Hi guys welcome back to the independent investor channel really one of the most important videos that I've put out in the five years of running the independent investor channel was my for sale by owner video that I did I've owned real estate in my past. And a lot of the success that I've had in personal finance investing, etc, has stemmed from my success in real estate. And this is very commonplace it with a lot of people that I speak with your home can be an extremely important wealth building tool over time and a lot of people don't look at it that way. In this video I'm going to do an update to one of my most popular videos. It was a for sale by owner video that I did, and I earmarked the steps that it takes to sell your home successfully. And since that time I've received a lot of comments, thousands of comments have come through on that one video, asking about certain aspects or phases of the process, and how I was able to get from the beginning stages, through the negotiation phase for a month or month and a half to ultimately closing which is where you want to be. Okay, now with this red hot real estate market right now. It's extremely important for you to weigh all of your options. And I think a lot of people out there, just opt for the traditional status quo of opting for representation on the seller side to help them sell a home which alleviates them from doing anything, other than just packing up their stuff and doing everything that is usually involved with the home sale, which could involve moving, arranging for moving, setting up arrangements and the new location, that type of thing. For you guys that want to take on a little bit more responsibility are interested in the prospects of saving a truckload of money at savings okay I was able to save about $8,000 on about a $215,000 transaction. A lot of you guys are looking at home sales right now double that. Okay, so when you want to talk about 6% per $100,000 it's very, very easy to understand that you could be up in the $20,000 $30,000 figures for closing costs to the brokerages at closing. And a lot of people misconstrued this on the onset because they think that the only way that you can sell a house is going through a realtor. Now I want to premise a few things before we get into this video. I did a pretty good job on my for sale by owner video of conveying a position of look. This is what I did. This isn't a bash on realtors. As a matter of fact it's the opposite. I think realtors are fantastic. They do a very, very difficult job. It's very, very difficult. It's very, very aggressive and it's very, very competitive. And I think a lot of people's personality may not jive with what is potentially required in a home sale negotiation. So you really need to do your own research as I did watch my first for sale by owner video tutorial because that actually walks through the first steps and the middle steps and getting to closing on how we were able to negotiate through my first time for sale by owner process. I also want to premise that if you're looking to this is just for selling.  Why not entertain the prospects of at least looking into what this could mean for you. Please understand that the bottom dollar that you're going to be giving away at closing may or may not be worth your your while. In other words for sale by owner is not for everyone. Okay. And a lot of people will tune into a YouTube video for sale by owner and they'll tune in for 1520 minutes and they'll think that that's the end all be all I'm here to tell you that that is completely untrue. And I would align myself with the realtors in this perspective, in that the majority of for sale by owner individuals that engage on a for sale by owner process, this step in a lot of different key areas, and therefore undersell the house or fail to sell the house all together and end up opting for a realtor anyway. But I contend that if you give yourself the best shot by covering all of your basis and covering all of the things that I'm going to discuss in this video, that in retrospect I did, but I learned a lot by going through the process. And I'm going to share those things with you guys now. Okay. So the first thing is to understand that it's not a free pass. Okay. For sale by owner is not just saying hey I want to opt into the for sale by owner program, and then crossing your arms for two months. It's not going to work that way. You will fail.  You will work for this money. There's a few key strategic areas where you can actually provide yourself probably just as good a value as the realtor in a couple of different required departments. What I'm going to do is I'm going to link up the description of the for sale by owner listing that I was able to put on Zillow and realtor.com and truly a okay I ended up not needing for sale by owner website, although there was some pretty good on there with regard to the home sale process, contract assistance, MLS listing, that type of thing. So you're free to kick over there and check that out. I did opt for their premium service which included the MLS listing piece. Now you're going to have to opt for a quarter point of brokerage fee to be paid there to get that listing to the MLS. I'll talk a little bit about that a little bit later in the video. But the first few things that you really need to understand is that repairs are better done before you enter into a negotiation. If you think that there's going to be something that's going to show up on a home inspection. And trust me guys the home inspectors are going to come in and they are going to find stuff. They're going to find stuff wrong that's what they're paid to do. If I'm a buyer and I'm paying for that service. I want them to find things. Furthermore, if I'm a seller, I also equally want them to come in and find things that may be that may be subject to scrutiny later on down the line, I would rather deal with them. The secret here for a seller is to make sure that you're identifying those things prior to chimney, HVAC, major utilities and systems, sprinkler systems, things like that that you know that you can repair or have somebody come in and repair ahead of entering into a home negotiation. That's better because once you're in the process, there might be some requirements there to only engaged with licensed contractors that can do the work and be put on record back with the backing of a license. Okay. The second thing is to understand that you need to clean the house top to bottom. You're going to clean the house and you're going to clean the house correctly. I've looked at for sale by owner listings a lot and they're horrendous. They're absolutely horrendous. Now I've looked at listing photos by realtors and for whatever reason, they're also horrendous.  You need to clean the house top to bottom. If you want to put a vase out on the counter, I think I could have probably made it a little more homely, but at least to clean up all of the clutter because potential buyers do not want to see clutter. We want to make sure that we turn all the lights on when we eventually photograph the house. Now repairs are a little bit different than cleaning, okay. Repairs, if you need to paint baseboards, if you need to do some repainting or touch ups on the walls, things like that. Want to try to minimize the personal touches that a lot of people think that they need to have pictures hanging on every square inch of every wall in the house. We want to make sure that we're taking photos that accentuate the house. And one secret that I had when taking my photos is to hold the camera or my iPhone up into the corner of the room and just hit the shutter button and take a bunch of photos and go in there and pick the best ones. The best angle that really gets the size of the room accentuated through your photo taking. The last thing I'll mention is the write up the write up has to sell the house. And this is where you can provide a strategic advantage as the homeowner, as opposed to a realtor who has lots of practice doing write ups, but nobody knows the house better than you. Okay, this is very, very important and you're going to find in my listing that I'm going to share with you guys in the description below. I think you'll find when you read through that, you're going to find that you can actually envision being in the backyard barbecue with the family, enjoying the landscaping enjoying the vast backyard you really need to sell how easy the houses to live in, as opposed to strategically just putting the features of the home, rather than really speaking to people on a personal level and conveying how personal the home is to you. All right. The next thing I got and this is a question that in retrospect I may have done a little bit different. The broker fee always comes up in negotiation, etc. I negotiated it off the 3%. If I had it to do over again, I may not have been so aggressive on negotiating that 3%. And there's going to be people out there say Ryan you're wrong it's always negotiable. I agree, but you're going to get what you pay for. Okay. So coupled with the question of, should we just go into a for sale by owner and only look for buyers that are also looking to buy without a realtor. Absolutely not. If you are looking for a video that's out there trying to identify that transaction where you're going to save on the totality of brokerage fees at closing the total 6%. I have a video for you. Okay, my negotiation and transaction did in fact involve the buyer's realtor, and I would go out on a limb and say that the majority of people, myself included fill a heck of a lot more comfortable entering into a buying transaction if I have the representative of a realtor. That's for a lot of different reasons guys if I'm unfamiliar with the area. Whatever I'm going to seek out the services of a real to who may have some specific knowledge about school systems, local neighborhoods, where are certain neighborhoods that are popping up new developments existing developments etc that are going to suit my needs. So I would venture to guess that the majority of buyers that are coming to the table that may potentially put you on the long list of houses for sale as a for sale by owner are coming to the table with representation. So if you want to try to cut those people out. Good luck to you. It just didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. And when we all sat down at the table to discuss the terms. They weren't interested in buying the house. They weren't interested in doing so without representation. It would have been my choice at that time to ask them to kindly leave. I'm not interested in dealing with a buyer with a realtor or what would be even more rude and what people might be willing to do but good luck to you is cut the realtor out of the deal at