The cable television network C-SPAN is going to partner with the location-based social network Foursquare to try and help educate users about the American political process. C-SPAN will have its own Foursquare account that will act a central hub for all of the C-SPAN branded content. The core of the partnership will be Tips, bits of information that users can "attach" to real-life locations through Foursquare. C-SPAN will attach Tips relating to policy and government to relevant locations through Washington, DC. 

Some of these Tips will be very elaborate. A Tip left at the US Capitol will contain a link to a C-SPAN YouTube video that explains how the federal budget process works. In time, C-SPAN hopes to start adding Tips to relevant locations outside of Washington, DC. It seems C-SPAN will do this primarily through its virtual "C-SPAN Digital Bus" that 'travels' the US, checking in from various locations and leaving Tips at relevant places nearby. 

[via Mashable]

Virtual world Wazzamba has given away its 75th prize vacation travel package to its users as it approaches its six month anniversary. Wazzamba emphasizes casual games as part of its virtual world offering, with trips given out to players each week. There are 30 different locations in Wazzamba's virtual world, where players are encouraged to play casual games and accumulate virtual currency. Then users can enter competitions for two-week DreamTrips and five-day GetAway Trips.

Wazzamba launched in January of 2010. It awards one trip package per week to a top-scoring free member and then three trip packages per week to the three top-scoring paying subscription members. Players can log up to 15 game scores for contest purposes each week, with their top five scores qualifying for entry in the week's trip giveaway. Destinations for giveaway trips have included Hawaii, Paris, Australia, Costa Rica, New Orleans, and London. 

Wazzamba's casual games include Classic Trivia, Word Traveler, or the Catwalk Countdown match-3 game. The casual games have a virtual goods element in that users can buy power-ups to help improve their performance, but must purchase them using the virtual currency (or "Wazzamba Adventure Club Miles") they need to use to enter each week's trip giveaways. The only alternative is to buy them using the cash-based virtual currency Wazzamba Dollars. 

Today Amsterdam-based Web directory start-up Kadaza announced that it was launching its personal start page product Kadaza.com in the US. Kadaza.com automatically filters the Web so that it displays only the most popular (and presumably, safe) sites. The page breaks Web sites down into categories like news, career, and social networking. Users can customize individual start pages with a simple drag n' drop visual environment. 

The idea behind Kadaza.com is to make the Web more visual and immersive. Instead of old-fashioned hypertext links and URLS, Kadaza displays site logos broken down into color-coded categories. Sites displayed by Kadaza aren't aggregated automatically, but instead carefully curated by volunteers working for Kadaza. Users can tag personal start pages with images from a collection of over 25,000 logos. The Kadaza start page can also be customized with colors, patterns, and images. 

Kadaza launched in its original Dutch version in 2008, created by a student named Karel Rotteveel who wanted to try and create an improved version of a Web directory. He studied the behavior of users surfing Web sites as part of a university project, then decided that what users really wanted was a concise and visual representation of the Web's most commonly-used sites. Kadaza was successful in the Netherlands and had since been launched in England, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy.

German online game publisher Gameforge announced today that it had closed a licensing deal with CBS Consumer Products to create two browser-based free-to-play games based on the Star Trek license. These games will be casual offerings designed to complement the Cryptic/Atari subscription MMO Star Trek Online. To date, Gameforge has published over 20 games in over 50 different languages that reach over 100 million players worldwide. 

One of Gameforge's Star Trek games will be for Facebook and developed by an unnamed external German studio. Another unnamed external studio in California will handle development of a second browser-based Star Trek game. The games will be published simultaneously in the US and Europe. One will be based on the original Star Trek series while the other will be based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It is not yet confirmed what type of game either title will be or how it will monetize. 

[via Worlds In Motion]

The MagiQuest live-action role-playing game is expanding online with a new virtual world called MagiQuest Online: The Portal Adventure Series. The initial content released for the virtual world will be called Chapter One: The Clan Courtyard And Twisted Woods Realms. The virtual world will share the live version's emphasis on puzzle solving and will be developed in cooperation with Cyan Worlds, developer of the Myst video games. 

MagiQuest Online will tie in directly with the storyline and content of the live MagiQuest role-plays. The story calls for players to take the role of powerful wizards called Magi and protect portals that connect the virtual world of MagiQuest to the real one. If the online players fail, then they're teased with the notion of dragons and monsters invading the real world. The live-action MagiQuest centers will also include storylines about protecting the portals from monsters.

