NCsoft has announced the release of what it says is its largest expansion ever to its Lineage II franchise with a 1 gigabyte update called Kamael, which adds a new race of one-winged soldiers to the slate of available characters, along with new lands, instanced dungeons and new account services.

The Kamael expansion is free to all current Lineage II subscribers, which NCsoft says number 17 million worldwide. The company also says it will make game features such as character server transfers, name changes and gender changes available for purchase.

There's also a bit of a game balance adjustment, it seems, with items and enhancements available for newer players to support the single-player experience and make it more accessible, while also adding new areas for players over level 70.

Interestingly, players can record certain accomplishments and boss battles on video with a record and replay system, to let them create their own gameplay movies. Wonder if they'll be able to share and exchange videos?

Tim Tan, NCsoft’s North American producer of Lineage II, says, “The new Kamael race is very unique and adds a new world of playability to the game. The new high-level lands will benefit our longtime players seeking harder challenges, while the new-player and soloing features will make getting to the heart of the game easier for more players. The sheer amount of content in this expansion is unbelievable and I really look forward to seeing the players’ response.”

The CBBC wants to know what kids want from their online experience, and they're asking them directly. They've got an interest, of course -- the network is developing the Adventure Rock online world, along with another online play space based on its Tronji IP, through a partnership with development studio Nice Tech.

So in soliciting feedback from its young users, what did the CBBC learn? Says Callum from Birmingham, "I'd launch a football style virtual world, where you would start off in your back garden and gradually get better. Once you were good enough you would get signed for a team's academy and eventually make the first team. If your stats were really high you'd get picked for your international team."

Apparently the boom in virtual pets is right on in its target, as County Durham's Zoe enthuses, "I would put a virtual pet shop in mine because I'm simply crazy about animals! I'd also have a mansion where me and my dream pets could live and in the garden I would have giant stables or maybe even a ranch!"

Amy from Bouillac, France, wants a world where she can be a successful safari veterinarian, and Zara from London just wants a big palace so that she and her friends can see each other all of the time. Cute!

[Via CBBC]

The Seattle Times recently published an overview of the ever-burgeoning Silicon Valley tech sector, pointing out that the region's status as a global tech leader is only growing stronger even as other global markets are picking up the pace.

The article credits virtual worlds and social networking companies as big drivers behind that strength:

"In less than two years, YouTube went from an idea to a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google. Within the bustling social-networking sector, Facebook, LinkedIn and Ning, as well as "virtual worlds" Second Life and Gaia, are headquartered between San Jose and San Francisco.

Even several sites that target audiences elsewhere are based in the valley or close by. Bebo — the top social-networking site for the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand — is headquartered in San Francisco. The top sites for the Philippines (Friendster), Brazil (Google's Orkut) and Turkey (Yoonja) primarily operate from the Peninsula, thousands of miles from their users. Facebook recently disclosed that 60 percent of its users were outside the United States."

60 percent of Facebook users? That's considerable.

[Silicon Valley thrives on global market - Seattle Times]

EDUCAUSE, a non-profit organization that promotes higher education through the use of information technology, has formed a new "Virtual Worlds Constituent Group," which brings together academic faculty members interested in the impact of virtual worlds on learning institutions, with Second Life playing a prominent, "although not exclusive" role in the discussions.

The site already has a small collection of virtual world articles in its resource center. The group meets at the organization's Annual Conference, and discusses issues via an electronic discussion list.

Says EDUCAUSE, "The creation of the Virtual Worlds Constituent Group marks a great commitment of resources by EDUCAUSE and will also expose the idea of virtual worlds to a large and growing audience.

[Via ArtsPlace SL]

Mitch Davis, formerly founder and CEO of in-game advertising company Massive (now a Microsoft property) and Sony Pictures Digital vet Andy Schneider have launched a new company, Live Gamer, whose proprietary technology is geared to create a publisher-supported, secure platform for real-money purchase and sale of virtual goods. They kick off with a slate of MMO and virtual world operators including Funcom GMBH, Sony Online Entertainment, 10Tacle Studios, Acclaim, GoPets and Ping0 Interactive, all of whom will work with Live Gamer to provide the transaction platform to their users.