that particular juncture. I really wouldn't recommend doing that because the realtor in my particular transaction in my one situation that I've negotiated for sale by owner was actually was actually very, very critical in the negotiation piece, the amendments the contracts. And then I had the obligation to the broker that she represented, right. So everything had to be on par with sales contracts, amendments of sort, addendums things like that. Now I had those things pre done, but the standard of the transaction was actually improved upon because there was an actual licensed realtor involved in the transaction, representing the buyer. Now keep in mind as a seller, the, the, just because there's a realtor involved doesn't mean that they have your interest in mind at all. They don't, they are not charged nor do they have any type of fiduciary responsibility to you whatsoever. Remember, you're representing yourself, but be cordial. Okay, this is a business transaction. And I think what helped a lot of the time is to acknowledge, look, I want to sell a house, you have buyers that want to buy a house, let's keep our eyes on a successful transaction, and make this happen within the time frame that is going to be, you know, conducive to both parties. And I think if you can enter into that, and keep your eye on the prize. I think you'll find that the realtor really does provide a ton of value, even though you're selling the house for sale by owner now what drops the 6% to a potential 3% sales commission to the buyer's agent directly. I was able to negotiate that down and in retrospect, I really feel like that was kind of splitting hairs to be honest with you. They put a wrinkle in the transaction a little bit in that the realtor wasn't working for traditional 3%, which part of that goes to the broker anyway if you understand a little bit about real estate agent, and or realtor compensation, you'll understand that they don't keep all of that. And I do want to footstomp the importance of not alienating 97% of the market out there by just saying hey I want to deal with another for sale by owner or a non represented buyer, because I just don't think they exist in as much as much as you think that they might, right, and it degrades from the quality of the transaction if you're going to try to do amendments or trying to do contracts up to the speed of what a licensed realtor can do. I think you're probably setting yourself up for some real disappointment and some real headache. And so I really want to footstomp that it is negotiable. I would just be careful on it. I think if I had it to do over again, I would just go ahead and agree to the 3% and we could move on with our lives. And that way, the integrity of the transaction is being maintained at the standard by which the realtor is used to working under. The next thing that I failed to mention in the first video that I came out with on the for sale by owner is the ability to try to get a fair market value that there's a couple ways that you should go about doing this and then there's the way that I went about doing this. The way I went about doing this and I might be the only one but if this sounds familiar to you. If you want to continue go ahead, but I was going on to Zillow and Trulia and printing out active listings and their, their write ups beforehand so I had a stack of write ups off of Zillow from my neighborhood and associated neighborhoods. The problem with doing that is, it's really difficult to do a comparative market analysis. In other words, some of the homes that I was printing out may not have compared as well as I wanted them to, or I was justifying the fair market comparison data that I was pulling, I might add this is publicly disclosed active listings and doing so in a manner that was trying to tailor the price now I had a very, very good idea of what my house was worth. Okay, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I think it doesn't matter what I'm able to prove through Zillow or Trulia or print and disclose none of that really matters. What really matters is to seek out the assistance from a professional real estate agent realtor have them do a fair market assessment or fair market analysis for you an FMA. It's free of charge to do. Now, I think the majority of the time this is kind of a feeler to win business as it rightfully should if I'm a realtor and I'm doing a fair market analysis for somebody I would expect that at the very on set that that's considered to be somewhat of a job interview to come over discuss what I feel is the farm fair market analysis and issue it some sort of paperwork or document that the FMA had been done and completed and that according to the time of the assessment that the house was worth X amount of dollars. I would do both. The next thing that you could potentially do is have an appraiser come in a lot of people out there know appraisers I did, and I use the services of an appraiser to actually get an independent type of analysis to cross compare the FMA to what I was getting from the home appraiser. Okay, now if you plan on selling in the summer or you plan on selling in the winter, you want to make sure that that appraisal is done within a few months or within the time period that you expect to sell. If you do not know, I would recommend doing both because the market can change a little bit from summer and it all revolves around the school season. When kids are in school, people are less apt to transfer when military transfer season comes around. It's more apt to be a little bit more lively, as opposed to off season when those types of movements of people are not quite as frequent. So you want to make sure an account for that in your particular market and only you are going to know when and if that's applicable. Okay, so getting the home's value. Remember what I said it doesn't matter what you think, because eventually you're going to have to sit down and the realtor is going to say this. Let's discuss price. Okay, you want to be able to limit the discussions at the table and slide official documentation across the, the table, basically attesting to the home's value that really does kind of take out some of the gray area and room for potential negotiation or mitigation or earmarking certain deficiencies on the house that may or may not affect the value, but a good realtor is going to go in there and identify those things. If you haven't done your due diligence in providing any type of documentation, a testing to the value of the home, a good realtor is going to go in there and nitpick the heck out of you. Okay, and you may end up just kind of yielding to those nitpick things and you may not even need to, because the appraiser has already come in and said hey, it needs a new roof. It's going to be X number of dollars to fix the house is worth this. Okay. And so if you have that documentation to provide at the time of, let's discuss price. So much in the negotiation and the home price. Let's be real is everything. Okay, it's everything and an official appraiser that comes in and says your house is worth X before entering into a transaction. It's nice to know that you'll be able to cross the finish line at or around that particular number. Okay, and one thing I'll add to the for sale by owner just a little trick of the trade. I'm just getting all kinds of phone calls from all kinds of agents saying I can promise you this, I can promise you that I can get you this I can get you that. All that is actually unethical and it's illegal. They can't do that. Okay, it's a trick to get you in under their envelope. Okay, which is a large reason why ethically I wanted to do for sale by owner. I was 100% vested I was not on the fence I was hell bent on doing it and that's part of why I was able to negotiate it successfully is that I was hell bent on learning and do everything I could possibly do to see the transaction through and that's the type of perseverance that you guys are going to need to have. I'll promise an exuberant price one month or a month and a half will go by and the finance appraiser will come in at the end of the negotiation to make sure that this exuberant offer is somehow something that the bank or the lender is willing to lend on. So if two things are going to happen, either they're going to agree with that exuberant price and say yeah sure, we'll go ahead and loan on this property, even though we don't think that it's worth that. We're going to go ahead and put that loan through and approve it at the at the negotiated price, or what's more realistic is they're going to come back and they're going to actually tell you what the house is worth. I'm going to have you go back to the seller and renegotiate between the seller and buyer on the disparity between what the house is actually worth and what the agreed upon sales prices you may have a bit of a quandary there. An agreed agent is just going to say hmm and they're going to act like they didn't know on the onset that the house actually wasn't worth what that is and that's also where that FMA or that appraisal of your home is going to be worth all hinges around what the house is going to be worth right if you sell any item in this life, you have to have an idea of what the item is worth. And there's a lot of great area with real estate there really is, but not that much.  