Lane Merrifield, the creator of Club Penguin, is now overseeing Disney’s virtual world kingdom. ToonTown was the first of Disney’s virtual lands, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Pixie Hollow, and Club Penguin. Making it an even five is the newly launched World of Cars, based on characters from the 2006 Disney/Pixar animated movie "Cars". It’s Disney’s richest yet, and may be the first gender neutral car game I’ve seen.  Even I had fun designing and racing my automotive creations.  Disney, by sheer size and scope, has created an impressive backend to its virtual worlds that I expect we’ll be seeing more of in the near future.  Check out this LA Times article interviewing the World of Cars product director Rachel DiPaola, as well as this recent interview with Lane Merrifield.

Disney Digital Books  is the first digital subscription library of children’s books.  A $24.99 subscription fee gives you 3 months of downloads.  The books I saw demonstrated were pure Disney – Mickey Mouse and Toy Story all the way up to Hannah Montana and chapter books – there are over 600 books in the collection.  The writing, as best I can remember, is verbatim from the Disney print books collection.

Built for kids ages 3 -12, these stories allow for listening as they are read aloud, highlighting words to be read aloud and the turning of pages. The books seem considerably less interactive than those on LeapFrog's Tag Reading System (formerly the LeapPad Reader), for instance, but they do have a (fully customizable) handsome opening interface resembling a kids’ library. There are also trivia contests and a simple build-your-own-story tool for young children.

You can log in to the Disney Digital Book area online (http://Disneydigitalbooks.com) or go to a book retail outlet and purchase a box that contains the online access code.  The good news is that a subscription is only a three month obligation, just long enough to overdose on the mouse.

PeeWee is a netbook that's specially ruggedized for kids.  Rotating the screen makes it serve dual duty as a tablet and a PC.  Following on the heels of other entries into the kids' netbook market ---- Intel Classmate, