Partnership : Habbo, Seventeen Magazine in Online Fling [feedly]

Teen-targeted virtual world Habbo and young girl-focused Seventeen magazine announced a partnership today that will see the two heavyweight brands promote each other in their respective beats. The agreement, a short-term deal slated to run for three months (and one...

[link to original | source: Virtual Worlds News | published: 1 day ago | shared via feedly]

RESEARCH: Panel on Casual MMO and immersive worlds

Its from the Summer of Last year but its well worth a watch as it allows you to see how things have evolved from a year ago, also the panelists provide some great stats and insight.

RESEARCH: Slides and MP3's now avilable

A follow up to Casual connect sees the recorded content go live

If you are interested in community gaming then you should see this click here

INVESTMENT: Iminlikewithyou gets 5 million

One of my fav portals has just got 5 Million investment, and they have changed there name to OMGPOP.com very cool name.

Having recently invited Charles to an Event to be a speaker which he had to decline as he was pre rev and was watching the pennies......its really great to see all the hard work has paid off.

The 5 Million has been raised on the strength of its plans to begin monetizing the site through offers of premium service subscriptions, virtual goods, and virtual currency. The round was lead by Bessemer Venture Partners with past investors Spark Capital and and Baseline contributing, as reported by Venture Beat.

Just shows you do something well and the money is out there.

BUSINESS: OBERON partners with DEUTSCHE TELEKOME

Oberon Media Inc. has partnered with Gamesload, the internet gaming platform of Deutsche Telekom AG, to distribute download games and online gaming. Gamesload is the market leader for commercial games downloads in Germany. Oberon will launch its community platform, offering web-based games to Gamesload customers. The community includes a diverse offering of multiplayer and online games.

BUSINESS: Ourworld lands Miniclip deal

Great news for the people at Ourworld they have landed a deal with Miniclip. I can imagine that its a very aggressive rev share deal with possible equity since Miniclip were partly responsible for the massive growth in club Penguin and did not reap the rewards of the sale to Disney.

Its no secret that Rob was not over the moon when they sold it for $700 million. Any partnership must be right for both sides and if Ourworld suddenly has 0ver 1 million UPPM and 50% increase in revenue then who cares if you gave a very small equity stake and rev share for the life of a player? right?

Good luck to Derrick and the team at Flowplay.

Currently Ourworld has around 200k UPPM and it will be interesting to see what the growth is and if the quality of traffic is good and converts to paying customers.

GAMES: iminlikewithyou launch new Jigsaw game

Following on from their ragging success of multiplayer Tetris which I'm completely addicted to Iminlikeiwthyou.com. have launched a new collaborative multiplayer jigsaw game.

If you want to learn anything about how to do casual games in a unique fun way this site is great. Well presented great games, simple and addictive, not too much choice all wrapped up with social elements.

This site attracts some 55,000 UPPM in the US and have similar figures for the rest of the world, but over 60% of traffic is from the USA.

It has great potential and the item based transactions should catch on as they help you win games, although this can be a bit frustrating when people obviously win because they have purchased numerous power ups.

The company received 1.5 million in funding this year from Spark Capital, baseline ventures, Betaworks Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen

3 Rings launch whirled

Its flash, its accessible, its great looking and its fun.

Three rings have launched a portal that offers a host of games. The format is not dissimilar from other community game portals like Boonty & Kongregate but its well presented and has a great feel about it. I see these kinds of portals as a next generation on the addicting games type of website, it has virtual world elements and flavors of MMO's. The community aspect is also very apparent, so the social element is mixed in with the game play.

And you even get to help digitize old books when you register as they use the recapture system.

play now

LittleBigPlanet scores 9.5 average on Metacritic | Casual games |

Its no surprise and well deserved. Expect a very large community to develop with constant uploads of user generated content.

Sony’s great casual hope for this year, LittleBigPlanet, is storming Metacritic, averaging ajavascript:void(0)n astounding 9.5/10 from the Western world’s major press.