When they full well know that it's all contingent upon the finance appraiser coming in a few days before closing there'll be a quiet period before closing. While they extrapolate the data, and I'll talk about that a little bit more when we get to the finance appraiser piece okay. If you're coming for sale by owner don't think that you're on your own. Okay. It was explained to me in a way that I'll explain to you now and if you're watching this video and you're really interested in for sale by owner. I want to stress this it's very important to understand that the title company does the work. The title company does the work. The title company does the work if you want to take that away from this video. It's more the wiser for it. Okay, the title company has the real estate attorney on retainer to review every single document submitted in a home sale package. Okay, they are going to go back and they're going to review any previous property sale history making sure that all the required documents are in the sales package addendums, etc. Before the title company even signs off on the package. Okay, furthermore, as a for sale by owner. I don't know if they're required by law to provide you minimum documentation next necessary to execute a transaction on your own and or represent yourself. Mine did. Mine gave me a for sale by owner package now I only used the addendums. Excuse me the disclosure aspect of the for sale by owner package but if you have a title company that's identified already. Go in there, talk to them, say hey, I have my property I'm willing I'm looking to sell for sale by owner. Do you have any documentation that can help me through the process. And they're going to provide you a package that's going to help you give some preliminary information on what to expect in the process, what to do. They're going to give you the point of contact with the title company, they were available to me to answer any questions that I had because they don't have an interest in the monetary side of the transaction. They have a vested interest in the legal side of the transaction representing their local municipality to make sure that all transactions real estate related are up to snuff. Okay, so make sure that you're using the title company they do all the work. Okay, you're going to close at the title company. Right, they do all the work. They review and make sure and that's what a lot of people think well for sale by owner that's really risky isn't it. No it's not risky. Okay, the title company is the one that represents you in the transaction they're the ones that review the documentation that has transpired addendums repair work that has been done the sales contract and the disclosures up to that point. If there's anything missing, then you can supplement the record at that time, if there's anything missing but there really shouldn't be if you followed some of my direction and making sure that you involve a realtor in overseeing the process at least on the buyer's capacity. Okay. Next is the MLS listing. I mentioned the for sale by owner. I put all of my information into the website and it was able to populate to the largest most popular websites before it could even get listed with the MLS which took about one day I believe I already have the household. Okay, I didn't need the MLS so I actually was able to go back and get refunded the point to five broker fee to to the broker for for sale by owner for actually providing that MLS listing service. Now I don't mention that to underscore the importance of the MLS. It's super important. Don't get me wrong. Okay. In my particular transaction, I didn't need it. Okay, most people are on realtor, Trulia and Zillow. We've all been there we've all done that and when a new home comes up on the market. When my home popped up on the market in early March outside of suburbia Detroit, and it just happened to be snowing outside but when my photo hit as a new listing, and it was sunshine with the flag flying out front. It sold in a matter of minutes. Okay, so I never needed the MLS listing. Why do I tell you this. The MLS for me was kind of a backup plan. Okay, I needed to sell my house, which was again part of that core transaction acknowledgement. I needed to sell my house and they needed to find a good buyer. We ended up finding a great buyer after just a few minutes of it being live and then and then it was done the house was basically sold. Now you enter into the transaction phase of the process, goings on back and forth, etc. There were repairs that were required during the transaction that I had to get a licensed contractor to come and execute during the transaction phase. And I will just say they were big repairs asbestos related chimney related. Okay, so just to give you some idea. No repair is unrepairable. But these are some of the things if you can earmark before entering into the transaction. Please do so. Now one of the key impasses during the process or toward the end of the process. What you need to enter into the closing is to understand that finance appraisal phase. This is the most important phase. This is not to be understated. And this is really where I think that the real estate transaction itself enters into the most important phase. But I think it's also the, the, the phase of the transaction that most people have already thrown up their hands. Because of being in the for sale, they just want it gone. They want it off their plate, the buyers are getting Nancy there's a lot of anxiety around the transaction, and they just want it to come and they want it to go and they want it to appraise for value. Okay, that's all true in most cases what I would say from a for sale by owner perspective is this, if you're for sale by owner remember you represent yourself. All that documentation that I talked about that I ended up ended up chalking up this kind of feudal, all those printouts that I was able to print off of Zillow to, to try to determine fair market value. Now remember, at the time of submitting these documents to the finance appraiser, I did not have a fair market analysis, and I did not have an official appraisal. It was unofficial in that I had talked to a friend of mine, but there was no documentation nor was their payment rendered for said assessment on the property if I would have had those two documents. It would have been at this time that I could have provided that to the finance appraiser when the buyers. The finance appraiser, since in their assessor and it is in their best interest to make sure that they are buying a house at fair market value. Okay, furthermore, it is in their best interest to come in and if there is any discrepancy at all between the agreed upon sales price, and what they are looking at with regard to fair market assessment. In other words, if they come into a property and it's the sales price is 450,000, and all homes in that neighborhood aren't selling for over 350. They may come back and say, adjusted, make it happen, or the deal falls through, it's not going to happen the way that you want it to happen. This is the disparity between the two. The real takeaway for the for sale by owner that I want you to understand is this fair market this finance appraisal is going to be an appointment based and you're the only one that's allowed to be there. Okay, the buyers realtor is not allowed to be there. Okay, they're not. And this is typically when a home buyers realtor will represent, excuse me, the sellers realtor, if you're not for sale by owner will show up and they'll escort the finance appraiser through the property inside and out to make a general walkthrough of the assessment to the value. It's during this time that you're allowed to submit any documentation to the finance appraiser that can be taken into consideration in the assessment of the fair market price. Now, since you're for sale by owner. Okay, it's very important to understand that that's your opportunity to shine. Okay, you want the highest price for your home. Your assessed value was 300,000 for example, and you know that the house is 300,000 finance appraiser it's unethical for them to promise you a price or tell you what that price is going to be it's unethical so don't expect them to do that. What you can do is say look, I've already had a fair market assessment on the property. Here it is. I already had a an appraisal done of the property just this spring. Here's the documentation. They are required to take that documentation and you are in fact liberty to submit that documentation, supporting your selling price. It's very important. This right here is going to be your your very investment in time everything that you've done up to this point, the write up for sale by owner, the taking of the photos, the showings in the house which I found to be very enjoyable I can show my own house, turn on all the lights, walk people through. It's great to have somebody ask questions of the for sale by owner and I just embraced it. I thought it was great. If you feel uncomfortable talking to a homeowner who's choosing to represent themselves, then that's your problem. My idea was to get over it, but we only showed the house one time, and it sold the very first time we sold it which I feel like is a lot of the justification for for sale by owner, because we're in a down market real estate market real estate agents really do. We had a ton of value in the marketing aspect, what marketing is really necessary right now when some homes are getting 75 cash offers on them. In other words, there's a shortage of homes on the market. Let me just tell you at the closing of this video, people want to buy your house, people want to buy your house. The question for you is, do you want to invest the time and energy and work necessary to successfully for sale by owner type of a negotiation, or do you just want to hire the services of a third party realtor to come on and do the work for you because here's the thing the bottom line is this, the work needs to be done. Whether or not you choose to do it on your own, or whether or not you seek to employ the services of a professional, but where for sale by owner fails a lot of the time is people who perceive for sale by owner as just being out of jail free card and showing up to closing and check and collecting your fat check. It's not like that. It's really just a supplement for the work that needs to be done, whether or not you want to do the work on your own, or hire the services of a professional to do that. The guys I appreciate this follow up man opportunity. I'm going to leave the link to my listing in the description you guys can kind of check that out. You guys can see what I'm talking about with the photos, the write up the cleanliness. Okay, the repairs that were done in the house. Some of the things I did to negotiate that contract will really help I had about 45 pictures online. Go overboard. If I'm a buyer. Photos are what sells it for me curb appeal and photos. That's it. I want to click through and I want to get a good idea of whether or not I want to call on this house. And when it comes right down to it, your listing photos and your description are going to be what is going to produce that those leads for you. And remember, I will close with this. 100 leads. You just need one good one. Okay, good luck to each and every one of you guys out there looking to sell your house for sale by owner. I offer this as a testimonial through YouTube. I was able to save just over $8,000 at closing for sale by owner would I do it again 100%. I will never ever in this life sell another house that I own without representing it myself. Buy a house. Not so much. I will absolutely seek out the services of a realtor and this was something that got missed in the first video is my understanding of options and understanding that realtors are fantastic professionals that can really aid in the process of a home sale transaction and negotiation. I just think we're in a time right now where you need to explore all options and choose what it is that's going to be right for you. Please leave your comments at the bottom guys if you'd like to comment content coming through the channel. If you haven't subscribed to the independent investor channel this is a little off topic for me but it's a very important topic that doesn't get talked about very often. The biggest business transactions that I've had in this life have not come in way of the stock market it's come in way of real estate transactions. And this is a great way to not only sell your house for top dollar appraised value etc but also save a little bit of closing cost on on paying those realtor fees out if in fact you look to opt for the for sale by owner program if you know somebody out there that's interested in a good testimonial on YouTube. And make sure and share this testimonial. This is real. Okay, I'm not just coming on and just talking about something that I feel passionate about I actually went through this process. So I'm a good resource to reach out to if you have questions about the transaction process. Please leave those in the comments as I do review those and I comment back to help each and every one of you guys that's looking at the prospects of for sale by owner and making sure that it's a correct fit for you guys thank you so much for tuning into the video and good luck in your investing future.


