Ajax Girl

The timing couldn’t be much better for InterActiveCorp to launch Zwinktopia, a new virtual world for young teens. Other virtual worlds, such as Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, are exploding in terms of unique monthly visitors and total time spent at the sites.

Until today, IAC’s Zwinky was a site to make customized avatars, choosing from 10,000 different outfits, accesories and other items, and embed them onto other websites such as MySpace. Users could also become friends with other users and enage in basic social networking activities. See Stardoll as well in this space.

Most of the functionality at Zwinky is accessed via a non-mandatory browser toolbar that users install. Zwinky says that they have 20 million active toolbars that were used in March 2007. Part of Zwinky’s business model is to collect search advertising revenues from toolbar usage.

Today Zwinky will add a virtual world to the site called Zwinktopia - users can use their avatars to roam around the world, chat with other users and engage in activities to earn Zbucks, the virtual currency of Zwinktopia. Zbucks can be used to buy virtual clothing and other goods.

Zwinky is part of the Fun Webs group at IAC, which includes Smiley Central, Cursor Mania and other sites and generates over $100 million in annual revenues. The Fun Webs group is part of the Consumer Applications and Portals group (iWon and Excite are within this group) and is led by Scott Garell.

Zwinky alone has 4.7 million worldwide unique visitors in March (Comscore), far more than Second Life and the other competitors listed in the first paragraph above. If a reasonable number of them can be converted into exploring Zwinktopia, it will become the largest immersive world outside of the gaming sites like World of Warcraft. See Comscore comparision data below (U.S. only).

See GigaOm’s recent article on Gaia, which is probably closest to Zwinktopia in functionality.

Update: The company will be running the television ad promoting Zwinktopia embedded below on NBC on Monday.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112994566/

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke at a education.au conference in Sydney, Australia last week. After his talk he took questions.

As reported by the Brisbane Times, Andrew Hansen raised his hand as a member of the press and was selected to ask a question. What Wales didn’t know is that Hansen is part of the cast of a wildly popular public television show in Australia called The Chaser’s War on Everything, a weekly half hour satire/prank show.

Hansen said “Ah, Jimmy, um, look I just have 10 questions,” and then fired off ten questions in a row, not waiting for answers (It’s normal at events like this for reporters to ask a follow up question at the same time as the initial question to save time). This is a regular prank by the cast of the show, called “Mr. Ten Questions.”

His questions:

• First, how are you enjoying Australia?

• Second, how do our computers compare to the ones in America?

• Third, why does everyone in IT look so nerdy, yet you look like a daytime soap star?

• Fourth, Mac or PC - do you really give a shit?

• Fifth, there are 1.7 million articles on Wikipedia; how long did it take you to write them all?
• Sixth, Craig Reucassel’s a bit unhappy with the photo on his page. Could you upload a better one maybe for him?
• Seventh, my dog is getting some scabs under his chin. I don’t know if you can bring him in the number of a local vet?

• Eighth, Jessica Rowe and Peter Overton - will it last?

• Ninth, cracked pepper?
• Tenth, how do you feel about the fact that when I looked you up on Wikipedia this morning I changed your page to say that you were a teenage drug lord from Malaysia?

To his credit Wales attempted to respond to four of the questions.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112984446/

There’s a new Australia-based social network called FatSecret - it’s designed to help overweight people leverage a network of friends and online resources to lose weight. Like Traineo, which we wrote about last year, Fatsecret focuses on building a support network around you to monitor your progress.

Users first state their current and goal weights, and are urged to report in daily with their updated weight. This data builds a graph that is included on their profile page showing progress over time. Each user is also provided with a blog/journal and can add other Fatsecret users as friends.

Users are given information on various diets (Atkins, South Beach, etc.). Diets are commented and ranked by other users, creating a top list. There is also a recipe area with a detailed breakdown of the nutritional value of the recipe, along with user ratings and compliance with various diets. Users can upload their own recipes in a very structured way, and Fatsecret will calculate the nutritional value by analyzing the amount and types of ingredients.

Fatsecret doesn’t currently have any way to encourage or track exercise, and this is a natural place for expansion.

Overall the service is a great resource for people trying to lose weight. I believe Traineo’s method of getting four friends involved who will monitor your progress via email is a a really good idea. With Fatsecret, unless you make friends on the site or get your existing friends to also join and become members, it could quickly become a very lonely place. I would also like to see Fatsecret provide the weight graph as a widget, so users can add it to their website (see Skinnyr).

CenterNetworks has a good overview of some of the other new weight loss focused websites.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112812739/