When players start a MagiQuest Online game, they will have the option of logging in with the account they use in the MagiQuest Live games. This will allow players to start in the virtual world with all of the powers, treasure, and experience they've gained at the live-action centers. Players can acquire more powers and items by playing MagiQuest Online, then transfer these winnings to their next live-action adventure at a MagiQuest center.

Players who complete the Chapter One content in the MagiQuest virtual world will gain access to an exclusive quest the next time they visit the MagiQuest live-action centers. Likewise, players can meet friends made during MagiQuest live-action games in the online virtual world, or vice versa. The first chapter of the MagiQuest virtual world will cost $9.99. It can be purchased at MagiQuest live-action role-playing centers and online at MagiQuest.com.

Today MindArk announced that virtual vehicles would become part of its Entropia Universe and Planet Calypso virtual worlds when the 11.2 client patch goes live. The patch is scheduled for today. Ground-based vehicles will be the only type available initially, but MindArk plans to roll out boats, aircraft, and even spaceships in future content updates. Users will be able to design and build their own vehicles.

"With this new system, the whole community now has the opportunity to build vehicles. The features included in today's release are just the beginning of the vehicle system content. The development teams are already working with upcoming features [including] boats. It will soon be possible to cruise the lakes and oceans on the planets of Entropia Universe," said MindArk, in a press statement.

[via Massively]

With our iPad Game Summit taking place this coming Monday, June 28th in San Francisco, we are now finalizing everything.  One of those elements is wrapping up registration.  Online Registration ends this Friday, June 25th. The event provides you with the detailed insight to create not just your iPad strategy, but your entire Apple mobile device - iOS 4 - strategy (iPad, iPhone and iTouch). Join Interpret, Flurry, Trinity Ventures, M2 Research, Hooked Media Group, Zong, IGN, Dictionary.com, Oceanhouse Media, XEODesign, Playfirst, ngmoco, Aurora Feint, Riptide Games, Chitika, Macworld, AdMob, Mobclix, VentureBeat, and more. Full speaker list and conference schedule are available here. Register here by this Friday and save $70 off the onsite price. By the way, Apple's iOS 4 comes out today - in fact it should be available for download anytime now.

Welcome to the Virtual Worlds News Wrap-Up for the week of June 19, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where VWN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual worlds industry.

• Big Brother Watches In This Virtual World: New Zealand paper The Sunday News profiles SmallWorlds executive producer and director Rick Earl. He discusses the things SmallWorlds does in terms of moderation and wordfiltering to keep the site environment appropriate for underage users. His goal is to balance user freedom and user safety.
• EA Playfish Racks Up Stats With First Branded Soccer Game FIFA Superstars: Playfish's new EA-branded social game has picked up 1.7 million users in three weeks. This game is a major test of EA's theory that brands will eventually be able to command strong audiences in social gaming just as they do in console gaming. 
• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "FrontierVille Is The Most Successful Launch We've Ever Had": Zynga's first major launch since Treasure Isle is shaping up to be a major success. The game picked up 100,000 users in its first day with over 70% of those users returning in the second day. 

This week mobile developer Hudson Soft announced a new augmented reality game for iPhone, AR Monster. The game will not only support Aurora Feint's OpenFeint platform, but will feature monsters from the iPhone RPG Aurora Feint 3 in a content update. 

AR Monster is a game where players use the iPhone camera to discover and battle monsters "hidden" in the real world environment. The game uses the iPhone's GPS system to populate real-world locations with virtual monsters from an initial library of over 600 creatures.

AR Monster will use OpenFeint for leaderboards, achievements, and social networking. AR Monster players can choose to battle each other's creatures, so an OpenFeint partnership will help promote the game to the network's over 26 million users. 

Previously, Hudson Soft has partnered with Aurora Feint to integrate OpenFeint into its back catalog of mobile games for iPhone. Aurora Feint is also partnered with mobile social gaming network DeNA, which was a major factor in negotiating the initial Hudson deal. 

Tween-oriented virtual world Woozworld is partnering with Zong to add mobile pay as an option for buying virtual goods. Woozworld acknowledges that tweens and teens love text messaging, so the company hopes that Zong SMS-based secure payments will be a good match.