Hello, hello, hello, good morning again. We should be live on the live stream as well. It's kind of pointless to tell everybody where the URL is, perhaps because they're watching already, but for those of you who want to tweet about it, next slide.com slash live stream as usual. So again, welcome. Really cool that you're all here. I have a few practical things besides a thank you. So we'll first do the keynote by Frank. After that, we have a break of about 30 minutes. There should be drinks on outside. And you can discuss all the cool announcements that we had in the keynote, of course. After the break, we start the lightning talks. That will be one, five minutes. And after that, we have lunch that will be on the first floor on tables. After lunch, we have a second keynote. And after the second keynote, we have again a bit of a break, and then we go to workshops. The workshops will be on the seventh floor. There are two workshop rooms. There will be signs, okay? So that's the practical stuff. I guess we should get started. So Frank, please kick us off today. Thanks. Thanks, Joss. So also for me, a really big welcome. I'm really amazing that you're all here, especially because it's so early in the morning. I heard that 10 o'clock is really a bit early. But it's really great to be here again. So and welcome you to the next conference 2018. So this is the biggest next conference we had so far. We have over 200 people. That's just amazing. We're growing every day significantly, every year significantly, every day too. We have people from Kenya, from Brazil, from Japan, from South Africa there, from all kinds of countries. So this is really, really amazing that we have this international big community here of next-flood fans and contributors. For the first time, we also have booth outside from other projects. That's really, really good. We have the most talks and workshops and lightning talks ever. So this is the biggest conference so far. So this is really amazing. Also, I want to take a step back now and think about it for a second and think about the background because we all know what the mission of next-cloud is. So next-cloud, the goal is to create a decentralized, open-source, privacy-aware, security-aware network of clouds, of features.  We are really us here in the room and everybody else in the community. We are so, I don't know, a bit crazy enough that we think we can actually challenge Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft and so on. And this is, of course, remarkable especially because we are growing all the time. So more and more people think that this is actually possible. There's this one quote that I really like. It basically means that we all have to realize that everything around us, and this is especially true for the internet, for cloud services, everything around us is not done by nature or not by some kind of holy law or something, this is all done by other people like us. So other engineers and other enthusiastic people like us actually built this data silos that exist today on the internet. And this also means that we can also challenge it. So we actually have a chance, we actually have a shot to change the world here. And yeah, to come to a future where everything is a little bit more decentralized and a little bit more open source and a little bit more privacy and security-aware. So this is something that unites us here, I think. And yes, it is a big goal, but I'm really convinced that it's possible to reach. And I think we can actually do it. Okay, so what happened since last year? What happened since the last conference a year ago? And I dig into some statistics and actually a lot. For example, if you look into the server repository in GitHub alone, this is only one of many repositories, as most of you know. It's the main repository, but there are a lot more of them. And we have 2,500 pull requests alone in the server repository. So this is a pull request is usually like a new feature or improvement or a bug fix, but then a change. And this is really a lot. You can think if you divide this by 365 days of the year and this is really a lot of activity. We did 20 server releases in the last 12 months. I mean, some of them were major releases. Some of them were minor bug fix releases, but 20, that's a lot. We did 25 iOS releases. So Marina here, you're a bit crazy. There's really a lot of releases, a lot of work. So really cool. Thank you. And the Android team, a little bit less releases, but of course, then the same amount of features and activity. And it's really, the Android community is really super active with a lot of contributors. And overall, we now reached over 1,800 contributors to the next lot project. And that's really a big number. We really have to realize that we are one of the biggest open source projects out there. There are not a lot of other projects as over 1,800 contributors. So this is really a big number. OK, so what are all these pull requests? What is all these changes? What are all the commits? What did all the people do? So of course, we worked on the software and improved things. And because of that, I'm really happy that today we can announce the next major version. So the next major version of NextCloud. It's the successor of NextCloud 13. And we have a really amazing marketing team. And I heard that you went to a mountain retreat with a lot of meditation and brainstorming for lots of weeks to think about what could be the name of the successor of NextCloud 13. So a lot of crazy work. And even some drugs were involved. I heard, I don't know. And really, I'm really happy that you come up with a really good idea. And of course, the name is 14. So I'm really happy that we can announce NextCloud 14 today. So this is a really big release. So I tested a little bit of rough overview. And these are some of the features and improvements that went into that. I don't think we have the time to go over all of them. But I think we can focus on five main areas, five areas that I think are especially interesting and important. And I want to go through those five areas now. The first area is design accessibility. So this is something where I'm especially happy about because one of the missions of NextCloud is, of course, that is software that's very secure and self-hosted. But it has to be end user-friendly. This is why I'm happy that we have such an accessibility and design and UI and UX-focused team here. And for that, I want to ask Jan to present these improvements. Hello. Yeah, so first of all, I'm only here as a representative of our whole design team. Everyone who works on design on front end and also all of you developers who are very design-minded. So I'd like to have another great applause for you all. OK, and so I'd like to show you a few major things that we worked on during this release. And one of the biggest ones, which I'm very happy about, is actually accessibility. So we have, for example, we have these accessibility settings, but that's not the only thing. We also improve the accessibility overall. So for example, keyboard navigation in the whole app is now much easier. Like you can tap through everything and you can activate everything by enter. And we're continuously developing it. We're continuously making it better. And yeah, there's been a lot of help from the community improving that. And we're also testing it more. So yeah, if you want to get involved there, if you know more about this, if you use screen reader software, for example, your help is much appreciated. And yeah, we have a lot of these settings like high contrast theme or also a nerdy dark theme that a lot of you will like, which is currently in beta. And yeah. So please, if you want to get involved, help out there. Then another thing is a simplified navigation. So we have broken it down basically. Previously, we had all this share stuff in there, all the different topics. But now we broke it down to just all files, recent, favorites, shares, and tags. And you can open it to reveal more. So for example, favorites, we now show all the folder favorites directly in the navigation. And since you already, since a few releases, we saw the favorites up top in every review. So they're always relevant and available. And yeah, so it's much simpler in the beginning, but then when you open it, it also stays open and it remembers what you had to open. So yeah, it kind of adapts to what you need. Then another really nice detail is the ad mention avatars. So now when you mention a person, you have this avatar next to it and you have it nicely contained. And so yeah, you see whenever a person is mentioned and that's just a really cool, small detail that I really love. And then there was a lot of settings restructuring. And yeah, this is only one of the screenshots that I could show you. So we have the personal page. We have, for example, a new locale setting that we needed for calendar. We have an admin overview page. And as you know, we have these privacy settings for your personal details. But a lot of stuff is always, a lot of work is always going into the settings to make it, make them make sense and have them sorted the way that they're, yeah, that they make sense and that they're in the proper categories. And then even the settings, even though we don't have so many settings, luckily, even that they are sorted in a proper way. Then another thing is the user management. It was basically completely rewritten and it's now much more responsive and it loads quicker and it handles users much quicker. Adding users is much easier. You can directly add them with the email address, for example, and yeah, it's much less hassle to add people there. And the last thing is standardization. So yeah, we did a lot of standardization work of all these different aspects that we're doing in the main apps so that your developers can also use that and you basically just use the design documentation and the different elements to just make it look like yeah, a next cloud app. So it's very simple for the developers too. And yeah, that's basically all of the design or the design things I want to highlight. So another great applause, please, for the design team and everyone working on that. Yeah, thanks, Jan, and the whole design team, of course. This is, you might think there's only small details here and there, but this is really important for end users because as you know, next cloud has the goal to actually get a lot of normal users, not like IT experts as probably most in this room here, but really normal users. And this UI work is so, so important. So thanks for that. The second thing I want to highlight are improvements in sharing and collaboration. You might think collaboration, what do I mean with that? Well, from a strategic perspective, I see the world a little bit like that. You could say that something like next cloud is in its core, something like a file server, right?  