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Social Networking - Sunday, March 25, 2007

Disney Invests in Tween Social Networking Biz Imbee

Steamboat Ventures, the VC arm of the Walt Disney, has made an investment in Industrious Kid, which built the tween social networking site Imbee.com. Imbee has also officially launched in Beta. We covered Industrious Kid last March when we reported that it had raised $6M in its Series A round of funding.

The first round included an investment from Steamboat as well as from its wealthy co-founder Jeannette Symons. Symons owned a large stake telecom networking's Ascend Communications, which was to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24B.

Imbee is designed for kids from ages 8 to 14. Functionality includes: avatars, blogs, messaging, photo sharing, Invitation access, points that can then be redeemed for prizes or rewards at the Imbee store. Imbee has teamed up with the Disney division Hollywood Records so that it will be able to offer song downloads to its membership. And of course keeping the site child-safe through user verifications is a big deal.

Imbee has a formidable competition from Club Penguin, which we recently profiled. Club Penguin targets the same demographic and had 4M visitors last January alone. Imbee says it has attracted nearly 25K active members since its launch.

Read - Creator of tween social network nabs Disney VC investment (CNET)