Live Gamer, backed by a $24 million investment by Charles River Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners and Pequot Ventures, says it wants to protect virtual worlds and MMOs from the impact of illegal item sales, and when Worlds in Motion spoke to Live Gamer CEO Andy Schneider, he explained that it was his and Davis' experience in the digital entertainment industry -- he's also founder, chairman and CEO of Brash Entertainment -- that helped them realize the need for such a service.

"After Mitch sold [Massive] to Microsoft, he was looking around the landscape and wondering, 'what else is going on in the game industry? What else can we do here?' That's when we both took a look at what [item sale platform] IGE was doing, and all of the bad things happening in the industry. There was a lot of black market activity, publishers were getting upset at IGE -- and this kind of virtual item trading has been going on since Ultima. There's obviously been a big uproar," says Schneider.

But, as he points out, this is a market that can be valued at as much as 2 billion dollars. "There's clearly demand, but it's going to the wrong place," he says. And in addition to issues like fraud and deception, publishers were swamped with customer support calls from users confounded by bad trades. Andy's solution? "We decided to create a company that would live or die based on publisher relations."

Live Gamer provides a toolset on the back end for its partner publishers that lets them maintain control over the in-game economy and resulting game balance, while offering a front-end component for user-to-user sales as a legitimized alternative to gold farming and black market virtual property sales and auctions. Publishers can either elect to be totally hands-off, or to set their own trading indices. Schneider says that, faced with overwhelming demand, plenty of publishers were on board from the start.

"We approached a number of publishers, and to our surprise everyone was very much in favor about being proactive about directing that consumer demand and not having it go out to the black market," Schneider says.

Live Gamer has a dedicated team to work with the publishers in support of the technical integration, and the company also leverages that publisher integration to ensure that the items users buy are actually delivered. But as to maintaining item value and adjusting game balance, Schneider says that control stays in the publisher's hands. He continues, "I think that it’s going to be up to each and every publisher as to how they decide to embrace and implement our solution. There are three categories of games- MMOGs, virtual worlds and casual games. And there are different types of players, but they can all benefit from a secure commerce platform."

We asked Andy about the meteoric rise of virtual goods as a component of online play, and he pointed out the generational aspect -- we've now a generation of users who've grown up playing games online, and that commerce is part of the social experience, he notes. "Both the gaming and the virtual worlds space are maturing. People are used to having a persona online that they accrue value to. Their character is their representation online, and has real value to them. The objects or items their characters have have real value to them."

So will Live Gamer work with all publishers? "The only real requirement we have for a neighboring capability is in someone’s level of persistence," Schneider explains. "We’re certainly open and willing to work with everybody – there are age considerations. We don’t want to deal with kids in this type of a market. I think there are some nuances, some compliance issues when we're talking about various age groups [conducting transactions] online. But we have solutions that we can implement. We have to be sensitive to regulatory issues."

He concluded, "But at the end of the day, we really want to talk to any and everybody that has interest in providing this kind of service to their users. The main point is that there’s also a network effect. The more people we get on board, the more we provide a better service globally and have a better idea of targeting people trying to commit fraud."

Worlds in Motion recently talked to Dr. Jim Bower of Numedeon, which developed and now operates the Whyville educational and social virtual world for kids, about a broad range of issues, and Dr. Bower shared meaty stats for Whyville users, his thoughts on why broadcast is dead, on Whyville's branding relationships, and discussed Numedeon's upcoming plans to build worlds not only for kids, but for an entirely different demographic of adults. We even asked him -- nicely -- why Whyville's graphics are so... well, let's call them 'simplistic'!!

Could you give a capsule history of how Whyville came to be what it is today?

Whyville was launched in 1999 as the first virtual world property developed by Numedeon Inc. The site itself reflects many years of research and development by the founders working within the Caltech Pre-College Science Initiative (CAPSI) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. I was for 17 years a professor of computational neuroscience at Caltech, and was also the founder and co-director of CAPSI. CAPSI's primary mission was to support the introduction of high quality 'inquiry-based' science curriculum in public schools, but a secondary mission was to explore the use of computers and computer networks to enhance and extend inquiry-based learning in broad terms.

Numedeon Inc today is the only virtual world company explicitly focused on engaging users through collaborative learning. Whyville.net recently surpassed 3 million registered users, 80% of whom are in the age range of 8-14, average age 12, 2/3rds female. Whyville.net is regarded as one of the leading educational sites for 'tweens, and is international in scope. Whyville has also attracted a wide range of sponsors, from the John Paul Getty Trust, to Toyota's Scion Division, to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Disney Interactive, and is increasingly recognized as a leading innovator in the development of new methods for Marketing and engagement on the Internet. Numedeon will soon be launching several additional virtual worlds aimed at new demographics.

