VentureBeat

Plenty of companies are making the shift from video games to virtual worlds. Knowledge Adventure is the latest as it announced today it has raised $5 million in a second round of funding to shift its focus from educational software to 3-D virtual worlds for kids.

Azure Capital Partners and Telesoft Partners led the round. The Torrance, Calif.-based company is an adolescent itself with 15 years of experience in making games for three-year-olds to 10-year-olds, including the JumpStart series and Math Blaster educational games. Now it plans to hire a new team to produce a virtual world.

Kids software is currently about a hundred million-dollar market, according to Arjun Gupta, managing partner of TeleSoft. But the potential for online worlds is greater, as evidenced by Disney’s $700 million purchase of the Club Penguin online game world for kids.

There is plenty of current or pending competition from companies building either kids online games or kids online worlds from the likes of Zookazoo, FusionFall, Webkinz, Neopets, Lego and Fluid Entertainment. In the past, many educational software companies assumed that parents would be too afraid to let their youngest kids get on the Internet. But Club Penguin changed all that.

“People are starting to realize this is the new Saturday morning television,” said Thomas Swalla, president of e-commerce at Knowledge Adventure.

Knowledge Adventure has some great brands with kids and it knows how to make games that entertain youngsters. But it has never been on the bleeding edge of gee-whiz graphics or game technology. My oldest kids grew up with Knowledge Adventure. But these days, it will have to compete with Brain Age on the Nintendo DS, Club Penguin, Bella Sara horse trading cards, LeapFrog’s Didj and Leapster educational game handhelds, and the Nintendo Wii. The company could thus find itself in a tough spot as it tries to upgrade its gaming experience for those who have plenty of other virtual world choices.

The company launched its first online games on JumpStart World a couple of weeks ago, but Swalla said that the first virtual world product would launch in the fourth quater. The virtual worlds will leverage the Math Blaster and JumpStart brands and feature 3-D environments accessible through a web browser.

David Lord came in as the new CEO of Knowledge Adventure a few months ago with the goal of taking the company into virtual worlds. The company previously raised a first round of financing of $12.5 million in 2004. The company has 65 employees in Torrance and recently opened a new office in India.

Online education portal Education.com will announce a total of $9.75 million in its second round of financing today, VentureBeat has learned. The site seeks to become a one-stop destination for parents looking for online answers about their children’s education.

The site’s main appeal lies in its School Finder application, allowing parents to see information such as teacher-to-student ratio, test scores, and other parent’s reviews about local schools. The site also hosts about 7,000 articles, drawn from both Education.com in-house talent and partnerships with organizations the American Association for School Administrators, covering topics like bullying, gifted students, or keeping kids healthy. The site also has launched an Activities section, which has suggestions for things parents and children can do together, arranged by grade and topic.

Chief officer Ron Fortune wants the site to be the equivalent of WebMD for parents anxious to learn more about their children’s education than what is currently available. “You can’t rely on the schools alone to get the job done in education,” says Fortune. “There’s a lot of talk of No Child Left Behind, there should be more about No Parent Left Behind.” The site is already seeing about 4 million page views a month, according to ComScore, and Fortune says they’re seeing more than 600,000 unique visitors every month.

Tech devoted to learning is having a moment in the sun. According to a report put out by Ambient Insight, the market is seeing its highest rate of investment since the last recession. We’ve written about several companies seeing investment of their own, including Flashcard Friends, Edufire and Dreambox Learning. Education.com is most directly competing with sites like Great Schools and SchoolDigger. With 53.2 million school-aged children in the US according to the US Census, the education marketplace obviously has the potential to grow rapidly.

The company plans to extend the sites social network capabilities, as well as build out their own educational content. Fortune says the site hopes to expand the services offered, mentioning offering premium subscriptions and low-cost online tutoring.

This round of funding was led by California Technology Ventures, with Azure Capital Partners and TeleSoft Partners also participating. Both Azure Capital and TeleSoft Partners had taken part in the first round of funding as well. The company is headquarted in Redwood City, Calif.

Are you looking to take a vacation with a specific purpose, say bird-watching? If so, perhaps you should check out TravelMuse, a new vacation recommendation site that launched this week.

The site, which has one of the better looking user interfaces of any travel site that I’ve seen, it set up like a travel magazine. The current “issue” highlights Argentina.