But of course, this is the ancient history. Nowadays, something like that is called file sync and share. This is a term that Gartner created like a few years ago and this means that there are additional functionality for offline syncing, for sharing links, for mobile access, for web access and so on. So this is usually called the file sync and share market. But we think that this is not the end of the road and the next step is collaboration. So it's great that you have access to all your files, but you want to do something with the files, edit them and view them and all kinds of additional things. So this is collaboration. Really, and I used this for a few months already, this slide here. And it's funny that just a few weeks ago, also Gartner, they renamed their market to content collaboration platform, which is maybe a little bit of a strange word, but I also think that collaboration is the future. So this is also where we focus on. So a few improvements in this area and therefore very small to very big. The first thing is a new feature in sharing where you can add a note to the share recipient here directly in the menu. I don't know, the next lot uses here, you probably know the situation that you want to share a file with someone and you can of course directly next lot share a file very easily, but then you usually send a second mail to the person and say, by the way, I shared a file with you and this is the reason why or this is what you should do or this is what it is.  So now you can directly type in in the share dialog also a message and this is in the mail that the recipient gets and I got the notification and this is much more streamlined collaboration process here. The next thing is improvements in the sidebar as Jan already showed, we have the sidebar that's collapsible here and in the share area, of course you can filter by shared with others and shared with you and so on and there's this new entry deleted shares pending shares. So you can actually, when you delete the share, it goes in there and from there you can recover it back. So this is just easier to handle and because in the past we have to ask the original person, hey, can I accidentally deleted the file? Can you please share it again with me? And this is better now. The next thing is we completely restructured and this is also UI improvement, of course restructured the overall sharing user interface. So this is an example of the options that you see with a share link and it's just a lot easier than in the past. I don't know if you imagine the old menu, it was actually a little bit harder to understand and here this is a lot more straightforward and better. The next thing, this is a more technical topic, is open cloud mesh. So open cloud mesh is an initiative to create a standard for federations, for federated sharing across different file sync and share solutions. So I think we as NextCloud, we are the pioneers here. Björn, who is not here, invented the very first version of the sharing API that we use now for many years and all the other projects use the same. But there is this initiative called open cloud mesh and this is pushed forward by CERN and by Shion and some other organizations, including us of course, to create a real standard, to get a real official standard and this the API went through a review process with a professional company that's doing API design and this is a real standard process and I'm happy to say that we are the first project or the first software that actually implements the standard. So in NextCloud 14, we are the very first that implements open cloud mesh API and this is additionally to the old API so we are still backwards compatible. Okay, but this API is not only prettier, it also has more functionality. So another reason why we did this is because we will use this in the future for other features like federated calendars, for federated video calls, for federated chat messages and so on, so it's very extensible. So this is only the first step here. Okay, then the next topic is global scale and specifically federated group shares. So this is another thing that we implemented because we could implement because of the open cloud mesh API that you can also do federated group shares which means I can actually share a file or a folder with a complete group on a different server. So this is a new feature that didn't exist before.  The global scale architecture is an architecture where you can write next cloud instance distributed over different hosting centers. And in the past it came with some functionality restrictions for example, group shares were not possible and this is solved now. So with next.14 you can also do federated group shares. So this are some improvements and there are a lot more in the area to make sharing more powerful and more useful and there's a lot more we'll talk about a few things later but this is a very important area for us. The second, sorry, the third thing I want to talk about are clients. So this is something that's interesting because I don't know, I and others we tend to look at the web interface. I mean I showed you just many screenshots of our web interface just now but when we talk to users of next cloud some of them say, well, I never used the web interface. Never, because the clients are so good. I can do everything with the clients. So this is why we also think that there should be a focus on really good clients and also have a lot of functionality. This is why I want to go through some improvements we did in the client area here. The first is the iOS client. So I talked with Marino. I think there's just some of the big improvements from the last six months. So really, really a lot. First of all, it's of course we implemented the end-to-end encryption as you know. That's a feature we announced earlier. So this is now fully supported here, fully working in iOS. The second thing is document provider. This sounds, it's a boring term but this is actually very cool because this means that next cloud is a first class citizen in the iOS file management. So in the file manager from iOS there is just next cloud is directly in there. You don't even have to open the next cloud app itself. It's just directly in the file manager from there. You can open, every application can save in there and open from there and can delete and basically do everything same as with Apple iCloud. It's really in the same level of functionality here. So really first class citizen in iOS here. And I think we are also like the first project of our kind which has this deep integration. Then, yeah. Next thing is push notifications. The notification is just a few weeks ago. We got push notifications which means I actually got a notification on my phone if someone mentions me in the comments as Jan showed earlier with the auto completion. You can mention someone and the phone beeps and you'll see what's happening or if you, a new server version is available or if you get a federated share invite running out of quota or something else. You actually get nice push notifications which is really nice and you can also see the activities. Media streaming is very cool. You can actually, if you click on a very big file, a video file for example, you can actually skip around and it only loads the right pieces. It's very, very good to watch videos and other big files. And server theming is something I personally find very cool. So if you change colors and stuff on the server, it automatically updates also the app. So that your, actually your iOS app changes color if you change the color on the server. That's also, I personally find this very cool. Then Android, really also a lot of improvements on the Android side. And to end encryption of course, again, we have this in all clients. Push notifications of course, activities and comments. Comments is also very nice. You can watch all the, look at all the comments on files. Huge speed improvements lately. Very nice video streaming and very cool new also trash bin and versioning support. So you can really access the trash bin and the versions of files directly in the next cloud app. So there are not a lot of reasons to actually use the web interface. You can do really a lot with the clients. So the last thing I want to mention in the client area is the desktop client. The desktop client, if you follow the history of next cloud and you know that we were not able to do a lot of improvements at the very beginning, but this has changed now. So we have a really super active desktop team with a nice contributed community and we really do a lot of improvements here. This is for example, a screenshot of the completely redone shared dialogue. So this is the shared dialogue where you can directly share things from your desktop. And the layout with the drop down menu and everything is actually done that it looks the same or works the same than the web interface. So there is basically synchronization of the UI between the different clients, the web interface and the desktop interface. So this is a lot more usable and better now. Next thing is the activities view. This is also improved a lot. And I mean, you could always see, I don't know if you're someone uploads or downloads a file, but now we can also show the more advanced actions that next slide can do. For example, you can see that someone wants to talk with you and next slide talk with a video call or someone invites you to a chat room or something or some other actions. So this is a lot more interactive and of course, you can also