How are your membership and stickiness statistics looking in late 2007, and could you say approximately how many members log into Whyville regularly?

On Dec. 1, 2007, Whyville surpassed 3 million registered users and is currently adding between 3,000 and 4,000 new users each day. At 3.5 hours per average user per month, Whyville is one of the most engaging sites on the Internet. Whyville also has remarkable statistics for longevity. Users who log in more than 10 times, on average maintain the same active account for more than a year. 10% of users who registered in 2001 returned to the site at least once in 2007. It is important to realize that to date, Numedeon has spent almost nothing on traditional marketing.

Over time, Whyville has hosted interactive promotions for consumer corporations such as Disney and Toyota, as well as intellectual institutions such as Getty and JPL- could you tell us about your more recent partnerships, and how Whyville is providing a unique service to them?

Almost all sponsors of Whyville.net maintain long-term relations with the site. Thus Disney and Toyota continue to add to and extend their involvement with Whyville. Our most recent major sponsor is the 5th largest bank in Spain, Bankinter, which in November opened a virtual branch office in Whyville. Within 20 hours, and without notification, our users had deposited 25% of the virtual currency currently in circulation in either savings or CD accounts within the virtual bank. In early December of 2007, Numedeon signed a memo of understanding with Bankinter, the regional government of Galicia, and a major Spanish IT company to bring Spanish to Whyville and Whyville to Spain and Spanish speaking children around the world. This new sponsorship has major implications for the reach of Whyville as well as new technological extensions of Numedeon's Virtual World platform, NICE.

Numedeon's business in general and Whyville in particular are both fundamentally based on the premise that measures of 'engagement' and not simple eyeballs will eventually be the metric for marketing on the Internet. We don't specialize in eyeballs; we specialize in "brains connected to eyeballs". In most other virtual worlds, first entry by a sponsor involves a simple replication of real world activities that take little advantage of the new capabilities unique to these worlds. Thus, this form of sponsorship or marketing turns into not much more than wrapping the same 'brand-based' approach around a new medium. Virtual worlds can support much more, however.

Numedeon specializes in the design of sponsored activities that are fully engaging and built around learning about products much more than simple branding. Our approach involves leveraging our advanced simulation-based technology, our expertise and capabilities in managing social interactions on the site, and our considerable experience designing games and activities that motivate our users. In addition, new activities are launched into an existing, vibrant, and well populated community. This means that the impact is almost immediate. Our technology also provides detailed and continuous feedback using metrics that measure real engagement. For all these reasons, our sponsorships tend to be long term with a continually evolving and expanding presence for the sponsor on the site. There are now numerous instances as well, in which a sponsor developed their approach to virtual worlds working with us and then exported the design to other virtual worlds.

As Whyville's graphic design and user interface are showing their age, does Numedeon have, or even feel that it needs, a strategy to compete with other more modernized personalization-focused social worlds?

Numedeon specializes in the construction of learning-based worlds, and therefore is more focused on 'process' than look and feel. We believe that the focus of most of the gaming industry on the latest graphics and style is a reflection of the fact that, underneath, the fundamental interaction with the user has remained essentially the same. Without substance, one must rely on Flash. Numedeon also does not regard the growing number of social-worlds as direct competition.

Once one digs below the surface, one finds that the real use of those worlds is much less than that claimed, and importantly, the longevity of use is very low. Most of the current and proposed new worlds are straight marketing plays, with little or no direct emphasis on learning and therefore with less potential for deep engagement. Numedeon remains the only explicitly learning-based virtual world company. Really engaging users for a long time requires constant enhancements to the substance and richness of users experience, which is closely linked to their ability to learn, and benefit from what they learn on the site and in the real world. This is our speciality.

With respect to graphics in particular, we believe that over-investment in sophisticated graphics can actually, in effect, limit engagement. The more complex the site graphically, the more dependent use is on having the latest graphics cards, upgraded computers and high-speed access. This approach also makes stand-alone software platforms much more vulnerable to changes in browsers, operating systems. etc, that these companies don't control. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the more sophisticated the interface, the less able the average user is to contribute actively to its content and therefore contribute personally of the site. In our experience, the greatest predictor of long-term engagement is the ease with which an average user can make a significant personal contribution.