"We expect the integration of Zong to have a significant impact on the conversion rate of purchases of user-generated virtual goods," said Woozworld CEO Eric Brassard, in a press statement.

Zong secures payments by sending a text message containing a PIN to users, who must enter it into the site to complete the transaction. Woozworld will also be supporting the Zong+ service, which will let older users with credit cards tether their mobile phone number to that method of payment. 

Woozworld launched in December 2009 with fifty admin-created virtual spaces. Users have since built up over 1 million virtual spaces. Average session time is 45 minutes long, with 70% of daily traffic comprised of returning users.

To celebrate the World Cup, Darwin Dimensions is adding realistic pro soccer animations and apparel lines to its the catalog of avatar customization goods in its 3D avatar generating site, Avatara.com. This will allow soccer fans to express their World Cup enthusiasm by sharing 3D avatars decked out in realistic soccer gear through twenty-five different social networks. The soccer goods will also appear in Evolver, Darwin's tool for building custom 3D models on the Web. 

"Avatara's user community is worldwide but has amazing concentrations in some of the most enthusiastic World Cup Soccer focused countries," said Brian Nilles, CEO of Darwin Dimensions, in a press statement. "“To be very honest, we felt an obligation to deliver Avatara's unique abilities to this fanatical group so they can suit up their avatars in their favorite uniforms to perform advanced soccer moves and share with friends on Facebook and dozens of other social networking sites.”"

Users will be able to use the new soccer tools to create realistic models of avatars dressed in the uniforms of teams competing in the championship like Brazil, Norway, Italy, and the USA. Content creators from Evolver.com are expected to add more soccer-themed creations in the near future. Animations available for avatars will include side kicks, far kicks, and goalie saves. Sharing avatars to linked social network accounts can be done with one click. 

The Tiny Planets brand is extending its presence from TV to the Web today with the launch of TinyPlanets.com, described by CEO Monica Laurence as a comprehensive entertainment platform for kids aged 4 to 12. It features seven different linked Web destinations. This platform includes a virtual world, online streaming television episodes, puzzles, interactive books, a kid-friendly social network, and lesson plans for parents and educators. Kids can earn a time-based virtual currency called Stars for participating in the site, as well as achievements in games. 

Tiny Planets will also feature a cash-based virtual currency called Keys, which is provided by a partnership with Social Gold. Keys are used to purchase exclusive content throughout the site, ranging from episodes of the TV series online to new virtual goods for use in the virtual world. In the virtual world, kids can fly spaceships, create planets, customize their avatar, and pursue missions. Certain special features for spaceships, planets, and avatar costumes will have to be purchased with Keys.

To prevent kids from buying things, Tiny Planets has implemented an account system that requires parents to be involved. Parents must first set up their own account before setting up child accounts attached to theirs. When kids try to buy Keys, the parent account is immediately notified and must approve the transaction. Otherwise, the child accounts can earn and spend Stars freely throughout the site, or participate in free activities like setting up an avatar. 

The entire Tiny Planets experience is Web-based, though it does require both Flash and Shockwave plug-ins to operate correctly. Most of the site's content is free, with Keys largely reserved for premium content. Tiny Planets was initially created as a TV series in partnership with the Sesame Workshop, comprising 65 dialog-free five-minute episodes. The episodes have aired worldwide and were honored in 2002 with the Silver Award in the Hollywood World Animation Celebration as "Best Animation Produced For Educational Purposes." 

Sony Online Entertainment confirmed today that its upcoming branded virtual world, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, would launch with 20 mini-games and 10 hub areas available for play. Individual players will be able to access the mini-games from a quick menu, or play them by traveling into hub areas and speaking with the appropriate NPC. Individual NPCs in Clone Wars Adventures will frequently be characters from the television series, played by their original voice actors.  

Among the activities offered in Clone Wars Adventures will be a tower defense mini-game and a lightsaber dueling mini-game. The tower defense game will feature a Droid army and has some features added to make the experience more interactive for young gamers. In addition to building towers, the player will be able to manually use items like bombs and stun grenades to influence the course of a battle. The lightsaber dueling game will be a rhythm game that features TV show characters as opponents.

