club penguin posts

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Disney will pay up to $700 million for Club Penguin

by Brad Linder Aug 1st 2007

Disney 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.

Tags: club penguin, ClubPenguin, disney

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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