directly accept and join things directly in the activity view. So this is very nice to get notifications. And there's a lot more, of course, end-to-end encryption again and the desktop client implemented then working notifications. This is something I personally am really happy about. In the past, it was a bit weird. You get a notification with the text that you have a notification. I don't know, some of you will notice. That's a bit useless. Now we actually get the real notification. You actually get a notification which says, hey, you're running out of quota or someone chat something with you or just a new comment or something. So this is actually usable now. And a lot of other UI polish also happen at desktop client. And we are really close to release the next version, the 2.5 version. I heard from the team that there's an updated beta coming just the next few days. The only problem is at the moment that I don't know, some server doesn't respond, I don't know. But if this is fixed, then we have a totally usable beta of all these new features out and I'm really happy about that. Okay, the first area I want to talk about is the app ecosystem. So, as you might know, from the very beginning in NextCloud and before we had this app concept, we always had these apps like plugins. But we didn't call them plugins, we called plugins such that it's just small extensions. But we see NextCloud as a real application platform. So this is like, this is why we call these apps. And the app ecosystem is something that's really, really important for us. So this is of course our app store. I checked it like yesterday, we have over 150 apps in there. So this is really a lot and it's growing all the time. And therefore all kinds of things. Of course, you don't really have to go to the app store because you can do everything from inside NextCloud itself. And this is the new app management which was also completely rewritten similar to the user management as Jan presented. And this is a lot better now. For example, you have this new sidebar where you can see nice screenshots and ratings and change logs and links to web pages and so on. So it's really a lot easier to browse through the apps and find good ones. The search now searches over all categories. The categories were restructured. The app bundles were improved. So it's really a lot of improvements where we think we can help our app developers to make their work more prominent and become really first-class citizens in the NextCloud ecosystem. And now I want to highlight a few apps that I find especially interesting that were updated lately. The first is, of course, the calendar. So this, as you all might know, is one of the most popular apps we have. And this is making so much progress over the years. It's just amazing. In the last release, there were features like free busy support added, but it's a real enterprise class feature where you can send an invite to someone and maybe the calendar is not shared, but you can still see if the person has time or not. So it's very nice. And in this release, we added resource booking so you can book like a meeting room or a company car or something directly from inside your calendar. And I really have to say that there is not a lot missing to that this is a real exchange killer or a really professional-grade group there here. So we're working on this enterprise-grade calendar features and it's really amazing what functionality is there over the years. Next thing I want to highlight is a tech app. This is very interesting because this is a bit of a hidden gem, I think. Not a lot of people might know this, but this is actually a super-powerful and super-nice application. It's a Kanban-style project management tool. And it's really, really nice that, for example, customers of the Next Cloud GmbH that come to us and they really say, hey, we want to use this tech app in production for our company and we want to have support for that, we want to pay for that and we want to pay you to add new features. So I know that Julius lately added some additional features for customers like direct file upload and so on. So this is really, really getting more and more popular and we will also officially, as Next Cloud, support this in the future. The next thing is, of course, Collaborar Online. This is a tool to do collaborative document editing in the browser and we have, of course, very close relations to the Collaborar guys for many, many years. And in this area, we also do a lot of improvements. So we are super close to release new features like a file picker, for example. In the past, if you ever to insert a picture into a document, you first had to download the picture from your Next Cloud to your desktop and then in Collaborar, then upload it again into the document, which is, of course, not optimal. In the future, you can directly from Inside Collaborar pick a file from Next Cloud and you can also share documents directly from Inside, Collaborar, and we do a lot more improvements, speed improvements and other things together. So this is getting getting better all the time. But I'm also happy to say that we have a second option now. This is only Office and this is a solution which is similar capabilities then Collaborar are different in some areas, sometimes can do more, sometimes less, but it's a similar solution and this existed for some time already as a community maintained app. But I'm happy to say that from now on, only Office is also like an official partner from us and really officially support this together. So if you need collaborative document editing, you have two options now you can choose. Okay, then the last thing, no, not the last one before, I want to show us some cool apps in the app ecosystem around GDPR compliance. The GDPR, as you know, is these new data protection requirements and there are some cool apps available that make this possible. For example, to add the terms of service link to the login page or to have a terms of service that you have to approve before you can download a file or in the screenshot here that the user can request to have data exported or data or the account deleted. These are all requirements that might not be necessary for you on your private instance, but this is for companies and service providers that's important to be GDPR compliant. So there are all kinds of apps to enable that, which I find also very cool. The last thing I want to show is this dashboard. This is an app that exists for a while, but it was a little bit rough at the beginning and was completely rewritten just a few weeks ago and this is now really nice. You can have all these different widgets that you can place there and there's a new API available where all kinds of apps can create these widgets and you can then show them here. So this is also something that's quite popular. Okay, so the last area I want to highlight now is NextLotTalk. So NextLotTalk is that's a really special and really amazing project. It is a communication solution. So it's a chat and video call solution. This is less than a year old. I mean, this is just, if you look at the functionality that's already there, this is really amazing. Of course, one year old is not the complete truth because we're building on top of all the experience of Spreet, which was a previous solution. So we are not reinventing everything, but the code is completely new and the concept is a bit different and this is really nice now. So you might think that, okay, why do I really need this? I use like signal or telegram or three or something. There are a few things fundamentally different with NextLotTalk and I think a lot better. First of all, it is 100% open source. So the server component, all server components are open source. The iOS app and the Android app are also open source. So this is not the case with this other messengers and video call apps. And second thing, as important, it's of course all self-hosted. You can just with one click in the app management, click on talk and then you have it running on your local instance and you basically have your own chat system, your own video call telephone system locally available and this doesn't exist anywhere else but this is quite unique. And of course, we have the full NextLot integration. You can use all your same login and the same web interface and notifications and so on. So this is quite nice. This is a screenshot of the chat, of the chat interface. This is a group chat here. So you can, well, chat, you can mention people and get notifications. You can invite people and the people can be from the same instance or you can also send out public links to someone. This public link can also be passive protected or not. So you can, if you have an internal chat or something, invite an external person to also join the channel. That's possible, of course, and you can also press the call button on top and then this turns into a video call, video call with multiple people. Actually, the number of people is not really limited from a software perspective. There are some limitations from bandwidth and CPU need. Which makes it practical or not, but there are ways to scale it really up to lots and lots of users if it's the right backend. And we have some talk about this later with more details. And of course, screen sharing here, you have screen sharing, which is also available. So something I find really nice about talk is our mobile apps. So here you see the Android app and the iOS app. And one of the cool things is that these apps are fully feature-complete with the web interface. So there's nothing you can do in the web interface that you can't do on mobile. So you don't really have to use the web if interface if you don't want to. You can download those apps. They are obviously completely open source. They are for free and in the app stores. And then you can do everything there as you do with Signal and Threema and Telegram but talking to your own server. That's very, very nice. So those are the five main areas that I wanted to highlight. Design improvements, accessibility, sharing, collaboration, clients, app ecosystem, next-float talk. So a lot of improvements all over the place for next-float 14. So if you hear all these announcements, all these features, some deck and calendar and talk and mail and things, you might think this is a lot. This is a lot what you're doing here. And some people that come to us and say, hey, why do you do all those things? Why don't you concentrate on file signature? You're doing too much. So the reason we are doing this is because I really believe that this belongs together. These features that really belong together. There's so much options for synergies and for nice collaboration that we think that this really belongs together. And it's not only our opinion. I