On the tail of my mental /boggle over GuildCafe’s venture capital deal, Chris Heintz, mouthpiece for Curse.com — formerly curse-gaming.com — emailed with some details about the recent redesign of Curse.com and its own hot VC injection.
I had noticed Curse’s redesign earlier yesterday when I went to check on some of my World of Warcraft addons. My reaction was something like, “hmm, another redesign at Curse. They sure redesign alot. If my bookmarks are broken again, I’m going to be pissed.” But they’re not, so I’m not.
Happy fun user information is in Curse’s news announcement and here’s the soon-to-be press release:
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — JULY (xx) 2007 — Curse Inc., the premier gaming portal dedicated to massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and their fan communities, today officially launched V4 of Curse.com. Formerly known as Curse-Gaming, Curse provides the most complete online resource for all MMOGs, and V4 is the ultimate destination for user-created content, communication tools, updates, add-ons and community news for MMOG players. Through a new partnership with Wikia, Inc., Curse now offers the most in-depth MMOG databases available anywhere. V4 is now live at www.curse.com.
“Curse’s V4 is the most comprehensive MMO community anywhere on the internet, increasing interactivity and user-created content possibilities for players everywhere,” said Hubert Thieblot, founder and CEO of Curse Inc. “MMO gamers can come to one destination for Web 2.0 applications that were designed by MMO players with the global community in mind.”
Introducing a multitude of new and unique features, V4 marks a concerted effort on the part of Curse to offer fans of MMOG’s everywhere more social networking options, enhanced interactivity and innovative new tools for creating and sharing user-created content. V4 is currently available in five languages — English, German, French, Spanish and Mandarin — with more coming soon.
In addition to V4’s updated design and features, Curse’s partnership with Wikia, Inc. provides users with access to the most comprehensive MMO-related wiki databases in existence, including the extremely popular WoWWiki.com. Curse will offer all of Wikia’s MMO databases, complete in every language Curse supports, with instantaneously up-to-date content.
V4 features include:
MyCurse — “ The ultimate social networking resource for MMO players and guilds, MyCurse provides users with the ability to blog, connect with friends, share hardware profiles, in addition to uploading user-created video and screenshots
Streaming Video Posting — V4 introduces streaming video posting, enabling the MMO community to tag, rank and share user-created videos for the first time
Curse Client — Available via download on the Curse homepage, the Curse Client is a downloadable program that syncs with Vanguard and World of Warcraft allowing players to capture and post screenshots from the game client. Additionally, the Curse Client uploads character information automatically to the user’s MyCurse profile
Social Bookmarking — Users can rate any content that’s relevant to them — news, forums, blogs, items and more – shaping the collective opinion of the global audience
Mini-Portals — If you play it, Curse has a portal for you. Curse.com features a portal for every MMO imaginable, providing even niche gamers with a resource for news, add-ons and updates for their favorite game
MMO Wikis — Thanks to a partnership with Wikia, Inc., Curse now offers its users access to the most exhaustive MMO wikis in existence. Users can find all of the content from Wikia’s extensive databases, including the comprehensive and frequently updated WoWWiki.com.To visit V4 and download the latest client, please visit www.curse.com.
About Curse Inc.
Launched in 2005, by founder Hubert Thieblot of the renowned Curse guild, Curse was built by a young team of creative, innovative, tech-savvy gamers to help develop a one-stop-shop for all MMO add-on needs. Formerly Curse-Gaming.com, Curse has grown to become the most visited user-generated MMO content portal in the world. Offering gamers an unparalleled social experience revolving around their favorite games, Curse is the only portal offering video and screenshot sharing, wikis, databases, add-on downloads, social bookmarking, blogging, forums, and guild website hosting. Curse’s direct relationships with developers and publishers provide users with in-depth game resources, and add value for the community. Curse is an invaluable resource for MMO gamers.About Wikia, Inc.
Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, more than 750,000 articles on 2,700 topics have been created and edited by over 100,000 registered users in 70 languages. In addition to working on open-source search, Wikia is currently home to several popular gaming-related communities such as World of Warcraft at http://www.wowwiki.com, Final Fantasy at http://finalfantasy.wikia.com and Halopedia at http://halo.wikia.com .Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia — the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.
Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.(xx) […]
Now that’s a venture capital investment I can understand. They have the UI mods, they have some wowwiki synergy, they have the traffic. Profit!
UPDATE: $5 million. Interesting.