Daily Marauder

Club Penguin, (www.clubpenguin.com) a popular Web site for the preteen set, has been acquired by Disney in a deal that could be worth $700 million. Disney will pay $350 million upfront and an additional $350 million by 2009, if the site, which has 700,000 paid subscribers, reaches certain sales benchmarks. (The New York Times 8/2)

Sad to say, but I took Club Penguin for a test drive this morning.  While I found it mildly creepy that I was pretending to be a child playing in a Virtual World (one can see how monitoring would be critical), the first thing I noticed was how many other penguins there were in every environment that I visited.  If you had a chance to read the article in Wired about Second Life this month, the first criticism is always that there are not enough users to populate the environment.  While many have created an avatar in Second Life and taken a test drive through the program, the level of engagement is not currently high enough to bring users back on a continual basis.  In Club Penguin, I could make my penguin sing, wave, and jump around.  I could also target other penguins and throw snowballs.  As long as parents feel comfortable with the security controls, I think this a very engaging environment for the K6-14 target demo.

TNT.tv launched Spy Toys of The CIA as an extension to The Company, the miniseries premiering Sunday night at 8 pm ET/PT. The 10-part broadband series goes behind the scenes to offer viewers trade secrets about some the real-life gadgets CIA agents use in the field. Other web exclusives include “Blood on Our Hands,” a brief secret history of the agency available from Sunday night.

Just to recap for a second here, The Company is the dramatic miniseries from Ridley Scott featuring some really hard hitting actors like Chris O’Donnell, Alfred Molina, and Michael Keaton.  Check out a sneak peek of the series below.  The cinematography in this clip alone blew me away and for an online video box to generate that reaction, it must at least be view-worthy.

Yahoo, after losing viewers to Google’s YouTube, is revamping its video site to include more content from media companies and Internet users. News services including the Associated Press and CNN will provide content along with sports leagues such as Major League Baseball. (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=aulvw5OZgWww 8/2)

Time Inc.’s recent acquisition of FanNation.com will enable the publisher to accelerate the rollout of social networking across its magazine brands, says company exec John Squires. Time Inc. is looking at additional acquisitions to help speed up its digital transformation. (http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=65019 8/2)

Could Facebook really be worth $6 billion? More than Rupert Murdoch is paying to snag Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal? That’s the rough valuation Bear Stearns is coming up with in a research report that makes the case for Yahoo to invest in social-networking sites. (http://blogs.reuters.com/2007/08/01/facebook-worth-6-billion/ 8/1)

AOL Black Voices has teamed up with The Style Network for the exclusive online debut of the new series Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane, available in its entirety for one week prior to the network broadcast.  The show will debut on The Style Network on August 5 at 8 pm. The show stars model, fashion mogul and mother Kimora Lee Simmons and her over-the-top life.

A&E is inviting Dog the Bounty Hunter fans to vote for their favorite episodes online. The two top picks will air On August 13 at 9 pm ET/10 CT and will be available online from the 12th.

Metacafe revamped its website to allow users to surf channels by multiple sorting criteria and subscribe to specific producers’offerings. User Channels contain cool features such as avatars, extended stats including honors, quotes, information and channel comments. The site also struck a deal with internet phone service Skype last month to provide videos to Skype users to help spiff up their “mood messages,” integrating with Skype’s new beta version 3.5 for Windows.

Barack Obama continues to lead other Democrats and Republicans in driving users to his website, according to the latest research from Hitwise, with a 29.5% market share compared to 17.35% for the #2 candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton. Republican hopeful Ron Paul came in third, outdrawing John Edwards, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Users who access Google’s Gmail or the Facebook social-networking site over Wi-Fi could put their accounts at risk of being hijacked, according to research from Errata Security, a computer security company. (http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/01/Web-apps-over-Wi-Fi-put-data-at-risk_1.html?source=NLC-WIR&cgd=2007-08-02 8/1)