mean, if you look at what Office 365 is doing for Microsoft, it's exactly the same. They have all these tools that are connecting closer and closer. Google Suite, Google Apps, they're the same, right? They also have different components, but they work together. This becomes one big suite for everything. And even as I said before, Gartner as a research company also called as a collaboration market now, also thinks that these things belong together. So we really think that there's different components that really belong together. And I want to show you some examples that I haven't mentioned before that demonstrate how this all fits together. This is why we are doing this. The first is, this is a screenshot from the sharing dialogue. And here you have Morris here with an avatar. And we use the avatars in more and more places, as Jan showed earlier. The thing is, with every avatar in next slide, you can actually click on the avatar and then you get this menu. And then you can directly, for example, send a mail to Morris. And if you use the next cloud, Mail App, then it automatically opens. And you can write a mail there. And if not, then this is normal mail to a link which means your native mail application opens. And you can also directly start a video call from everywhere in next slide. You can directly call or chat with a person. And this is very nice because maybe you see a comment. There's somebody, the change of a document or you're working together on a document and you want to talk to the person, then this is very, very easy. So it's all integrated. Second is, here in the share dialogue, again, I typed in ENG and I get this auto completion here. And this auto completion is actually a chat room. So you can, when you want to share a file, you can share a file directly into a chat room. And that's very nice because everybody in the chat room then gets this link directly placed into the next cloud and you can then work together on those things. And it's even so clever that if you later add more people, they also gonna get the file. So really have the connection of files and a discussion and a video call and maybe in the future more. So this is all nicely integrated. You can imagine how this could work, right? You have a, I don't know, a discussion, a discussion around a customer project or your wedding or whatever. And then during the discussion, where is this picture or can I collaborate on this document or something? You can just type in, go to documents, they are shared in the channel and then everybody in the channel gets a document. And you can talk about it or maybe click on it and of course then collaborate, work collaboratively together on the document. So this is all fits very nicely together. Another example is the Outlook plugin we have. So this is a nice feature where you, when you send a big attachment in a mail, then you have this plugin installed. It's automatically in background uploaded to next cloud and the sharing is generated and the sharing is put into the mail. So this is again, then you use also next cloud together with mail. Another mail feature and this is a bit other way around is this feature. This is a feature, an app that you can install and it works like that every attachment you get by mail automatically is automatically placed into a folder in next cloud. So every attachment you get, you connect it to your My Maps server and every attachment you get is automatically placed in the server and in this folder.  But it's also very nice that integrates email workflows with file sync and share workflows. Okay, but as one last feature I wanted to show because this is a bit special and very unique. I don't think it exists anywhere else. So for this feature, we created actually a very nice video that demonstrates it. You can watch it on our website later today. I can't show it here because of audio problems but I can explain what it is, of course. So video verification is a solution for the following problem. If you want to share a very confidential file with someone you can of course generate a share link and send the share link to this person. But at the end of the day you send it by mail to some mail account. You really don't really know who this mail account belongs to, who is on the other side, who is reading the mail. It could be the Swiss admin, it could be someone else who is using the same PC, the kid who is playing with the smartphone. I don't know. And if it's really needed as a special document really reaches exactly one person and no one else, then this is something that's really hard to do with just sending a share link to someone. Of course you can protect it with a password but the same problem, right? You have to get this password and also to someone and you don't really know who gets this password. So this is a challenge that others solved, for example in Germany there's this post-ident for Farn. This is a, some of you might know, this is a system where you have to go to the post office, you have to show your password and the person compares the face on the password with the person there. You have to sign a document and then it's basically certified that you're really that person. In other cases like with GPG, for example, this is done with key signing. All right, you have this key that's associated to an email address but you don't really know that this key is also actually owned by this person. This is why you have these key signing parties where you basically match keys to people. And this is a problem that is not really solved in file sync and share so far. But we think we have a nice solution here with video verification. So it works like that, that in the sharing dialogue, there is this new option which is called password protect by talk. And I can just go there. This is a very confidential document and I can click this button and I choose a password that I type in here. And then this share link is sent to this person by mail and this person then clicks on the link and the browser opens and then you basically see that you type in the password here that you don't know but you can press the request password button. And if you do that, the sidebar opens with a video call to the person who shared the file. Okay, so you can actually, the phone of this person rings because we have, as discussed, push notifications for next lot talk, right? Your phone rings, you answer the phone, then you have a video call to the person who got the link and you say, okay, hey, how are you? Do you recognize the person? Yes, this is the guy that I mean. And then you tell them the password, this is the password, one, two, three, type in the password and then you have access to the document. So this is a way to verify, to not share to an email address, to really share to a person. But this is very, very unique. So this is the last feature I wanted to show which shows why we integrate all those nice tools together. And this is also fully working now in next lot 14, of course. So because of that, I really think that we can call next cloud the most advanced content collaboration and file sync and share platform because we have all those improvements in all different areas and it all fits together. Now is the question, of course, how do people get next cloud, right? The next cloud, I showed you all this nice functionality, all these nice features, that's great. But how do people get next cloud? As I told you at the very beginning, we have these crazy goals to really reach a lot of people on this planet, right? Not only us who can install a Linux package or run a Docker container or something. How do we actually reach a lot of people, like many, many millions, maybe billions of people all over the world? And this is something where we talk a lot and brainstorm a lot around that. And I think we have two solutions for that. So, that I want to announce today. So the first solution is called Simple Sign Up. And to talk about that, I want to invite Joss on the stage to tell us what is Simple Sign Up and how does it help to get many, many millions of more users. Hello. So I'm Joss and I have a question for all of you. How many of you think that with the current tech, most people can quite easily run a server at home? There's three really enthusiastic people. I think the rest is slightly more realistic. So with that in mind, let's take a little step back and Frank already talked about what we're doing here. We're pretty ambitious. I mean, what we're working on, we don't do it just for the people in the room. We don't do it for all the people watching, even though they're all very cool. Hello, everyone there. We do it because we really want to give everyone a chance to take control back over their data. And with everyone, I mean there are 7 billion people on this planet and ideally we would have all data decentralized as much as possible. So where are we today with that? This is in 2015 when Frank gave a keynote also here at the university and he put up numbers, a rough estimate of how many users there are in next slide. Well, how many people were using a private cloud and back then he estimated between two and four million people. Now I think today a more realistic number would be between 15 and 25 million, which is I think a big improvement. That's cool. So last time when he gave this keynote, everybody also applauded for this slide because this is a very nice number and Frank who never really, let's go for an opportunity to, I guess, ruin the mood, then came with this slide. If you can read it, it puts it next to the other players, Google with hundreds of millions, Apple. I mean, if you add up the numbers that are at the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Dropbox, Apple, we're probably talking about well over a billion. So what we're doing together is basically putting all our eggs in one of like half a dozen baskets all over the world. Everybody has their data at one of a handful of huge companies. And I mean, you wouldn't be here probably if you thought it was a good idea. So I'm not gonna talk extensively about why it's a bad idea. I think we're all on the same page on this one. The question is what are we gonna do about it? Now we had in our clients for a long time a way to sign up to NextLoud in the sense that there was like a button or a link where you could go to NextLoud.com. You could download the zip file and then have no idea what to do with it. Or you could go by a device and then at home when you got it, you would configure your router if you knew what the router was. Or you could look for a provider. You pick one out of a hundred providers. Some of them have the data in the mountains in Switzerland. Probably very safe from, I don't know, alien attacks. Another one would have like green windmill powers which always reminds me of a French night from a long time ago. All kinds of options there. And that's pretty hard for normal people to figure out. What is the right choice for me? How much storage do I need? How much should I pay for it? Should I have all SSD storage? Daily backups, a lot of options. And once you've made a choice, you have to then figure out, okay, I need to get the technical data. I need to then give the link into the client, then username, password, and then you log in and you have your data. How is this at Dropbox, for example, or Google? I mean, to sign up to Dropbox, all you need to do is give your email address and the password. That's quite a bit less work than everything I just was talking about. So we fix this. It is now just as easy to sign up to Next Cloud and to get a privacy-protecting decentralized cloud as it is to sign up to a centralized cloud. Thank you. So I'm gonna show you. If you start up the client and you click on the button, sign up, you just have to enter an email address. We pick a provider for you. We pick a provider based on where you are. So it's a matter of distance. If you don't like it, you can change the provider. We don't have to. You can just enter your email address and click on the sign up button.  