“We want to provide vibrant photos and content that changes every week,” chief executive Kevin Fliess says. “We want it to be like picking up the newest issue of Travel & Leisure.”

This attention to design and user experience may help it compete in the ever-expanding travel website field. Rivals now include NileGuide (our coverage) and Kayak, as well as the big boys, Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz and Hotwire.

The Los Altos, Calif-based company has raised $3.5 million from Azure Capital Partners, California Technology Ventures and angels.

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Education.com, a Redwood City, Calif. company dedicated to teaching parents how to help their kids through school, launches today with $4.5 million in funding.

Attempting to build a company around a domain name, instead of the other way around, can be dangerous. As the huge flop of Wine.com has shown — hundreds of millions of dollars invested, and still struggling seven reincarnations later — faith placed in a domain name with no business plan doesn’t work. Business.com is another example of company that flailed around, looking for a plan. Healthcare.com is another, just launched (we covered yesterday). Chocolate.com, meanwhile, looks like it is off to a good start.

Education.com sounds nobler. But will it work as a business? David Limp, a partner at Azure Capital Partners, said his firm and another venture firm Telesoft Partners acquired the domain name when they bought Knowledge Adventure, an education software company in 2004. Last year, the two firms invested in Education.com to spin it out.

The company cites a survey conducted by conducted by Harris Interactive, which says 74 percent of parents of children ages 18 and under said they wished they had a single resource they could turn to for information and answers about education and 96 percent of parents believe they need to take an active role to help children through school.

Education offers the following:

–Over 4,000 reference articles from across the Web
–Editorial content that encourages parents to take learning beyond the classroom
–Networking features for parents

The site hopes to make money from advertising, and then eventually by charging for services offered.

Rooftop Media is a company that publishes video video of stand-up comedy performances in clubs around the nation, featuring artists who may not make it to the big leagues of Comedy Central.

The San Francisco company said it has raised a $2.5 million first round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners.

The site isn’t open to any Joe comedian — you have to have had some talent in order to quality. Even if a comedian performs in a decent club, human editors are still used to filter to make sure clips are consistently funny.

So this company is a “middle tail” company, somewhere between the Will Ferrells recognized by Hollywood and New York, and the long tail of the masses (see Bernard Moon’s column about why the long tail doesn’t own everything).

Otherwise, Rooftop offers up some of the latest Web 2.0 tricks, including ways to find out more about a comedian (see screenshot below), share clips with friends, search for related comedians, and view specialized channels, such as politics comedy or female comics from Canada. That way, it can target advertising around topics. Comedy draws, but the one shortcoming of this site is the length of the clips. We found none running longer than three minutes. The majority or two minutes or less.

It says its destination site, RooftopComedy.com, features about 1,200 comedians with about 4,200 videos. Will Rogers, chief executive, said the site partners with comedy venues, but uses its own recording equipment, and then streams it live over the Web. It also sends the clips to syndication partners, including mobile carriers. It is featured on the Sprint’s mspot platform in the U.S., and in Nokia’s embedded mobile browser in Europe.

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Zend Technologies, the Cupertino start-up that sells software to develop Web sites based on the popular PHP scripting language, has raised $20 million in a fourth round of venture capital (release here).

By raising so much cash, the company must be aiming to produce a substantial return to make it worthwhile for its investors. It had already raised $16 million.

PHP is hot right now. Zend supports open source PHP initiatives, but it also offers commercial PHP products for software developers, and counts companies like gaming company Amp’d and social networking site Tagged among its customers. PHP does have is competitors. See our background on Zend and PHP here. Still, the company says PHP is the language of choice behind more than half of all Ajax-enabled site (Ajax being the highly interactive technology used, for example, in Google Maps).

This may also be a sign the company plans to go it alone for some time, at least if you believe the announcements by the company’s execs. Earlier this year, we reported that Oracle was in talks to acquire the company (scroll down). But now co-founder Andi Gutmans says he’s considering an IPO (Venturewire, sub required).

The round was led by Greylock Partners. Existing investors — Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital — also participated.

Correction: An earlier version of our post said Digg and Facebook were customers, something we’d seen referenced in the VentureWire piece cited above, and which do use PHP. However, turns out they are not Zend customers.