For these reasons, Numedeon made the decision in 1999 to construct its engine around the current capabilities of standard browsers. That is not to say that we aren't continually evaluating available technology and ways to further reduce barriers to use and at the same time enhance user experiences in our virtual worlds. As browsers change (and they will) we will add more capabilities. Q1 of 2008 will see a number of changes in the look and feel of Whyville.

What are your thoughts on the prospect of competing for the mindshare of the 16-through-28 high-cost, media-saturated demographic?

Whyville's demographic is primarily ages 8-14, although participation is open to all. However, Numedeon will shortly be launching a new virtual world specifically aimed at this older demographic. In our view what we offer is so substantially different from other 'media' that we believe we will be as successful in differentiating ourselves within this demographic as we have with our younger demographic.

The key difference is an explicit understanding that 'Broadcast' is dying and soon to be dead. The Internet is slowly driving a fundamental shift from broadcast to a passive audience to interacting with an engaged audience. Since the invention of the printing press and Universities, media and education have all been about broadcast to more or less passive receivers. The fact that the Internet includes a wire going and a wire coming will eventually reduce or perhaps even eliminate broadcast as a mean of influencing or educating people. Essentially none of the traditional media companies have really learned how to use the wire coming back - and they don't seem to really yet understand that the information on the wire coming back is likely to be more interesting than the wire going out. Even in most Internet properties, "media-saturation" means broadcast media saturation.

Numedeon builds non-broadcast user engaging media. It is this change that underlies Whyville's remarkable stickiness statistics. It is also this change that our sponsorship partners have engaged with us to understand. The value and appreciation for real engagement is not limited to one demographic group and we are looking forward to making that point with a new demographic.

What do you think Whyville can tell us about the future of education?

Same message, broadcast is out (doesn't work anyway), engagement is in. Numedeon's virtual world technology provides a completely new and more dynamic, user-centered means for learning and therefore education that also scales. Perhaps the most important point is that Numedeon believes that, in simulation-based virtual worlds, when engagement is maximal, the difference between education and marketing, between learning and influencing, disappear. If we are correct, the implications are just as profound for the educational establishment as they are for the business establishment. In both cases, what you want them to know is not as important as what they can and will learn themselves with your supervision. "The product" then, whether it is physics or a new car, will need to be able to withstand the scrutiny of the public. If it does, the effect on the user will be long lasting.

From your perspective as a neuroscientist who has spent a number of years working on practical methods of combining play, instruction, and advertisement, how would you define the concept of "entertainment"?

As already stated, in the modern world, most media entertainment has been passive and not very effective. Even the educational system is constantly striving to be more 'entertaining". However, what gets the 'brain juices' of any human really cranking are circumstances when that human is personally engaged and involved and that involvement has a direct consequence for their social status. Traditional TV and radio marketing can only attract your attention - attention mechanisms, however, are intended to direct your brain to something you can now "do". There is no 'do' in traditional broadcast media.

The 'social do' that drives the willingness of humans to watch evening television, are water cooler conversations the next day at work. Social networking sites on the Internet are a "water cooler" phenomenon, but they aren't a very effective venue for the 'doing' part. Numedeon's virtual worlds are completely focused and designed around 'social doing". We design activities where both happen at the same time. The gaming industry has only slowly realized that the reason gamers play games is the social stuff they build around the games by themselves. However, the 'doing' in most video games is also limited.

In summary, the highest form of human engagement is reserved for conditions under which learning leads directly to an increase in social status. Learning is what our brains do, social status is what we care about. Eyeballs attend, brains engage. Numedeon is in the business of engaging brains, not eyeballs.

[Patrick Murphy contributed to this report.]

Seems Second Life-focused Electric Sheep, developers of the OnRez browser for Second Life and world-builders for the likes of Warner Brothers and CSI: NY, has laid off a third of its employees, or 22 people.

TechCrunch credits disappointing performance for the CSI:NY/Second Life crossover -- not that it was an outright failure, but that it didn't garner what the article calls a "ridiculously high number" of expected signups. It also highlights the recent loss of two of the company's weightier clients, AOL and Pontiac, who've departed Second Life.

There's not enough info to tell if Electric Sheep are here a victim of the widely-perceived Second Life entropy, or if they simply raised expectations for growth too high, too fast. The layoffs come just in time for Christmas, too -- hang in there, guys.