The business model for Clone Wars Adventures will be extremely similar to Free Realms. There will be a monthly subscription option for dedicated players, but otherwise the virtual world can be played for free. There will be microtransaction items available for purchase, largely vanity items that a player can use to customize his or her avatar's appearance. Players will be able to give costume pieces custom paintjobs at no cost, but may have to pay for certain colors of lightsaber. SOE also mentioned the possibility of players paying in order to change their character's gender or to change into an alien race. 

Japanese mobile game developer DeNA has added $27.5 million to a new strategic investment fund for social games. The fund is called Incubate Fund Number 1 Limited Partnership. The investment effectively gives DeNA an 83.3% stake in the new fund. 

The fund's stated goal is to find and invest in new enterprises that drive social media, with preference given to game developers that DeNA can include in its Mobage Town platform. The fund will seek out enterprises that are seeking funding at the seed level or other stages. 

DeNA reported Q4 2009 revenue of $205 million, an 81% year-over-year increase. DeNA's total revenues for 2009 were $510 million, up 28% from 2008 revenues. This figure is comparable to the roughly $600 million run rate forecast for Zynga this year. This revenue dates from before DeNA's recent partnership with Yahoo! Japan, which is expected to drive much higher traffic to Mobage Town through the Yahoo! Mobage service.

Yahoo will be helping DeNA seek out game developers for potential investment. Preference will be given to mobile and social game developers that seek to develop games for both the Japanese and global markets. DeNA's commitment to the fund is unusual given the ongoing downturn in the wider Japanese games market. DeNA operates games for both mobile devices, generally Japanese feature phones, and PC portals. Its games are not primarily distributed by any particular Japanese social network.

Sulake's Habbo Hotel virtual world celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. To date, Habbo users have created over 170 million avatars and over 120 million rooms. Habbo serves over 15 million monthly active users who visit from over 150 countries and use the site in 11 different languages.

Habbo launched in 1999 as a hobbyist site called "Mobile Disco," founded by Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrola. The site was intended as a chat site for a friend's brand, but spread virally until it was popular enough that the founders could consider running it as a business. The site's microtransaction business model was ready in 2000. The first international edition of the initially Finnish site launched in the UK in 2001.

Sulake cites continuous development as the main driver of Habbo's decade-long run as a top teen virtual world destination. The steady flow of new features, new content, and improvements to the business model kept Habbo growing while competitors slowly became outdated. Sulake recently announced its best quarterly results in the company's history (Q1 2010), so the company has no reason to think its best days are behind it. 

Welcome to the Virtual Worlds News Wrap-Up for the week of June 12, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where VWN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual worlds industry.

• Announcing Viewer 2.1 Alpha And Voice Morphing: The test version of Second Life's latest viewer version is out. It introduces a new feature called "voice morphing" that will change your voice during in-world voice chat, ideally to match your avatar's appearance. There will be 25 voices, available for purchase in packs of five each. 
• CTU Instructor's Virtual Mars Expedition Wins Army Challenge: A mission to Mars simulation created in Second Life has won the Army's prize in the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge contest. The simulation quizzes users on what they've learned during the simulation before allowing them to proceed. 
• Ekomini Teaches Kids How To Save Money Through An Interactive Treasure Chest: Ekomini is a toy treasure chest with a USB cord that plugs into a computer. It tracks money deposited into the treasure chest and lets you child connect to a virtual world where they can interact with NPCs that teach lessons related to economics and fiscal responsibility.
• Journal Of Virtual Worlds Research Volume 2, Number 5: Titled "The Metaverse Assembled," this issue of the JVWR features the best papers from the SLACTIONS 2009 conference as well as peer-reviewed papers submitted directly for publication. The entire issue is available to read for free online.
• Second Life's Thriving Music Scene: Indie bands are increasingly turning to virtual concerts in Second Life as a source of funds. These concerts feature virtual interactions not possible in real-world concerts, such as the audience generating bubbles or snow animations during particular songs. These concerts can reach groups that ordinarily can't attend concerts, like parents with young children or those with physical disabilities. Virtual concerts also save gas and reduce an artist's carbon footprint. 
• Tagged.com Warned Over Children's Online Safety: New York state attorney Andrew Cuomo may sue the teen-oriented social network if it doesn't begin enforcing its child safety standards. Tagged.com encourages parents to contact the site if they find violations, but pictures of child sexual abuse are allegedly remaining on the site undisturbed. 
• Virtual Celebrity Islands Was A Hit With The Stars Of Twilight, Glee, Jersey Shore, Sex And The City: Virtual worlds start-up Virtual Celebrity Islands gave virtual islands away to stars as part of the MTV Movie Awards gift bag. The start-up intends to include its virtual celebrity islands in gift bags for future major award shows and events. 

