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Filed under: Business, Internet, Social Software

Disney will pay up to $700 million for Club Penguin

Club PenguinDisney is buying its way into social networking. The company today picked up kid-focused game and networking site Club Penguin for $350 million in cash. Disney will pay up to $350 million more if the company hits a series of performance goals by 2009.

Club Penguin is described as a "virtual world," where kids can interact with one another and play games. The site was founded in 2005 and has 700 thousand paid subscribers.

TechCrunch reports that Club Penguin's been on the market for a while, and that previous bidders had passed on the company because of its habit of giving large amounts of money to charity. Another interesting note is the fact that penguins are kind of hot these days with March of the Penguins and Happy Feet, and Surf's Up in the theaters and DVD stores. How long this trend can continue is anybody's guess. Of course, Linux could become a huge hit with the kids next, and then everybody'll want to join the site in the hopes of being like Tux.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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