Who Wants to Buy a Virtual World?

If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.

WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running out of money. The team of five that built WhuddleWorld over the last year and a half is soliciting acquisition and partnership offers to get the immersive world back online.

Co-founder Dee Hardrath claims that at the time of shutdown WhuddleWorld had grown to 76,000 registered members and a monthly page view count of 20M. She also says the company still receives emails four months later from loyal followers pleading them to get the world back into operation.

Interested in investing? Drop them a line. Perhaps you will be the one to pull them out of the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Check out our recent roundup of virtual worlds for information about the competitors in this space.

Update: Additional materials regarding the WhuddleWorld business plan and its pre-shutdown traffic have been posted below in comment #21.

Exclusive: BlogMusik To Go Legit; Launches Free & Legal Music On Demand

Back in September last year Michael suggested everyone check out BlogMusik quickly before it was shut down. BlogMusik is a service born in France that lets you search for mp3 files on the web and listen to them in streaming mode for free. At the time the service was young and had no particular licensing agreements. A few months later, the SACEM, the organization in charge of collecting payments for artists’ rights sent them a cease and desist letter with a view to stop the service. A lot has happened since (beyond a rather nice site redesign and addition of sharing features).

BlogMusik will announce tomorrow that they came to an agreement with the SACEM, clearing the service of copyright infrigement accusations. The details of this agreement are not are not being disclosed, but other deals suggest it is based on a revenue sharing mode. BlogMusik’s business model is relying on advertising and affiliate revenue coming from the sales of songs on iTunes and Amazon. This agreement should cover BlogMusik for any music they host wherever the music is listened from. However they still have to come to an agreement with organizations representing majors and labels (Pandora had to face new webradio rates imposed by the RIAA). This is being taken care of according to the CEO of the company and new agreements should be announced soon.

All in all this is a good news for BlogMusik The company now has an opportunity to become a true free legal alternative to listen to music on the internet. Unlike Pandora this is a music on demand service where you choose the titles you want to listen to (although you have a smart playlist option to generate automatically radios out of a song or an artist).

BlogMusik.net will also change name and become Deezer.com. This is a good thing i had a hard time getting the UR/nameL right with this “k” in the middle (not mentionning the .net).

RadioBlogClub, another popular french service was forced a few months ago to change hosting provider following a complaint sent by the same SACEM. The service was interupted a few days and opened again as fresh as new. To date no official licensing agreement was made with the company.

Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans

Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The company provides a great package of event management tools including online registration, email marketing (souped-up spam) and online event promotion.

Their online event promotion tools include a nifty service called Event Network Listing that can only be described as “AdSense for events.” The service lets event planners for a fee list an event on any site or blog in Eventbee’s growing partner network. The partner network consists of sites and blogs that have AdSense-like code embedded on their sites. This allows for highly targeted and controlled event promotion. You can see Eventbee’s network event listings in action on Rajesh Setty’s LifeBeyondCode.

Eventbee partners get paid in two ways. First, they get an initial listing fee for each new listing that they get to set in advance. Second, when event ticket purchases are initiated from their site they receive a commission. The commission amount is set in advance by the event planner. Eventbee keeps 29% of the total earnings partners make.

Event planners can create customizable event pages on Eventbee’s site just like you can with Eventbrite (see our Eventbrite TC20 page here). Tickets sold from event pages start with fees as low as 1.45% of ticket price, plus a minimum fee of $0.25. RegOnline and Acteva also offer online event registration.

Eventbee’s glorified spam, I mean, email marketing service is tightly integrated with their online registration. You can create beautifully designed emails by importing HTML code or using their WYSIWYG editor. The service allows you to track bounced emails, opened emails and online registration URL click-throughs.

They currently have over 6,000 event managers. They are self-funded with CEO Bala Musrif claiming to be profitable since 2005 with no plans for raising money.