Habbo Hotel, the under-21 social networking site that was forced to close down earlier this month after it was revealed that people were using it to send sexual and other illicit messages to underage users, is now open once again, TechCrunch has learned.
Sulake, the Finnish company that owns Habbo Hotel, two weeks ago “muted” activity on the site as it scrambled to implement better content and… → Read More
In the wake of the disturbing news that teen site Habbo Hotel had hosted illicit and inappropriate content, the response from other sites aimed at teens and younger children has been patchy at best.
Yesterday UK broadcaster Channel 4 published allegations that the site was playing host to pornographic sexual chat, despite being aimed at children as young as 13 years old.
We asked similar… → Read More
Top European VC firm Balderton today has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is ditching a 13 percent stake in Finnish social networking and virtual world company Sulake, creators of Habbo, after the youth-oriented site was exposed for hosting illicit content not appropriate for its intended users. Balderton had been an investor in Sulake for the past eight years and together with other backers had… → Read More
Convincing people to pay for nothing, or rather for things with zero marginal cost to produce, is a great business model—in theory. In practice, there are so few examples to point to, and most of them are overseas, such as Helsinki-based teen virtual world Habbo. The virtual world’s parent company, Sulake, today reported some selective financial and user data for Habbo. In 2008, Habbo’s… → Read More
EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February. The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete lack of customizable features (outside of the usual Sims customization… → Read More
EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership. EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in… → Read More
Habbo Hotel, a Helsinki, Finland virtual world/social network startup, announced a 6 million Euro round of financing today (parent company is Sulake) from Movida Group (a joint venture by SoftBank BB Corp. and Asian Groove). Previous investors include Taivas Group, 3i Group plc, Elisa Group and Benchmark Capital. This most recent round was a “substantial valuation increase” from the… → Read More
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