Habbo Hotel's Mini Friday Coming to the iPhone Soon

Owned and operated by the Finnish Sulake Corporation, Habbo Hotel, a virtual world game, has been host to a social network of teenagers for years. Since its inception back in 2000, the virtual goods based business has expanded to include communities across 31 countries in five continents. The game allows players to create their own Hotel rooms and create a social space for themselves and their friends using furniture they buy with real currency. They can then travel around this virtual world to socialize with others within various "chat rooms." Each room is either dubbed public or guest, the latter of which consists of a highly customized space created by a player who then has complete control over whom they admit. Public rooms, on the other hand, are created by Sulake themselves and are not customizable, but rather depict scenes such as restaurants, bars, clubs, etc. In addition, the free guest rooms also play host a number of mini-games such as Falling Furni, Quiz, and Wobble Squabble. Each game is hosted by the administrator and can reward winners various prizes such as new furniture. The company became profitable this year, 2008, with revenues of $50 million. Habbo has 100 million registered users and there are 10 million active players each month. Sulake has also released a mobile version of the service called Mini Friday that is nearing the 1 million registered user mark. Here’s what makes that number even better: Not only is the game restricted to users 18 and up, but it only works on the Nokia S60 series of mobile phones. Inside Mini Friday, players can create their own avatar, customizing aspects such as gender, height, and clothing then move about and between rooms. As most of the rooms look to be bars, the chat is more mature, and players can talk between one another individually or "shout" and be heard by all. Currently, the game is still in beta, and has been since 2006. Since that time, it has steadily grown in popularity, especially in areas such as Indonesia, and is expected to leave the testing phase soon. Perhaps what is most interesting, however, is a comment noted in a VentureBeat article from Habbo Hotel co-founder Aapo Kyrola. While there is little to go on at this time, Kyrola did state that the company is working on an iPhone version of this application. He goes on to say that compared to the Nokia platform, the iPhone has been a significantly better experience. [via VentureBeat]

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Habbo Hotel's Mini Friday Coming to the iPhone Soon

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