Disney Interactive is continuing to exploit its children's virtual world properties for console and portable video games. This week saw Disney announce Club Penguin Game Day! for Nintendo Wii to tie in with Club Penguin and Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue for Nintendo DS to tie in with Pixie Hollow. Game Day! will be Club Penguin's first home console title and will focus on multi-player mini-games. 

The connectivity element of Game Day! will allow players to synchronize their games directly with their Club Penguin online accounts. This will allow the Club Penguin virtual world to track when players unlock new achievements or make other progress in Game Day!. Players will also be able to earn virtual currency for Club Penguin by playing mini-games included in the Wii disc. 

For Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, players will be able to create a fairy avatar using a library of over 260 customization pieces and then transfer it directly to the Pixie Hollow virtual world. Players will also be able to create avatars in Pixie Hollow and then transfer them to the DS game for use. DS players will be able to send postcards to Pixie Hollow players or transfer items between their two accounts.

The DS game's plot concerns fairies leaving Pixie Hollow to stay in an area called Fairy Camp. Once there, the fairies are tasked with beginning springtime in the English Countryside, using a variety of different skills. The DS game will also tie in with an upcoming Tinker Bell DTV film about Tinker Bell living for a brief time in the human world with a girl called LIzzy.  

Virtual worlds and social networks seem destined to begin incorporating each other's features. One recently-launched Web venture, Shtyle.fm, is saying it's the first hybrid social network and virtual world. The site is currently ranked in the top 1500 sites globally and is founded by India native Vaibhav Beniwai. Shtyle.fm serves over 8 million monthly active users. 

So what makes Shtyle.fm a virtual world? The logic seems to be that users have access to social spaces called "rooms" instead of standard Facebook-style profiles. Users can purchase virtual items from the site's item shop to decorate their rooms, but don't seem to be able to explore or interact with the virtual space using avatars. 

It's possible this feature is intended to be added in the future, since without avatars it's hard to describe Shtyle.fm as more of a virtual world than, say, Korea's Cyworld social network. Shtyle.fm was developed by two persons on a budget the site's press release describes as "shoestring," without venture funding, so the site may have any number of features on the backburner for future rollout. 

Viacom division MTV Networks Asia is partnering with Singapore developer GigaMedia Limited to finally develop a Spongebob Squarepants MMO. This will be the first virtual world featuring Nickelodeon's now-classic character, though Nickelodeon first announced a similar project two years ago. Viacom acknowledges this game, to be jointly published by both developers, as the first. The title will launch simultaneously in numerous Asian territories, including China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and India. 

The Spongebob MMO will be Viacom's first game project with a studio outside the US. The MMO will actually be developed with Asian audiences primarily in mind, particularly casual gamers. Nickelodeon animators will help develop the look of the avatars and environments of the game, though it's not clear if it's intended to be primarily in 2D or 3D. The MMO will be a freemium game that monetizes through microtransaction sale of virtual goods, Flash videos, and casual games to play within the world. 

[via Worlds in Motion]

Women's shaving cream brand Skintimate is partnering with virtual world WeeWorld for the Skintimate Studios viral campaign. The multi-channel campaign will include placement in WeeWorld's WeeMee Avatar Creator App, social features embedded into WeeWorld itself, videos, interactive media, and branded virtual goods. 

"This is the largest and most integrated viral campaign that we’ve ever done," said Jeffrey Wolf, Senior Brand Manager of Skintimate, in a press statement. "It’s a custom integration into a thriving teen community – we are giving away virtual samples of Skintimate and showing young women the essence of our brand in the digital arena."

WeeWorld events for the campaign will include competitions for Skintimate trophies, a contest that gives the winner a chance to make a movie, a $500 scholarship and a handheld video camera. To promote the movie-making contest, WeeWorld is going to make a virtual movie set where users can gather and roleplay their ideas while chatting with friends.