Creator of tween social network nabs Disney VC investment

Industrious Kid, creator of tween social-networking site Imbee.com, has attracted an investment from Steamboat Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Walt Disney Company. According to Industrious Kid co-founder Tim Donovan, the company quietly raised about $2.5 million from Steamboat Ventures late last year, in its first Series A round of funding.

Industrious Kid was launched in early 2006 with $6 million in private funding from co-founder Jeannette Symons, among others. (Symons sold telecom-Internet networking firm Ascend Communications to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion.)

With the Imbee investment, Disney (a la Steamboat Ventures) is placing a wider bet on kids' sites online, and in particular, social networks for the younger set. To be sure, Disney already runs the most popular collection of kid-oriented sites online, including the character-driven Toontown and the virtual game Virtual Magic Kingdom. According to researcher ComScore Networks, Disney Online drew about 25 million unique visitors in January. In comparison, Nickelodeon's kids sites drew just more than 11 million unique visitors in the same period.

But most of those Disney and Nickelodeon sites don't let kids do what their older brothers and sisters are doing on Myspace.com and other social networks, which is blogging, downloading songs, sharing photos and watching music videos. Imbee, which launched last summer and is still in beta, boasts a "secure" network that lets kids do most of those activities--if not all of them now, it will offer them soon--in a private community, away from potential predators.

In April, Imbee plans to take the wraps off a redesigned site, which will let kids watch music videos, among other new features. Through its partnership with Steamboat Ventures, Imbee has teamed up with the Disney division Hollywood Records so that it will be able to offer song downloads to its membership of kids ages 8 to 14.

According to Donovan, Imbee has attracted nearly 25,000 active members since its launch. (Comscore did not rank Imbee among its top kid-entertainment sites in January.) This year, the company plans to use the Steamboat investment to market itself widely to teachers and community groups to expand its business, Donovan said.

"Tweens are really a new consumer group that are demanding a slice of the Internet of their own," Donovan said. "We fill that gap between the kid-oriented destinations of Nickelodeon and the older kids' destinations like MySpace."

[HolodocDR]

Toontown: Regulating Internet safety by banning good subscribers?

What would you say to a three-day suspension for telling a friend that you had pizza for lunch? Or telling a relative about your vacation to New Mexico? Recently, an acquaintance mentioned he was planning to travel to Boston for a Red Sox game against his home team. 3-day suspension for him. He has never cursed in chat, never used bootleg software to enhance the gaming experience. But a trip to Boston has cost him 3 days and a record against future "offenses." Another person recently told their friend not to use a named bootleg utility. The name of the software was caught by Toontown's filters and they were suspended, even though they advised someone not to violate the terms of use.

To chat freely in Toontown Online ("freely" being a relative term), one must know the individual outside the game to pass a temporary code over to them. When they enter it in a friends module ingame, textchat is activated. For friends you meet in the game, there is a vast library of pre-made phrases, as well as dozens more one may purchase in a weekly "cattlelog" of goodies.

Toontown support has a very poor reputation. But for the past three months or so, innocuous chat has been monitored and pegged as a violation of their terms of use. Paid customers are still being suspended on these grounds, and no one in management seems to listen. The concept of customer retention does not seem to be within their realm of comprehension as more and more of our friends leave. Many of us who would have considered a second account to play with more characters are afraid to say what we had for breakfast for fear of getting an unreasonable reprimand leading to a permanent ban.

The BBB and other agencies are starting to accumulate data on Disney Online's practices, but they have done little to change anything.

The conspiracy theory is they are trying to drop subscribers off without having to return funds on the grounds of a contrived violation in order to focus 100% on their upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean game. It doesn't make much sense, but their actions have not made much sense lately as it is. Disney seems to see its subscribers as the enemy and compulsively bites the hand that feeds it.

When you see their ads on Nickelodeon, please think about this post.

[Arb0905]

i know all about it

i just got kicked off for 72 hours because a adult friend gave me a yahoo handle on the messenger and we both got suspended without a warning. i think it's unfair of them to just do that without warning and i don't understand how they can do that when the customer has paid in full for a year subsribtion but hey what do they care they already got the money, but there not going to like it when people start pulling there accounts! Cause for one thing a year sub. is not very cheap at all!!!! they ask for respect how about giving it there's a saying u get respect when respect is givin and right now they don't have it from alot of subscribers!!!!!!!!!!