[Via TechCrunch]

Big Stage, a new internet media company, has announced that Chuck Huebner, former head of worldwide studios at Activision, has joined the company as its president and chief executive officer. The company's technology allows users to create and personalize a 3D avatar of themselves that can be integrated into movie scenes, TV shows, video games, virtual worlds, user generated content and other media. It's planning to launch to consumers in 2008.

Prior to his work with Activision, Huebner was president and CEO of Hasbro hobby and game subsidiary Wizards of the Coast. He's also held senior management roles with Coca Cola -- he led a $2 billion restructuring of the Coca-Cola Japan bottling system, as well as new business acquisition and development. Additionally, Huebner co-founded ERS International, a retail technology platform that went public in 1992.

Says Huebner, "As a revolutionary global media company, Big Stage will redefine how consumers experience entertainment. I have never seen a company or a technology that I believe has the potential that Big Stage does. It is a testament to the founders and tech team that they had the vision and the wherewithal to bring the company to this point and I look forward to leading us further along the path to success.”

Short piece up on ZDNet that peeks into IBM's corporate virtual world, Metaverse, and touches on the reasons they chose to build their own internal world rather than use Second Life -- as expected, confidentiality and security. The article also culled the company's three biggest lessons from using virtual worlds for business:

"Remember the users when building a virtual world. The goal is to enable collaboration, not make things complicated. Ackerbacker said IBM is still noodling over how to bring the emotional connection into virtual space and get employees there easily. “Can we create a learning environment that doesn’t get in the way?” asked Ackerbacker.

Cater to your culture. The avatar options in Metaverse–built on the Torque gaming engine–were distinctly IBM. For instance, ties are an option. So is gray hair is an option. And no one is some hybrid animal thingy.

Don’t be exclusive. If you want collaboration you have to make virtual worlds simple. Ackerbacker said IBM stripped down its user interface 'quite a bit.' 'We only have a dozen controls,' said Ackerbacker. 'Click on an icon and it’ll do something–fly, teleport and dress. We’re having an ongoing discussion on how to make it easier.'"

[IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security - ZDNet]

Casual games publisher PlayFirst has announced that it has raised $16.5 million in its Series C financing round led by DCM, adding to its previous Series A and B rounds of funding and bringing its current total of venture capital raised to $26.5 million. Existing investors, including Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners, also participated in the round.

PlayFirst says it plans to use the funding to accelerate casual game and web development, expanding its new business models for games like Chocolatier, Wedding Dash and Dream Chronicles, which incorporate microtransactions and social networking elements.

The company also announced a joint initiative with web application developer RockYou to distribute PlayFirst's Wedding Dash game on social networking sites, beginning with Facebook, aiming to expand the way its users engage with casual game content and allowing the audiences of those networks to receive promotions from PlayFirst.

Said PlayFirst president and CEO John Welch, "PlayFirst has a history of breaking new ground and with our introduction of virtual goods into Diner Dash, we continued that trend in 2007. We are thrilled to have the backing of DCM and the continued support of our existing investment partners to help us grow the casual games industry into the mass-market, highly profitable business that industry insiders and analysts expect it will be.”

Linden Lab is apparently now offering Second Life users account statements of their monthly finances in-world. Second Lifers can now view details from all of their transactions -- from dollars in to dollars out -- as far back as possible. The statements are in U.S. dollars and let you view transactions one month at a time via PDF. This is probably of particular use to Second Life business owners who need the info for taxes.

The chart projects Second Life's userbase to double from 10 to 20 million, but the interesting question would be how the world will promote such an increase in adoption when other platforms are gaining in presence at the same time, and the idea of using it for both public and private enterprise has some notches in its luster. Kzero's forecast for There is much better -- projected to grow from 1 million to 7 million users, and things look good for Kaneva, also, expecting growth of .6 million to 3 million.

[Via ArtsPlace SL]

It's not news to anyone that branding, fashion and celebrity are three big drivers behind the appeal of social virtual worlds, especially those geared at younger folks. Users want to be able to dress their avatar in big-label brands, and virtual worlds users actually embrace advertising because it enhances realism. Finally, the way virtual worlds permit people to create better-than-the-real-thing versions of themselves and their lives, if they like, is part of its appeal -- fame and glamour are possible for anyone.

