A good day for Steem.
The price of STEEM continued climbing to $0.33.
Steem moved up no. 48 on CoinMarketCap.com
Increasinging the communication flow from Steemit Inc and from CEO Ned is definitely welcome by all.
More of all of it please!
Ned's Second Appearance of the Week on MSP Waves
After the surprise visit to Aggroed's show on Sunday, Steemit Inc CEO Ned Scott came on the State of Steem Forum #4 as a guest to talk about the new Mission, Vision and Values document.
Ned spent over an hour on the forum talking about the MVV document.
He also answered questions from the host 
Ned emphasised that building communities, and providing the tools to facilitate that, are an upcoming priority for Steemit Inc in the coming months.
He also mentioned the importance of advertising as a growing additional income stream.
The steemit.com front end app will be given much more development attention now to increase usage and stickiness and to provide a platform for the advertisements.
Steemit Inc are looking to move forward with more open communication with the community particularly through more appearances on various Discord channels.
They are keen to involve community developers now in ongoing technical development. In the first instance they will be looking for ideas and input in building out the steemit.com app.
With Hivemind now being available it may well be that the community may begin to develop community applications on top of that.
Completing the current MIRA Rocks DB work is the current number one priority to facilitate further node cost reductions.
Once that is completed the attention will return to development work for SMTs and Communities.
Ned was not able to give any specific timelines or target release dates at present.
The recording of the forum and Ned's interview will be posted very shortly.
And speaking of Communities...
Developer 
He has just announced significant progress on getting Communities up and running on the Stratos network.
Stratos has become one of the first users of 
Implementing Communities is now the main thrust for Stratos...
I’ve also been working very hard on an upcoming Communities implementation. I believe communities are integral to increasing Steem engagement and curation and are the future of Steem. So far what has been implemented is the creation of communities as well as the ability to give people roles such as Owner, Admin, Moderator, and Author.
It is looking like Stratos will have the first Communities system available on Steem before the Hivemind Community facilities become available...
Price-Breaker.com now accepts STEEM
Getting STEEM out there in the marketplace being used for retail payments is a big must.
More usage = more demand = higher price.
They are using the CoinPayments.net system.
If you spot any other sites using CoinPayments.Net ask them to switch on the STEEM payment option.
KEY DATA [ from CoinMarketCap & 
]
(change on previous day in brackets // n/c = no change)
| Steem price | US$ 0.329 | 2019-01-18 02:42am UTC |
| SBD price | US$ 0.859 | 2019-01-18 02:42am UTC |
| Market Cap | US$ 102,052,912 | 2019-01-18 02:42am UTC |
| CoinMarketCap Ranking | #48 (+1) | 2019-01-18 02:42am UTC |
| No. of Whales | 36 (n/c) | 2019-01-16 |
| No. of Orcas | 319 (+1) | 2019-01-16 |
| No. of Dolphins | 1978 (+3) | 2019-01-16 |
| No. of Minnows | 9097 (-5) | 2019-01-16 |
| Alexa rank (steemit.com) | #4158 (-12) | 2019-01-18 02:41pm UTC |
for more statistics.
NEWS FROM STEEMIT INC
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#37 
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#141 
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- Fundition proudly presents: @chibera 's project: "Chibera Open World MMORPG"
If you want to check on progress of development on Steem, check out the GitHub here...
- https://github.com/steemit/steem/branches
If you want to check on the current list of full API Nodes witness 
- https://steemit.com/full-nodes/@fullnodeupdate/full-api-node-update---1712019
MEDIA COVERAGE OF STEEM & STEEMIT INC
Hacked - STEEM Coin on the Move While Steemit Loses 20 Million Visitors in Six Months
This is #46 (17 Jan '19) of this daily news service.
Please let me know of any important posts or key data that should be included. Comment below or message me on Discord Pennsif#9921