, we’re still getting the data for your request, please try again”.

We’d like to revamp the way you do commerce, including giving you real stores, promoting your items as much as, or more than, our catalog, finding more ways for people to search and select items, and giving you better ways to manage your commerce (to name a few). Finally, we plan to introduce some, shall I say, “new” ways of shopping that I won’t talk about right now (wink, wink).

I’m not going to steal all the thunder from later presentations; I’d like to mention two big developments coming up in the Community area. First, the return of one of my personal favorites: “The Top 10”. “The Top 10” is your way of letting us know, in no uncertain terms, what your “Top 10” concerns are, and I’m really excited about it’s return.

The community group is also planning a regular new “Community Survey” which will help us guage the “temperature” of the community, and make sure our perception of how things are going matches yours.

In closing, I’d like to reiterate our thanks to you, our customers, for making There what it is today, and what it will be tomorrow. Without your dedication, creativity, and support I don’t know what we would be here today.

For those of you here live at the There Real Life Gathering, we’ve got a big day planned for you. The entire Makena staff has been hard at work preparing for today, and I’m really proud of what they’ve put together.