While visiting consulting group Kzero's site to check out their growth projections for virtual worlds, I happened to see their display for the latest campaign they built for L'Oreal Paris. They created makeup skins for each of the cosmetic line's celebrity looks to be worn by Second Life avatars, and to demonstrate, they showed panels of the Second Life celebrity looks alongside the real ones.

An intriguing conundrum is revealed -- the difficulty in emulating real faces in Second Life and other avatar-based virtual worlds. If a celebrity is the "face" of your campaign, that might be a challenge to translate. It seems that Kzero only skinned the makeup looks and not the celeb faces, so it's not an issue for users who want to adopt those color schemes. But for other display ads, will a virtual Scarlet Johansson have the same draw for users in the virtual world as she has for the real world if users can't necessarily recognize her?

Try and test yourself! Here are the celeb faces from Kzero's campaign -- can you tell which stars they are? Answers are after the jump -- but if a famous face is your branding and it can't be recognized in the virtual space, something's lost in translation, isn't it?

Cellufun has announced Merry Mobile, which it describes as a "cooperative, community game where consumers celebrate the holidays in a mobile virtual world." Users who have homepages on Cellufun's mobile social network can decorate their pages with a holiday theme. More interestingly, though, the Merry Mobile kickoff marks the launch of Cellufun's new Virtual Mall.

The Cellufun Virtual Mall will let users buy and give gifts to one another and participate in gift-giving competitions. Using their mobile profiles and avatars, players can use their "Cellupoints" to shop for virtual gifts such as fruitcake from Herr Strudel’s Bakery and SpaceWars ship models from Miss Dolly’s Toy Shoppe, making purchases with Cellupoints.

Cellufun says it expects to continue the Virtual Mall beyond the holiday gift-giving season, and expects similar events to take place during Valentine's day.

Cellufun CTO Steve Dacek says, "For most of us, the mobile phone has become an extension of self. At the same time, virtual worlds and social networks have redefined our sense of community. So it made perfect sense to bring the virtual world experience to the phone, and to do it around the holidays. The gifts are virtual, but the joy of giving them is real.”

Official demographics for Second Life have just come out on the Second Life blog, showing an active user base of 538,400. The average in-world time for these users is 45 hours a month, which is pretty formidable.

However, over at New World Notes, Wagner James Au reminds us that that active users number, while less than that in August, was slightly more than that 538,400 number in July. He points to recent trends of stagnation even in spite of increased Second Life promotion, like the two TV shows (CSI: NY and The Office) that featured Second Life in the month of October, and states that Second Life has reached a plateau phase.

Au continues:

"The main reasons for this stagnation, of course, are obvious: constant system failures, a confusing user interface, and disorienting first-time visitor experience. Improvements to the first hurdle will surely grow the populace, though I'm beginning to wonder how much the latter two can really be addressed: OnRez, despite its many strengths, coupled to a highly polished introductory experience, did little to improve overall retention rates. It may be that the conceptual barrier will always remain constant at 10%, and the remaining 9 and 10 who try a user-created 3D world without imposed guidelines and goals are fundamentally, intransigently incapable of embracing it. That may be."

[Via New World Notes]

The Walt Disney Internet Group has announced it has appointed A.D. "Bud" Albers as chief technology officer, where he'll be responsible for "leading technological breakthroughs on existing platforms as well as developing cutting-edge new technology solutions in support of the company's new media technology needs."

Prior to joining WDIG, where Albers was senior vice president and CEO at MediaNet Digital (formerly MusicNet), where he supported the launch of music services including Microsoft Zune, MTV Urge, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Virgin Red Pass and the Samsung Media Service in Europe. He also played an active role in the company's shift into video, DRM free and cross platform technologies.

Steve Wadsworth, WDIG President, commented, "Bud's depth and breadth of experience in complex technology solutions and global business challenges will be invaluable to us as we pursue our mission to offer a compelling mix of interactive entertainment and information content and services for Internet and mobile devices for audiences around the world. We're fortunate to have someone with Bud's deep success record and strategic insight on our leadership team."

Continued Wadsworth, "His technical knowledge combined with his strategic thinking will help us achieve our vision of a world where users can access The Walt Disney Company content, including Disney-branded characters and stories, ABC news and entertainment and ESPN sports coverage and analysis, anytime and anywhere."

That "anytime and anywhere" access to Disney-branded content likely includes the company's recent strong presence in the virtual worlds space, too.