You can start to upload your files right away, done. There's nothing else to it. It's as simple as that. Email, password, and it's running. You're logged in. So right now we have six providers that we're working with. So I want to thank you to all of them. Some of them are here. Let's give them an applause for being awesome. So they give two gigabytes of data to everyone. Minimum free storage. Some of them give three, four, five. There's a whole bunch of apps available as well. And it's for free, just as with the big cloud providers. So again, you get the same as what you get with centralized cloud, where you actually have a choice. Over time we will have more providers. We will work with them to make sure that the quality is good, that you can trust them. And again, in here at the conference, several of them are here. You can literally walk over to them, have a chat, and figure out whether you think they're trustworthy or not. If not, come talk to me. I might do something about it. So now you know where your stuff is. We have a bunch of nice posters and stickers of this because I think it's important to help people figure out where the data is and who has access to it. So please tell everyone that they can now sign up to NextLoud, even if they're not very technical. If they don't want to go through the hassle of running their own server or even figuring out what provider they want to pick, it's as easy as it gets. You can go to this page and see your options or you can just immediately go to NextLoud.com and register, sign up. It's literally email address and a password. That's all you need. Thank you very much. Thanks, Joss. Yeah, this is really nice. So of course we announced this feature like here now on the stage today, but the feature was already active for a few days in our mobile apps in iOS and Android and will be in the next desktop version of course too and there will be a sign up button on our website too. So lots of different ways to sign up and some of them were already online for a few days, mainly for testing. And we already heard from some providers they got like a ton of new users via this channel. I don't know how much and I don't really want to know anyways, but it really seems to work. People seems to like that. That really solves the problem as Joss said that in the past you downloaded the app and the first thing you see is what is the server address and normal users are like server address? What is that? I don't know what this is. Then they go away and they use Dropbox. And this is something that we really think we solved here. Okay, so this is the first option, the first way where we think that we get a lot more users for NextCloud, but there's also a second thing because this is a way where you can go to a service provider. Of course, a service provider is still not you at home. It's still a company that you have to trust, but we believe that it's already a lot better if the data is decentralized between like, I mean our website, we have over 100 service providers listed already that offer NextCloud. We were not able to all put them into this program, but over time we get and expect that we have a lot of service providers there. And if the data is distributed over 100 or maybe a thousand service providers in the future, there's so much better than one data silo at Google. So this is really good. But of course there are also, there's this other way to think about it where people think, okay, I really, really want to have my data at home. I really want to have my data here in this box. I want to touch it. This is here. This is where it is. I don't trust anyone. Okay, so this is the question. This is the second thing we want to solve. I mean, at least make progress here to get NextCloud at home in a very easy way. So if you might know that two years ago, I think also here at the TU, we launched the NextCloud box. So the NextCloud box was a project that we did in collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Canonical Ubuntu. It was just a Raspberry Pi with a hard disk and NextCloud on it. And there's also a device that you could buy for including the Raspberry Pi, like a hundred bucks depends. And then you can run NextCloud on it. The thing is of course for us, this was always meant as a proof of concept as a test device. Because we definitely don't want to become a hardware company. We're not in the business of selling hardware. But we did this and we sold like a few hundred of those. How many did we sell, Joss? How many boxes did we sell? One and a half thousand. One and a half thousand even. Stop production. Yeah, yeah. Then there's stop production, because for everybody it was just meant as a proof of concept. So there was this demand, but we don't become a hardware company here. So this is just a test device that we did, because we hoped that other companies that are actually in the hardware business see this and then come up with an idea, oh, we can do the same. And actually I'm really happy to announce today that exactly that happened. So we are actually working together with NEC and Japan and with a company called Waffle Cell and us of course. And we are actually doing the same idea, of course a lot better. I will talk about it in a second and to really bring it this time to millions of users, not to like 1,500. So the idea is that NEC is one of the biggest home router manufacturer in Japan. They really have millions and millions of customers. Okay? And NEC will put next cloud on those home routers. So this is very cool because of a few reasons. First of all, the customer, the end user, they don't really have to pay for it because it just comes as the normal box. It's just a feature because the next cloud box is of course you have to convince normal people on the street that they should pay like 100 bucks for this box when they get everything from Google for free. And in this case it's also for free because it's just built into the normal router that everybody has at home anyways that they need for their normal internet access. That's the first thing that's really cool. The second is the speed. In Japan, 70% of the people they have actually fiber channel internet connection with gigabit upstream and downstream. So these next clouds that are deployed by the millions there are actually really fast and really totally suitable for federated collaboration between all those different home routers. You can have shared links and have calls between them and chat between them and so on. And this works super fast and very nice. The next thing that's really cool about that is that all this network configuration problems to go away because with a device like a next cloud box of course it's sitting behind your router. You have to configure some kind of port forwarding. You have to configure some dynamic DNS to access it from the outside. All this goes away because it actually runs on the router. So this all works automatically. So this is actually very nice. And we all optimized this of course for this federation that you can really share photo galleries with your neighbor in an easy way and everything very nicely decentralized. So because of that, I'm really happy to ask our guest from Japan here on the stage, Mr. Masayoki Noti to find a little bit about his project. I'm so happy to be here at Next Cloud conference 2018. Next Cloud is a great product and great community. I think you can change the world much better. And Next Cloud, NEC platforms and manufacture and Waffle Computer that makes this operating system called Waffle Cell are the best partners to make this happen. And I want to tell you something. NEC platforms and Waffle Computer is trying to make the network distributed. And this infrastructure is just can do anything by itself. So we need developers like you guys. And I want you to remember that just imagine there will be millions of the Next Cloud instances running on the network. I think the world will be much better with your help. Thank you. Okay, thanks a lot. So those were our announcements for today. So the big summary of this morning is we have Next Cloud 14, which we think is the most advanced file sync and share solution out there. Collaboration solution. We have video verification, which is I think a solution doesn't exist anywhere else, which is very important if you're a bank or you're a doctor or you're someone who really handles that very confidential document once we share them. So this is a very unique security feature. It doesn't exist anywhere else. Simple signup where we can really bring Next Cloud to a lot more users with the help of our great providers. And then of course, together with NEC, we can deploy many, many millions of Next Cloud instances at home. So these are the announcements for today. And I'm really happy that Next Cloud evolves so fast because of the community, because of you and thanks a lot. And I really wish you a great Next Cloud conference. There will be a lot more talks and keynotes and presentations and everything. And Joss will tell you all about the next things that happen and other logistics. Thanks a lot. So we're already over schedule. There was just too much good stuff here, so that's OK. But we're going to skip the break a little bit. I need two minutes to prepare the keynotes or the lightning talk slides. And then we're just going to go off the lightning talks. If any of you is really, really in need of coffee, there is some on the first floor. So if you go out at the second door, I think you're there quickly. And then you can come back and...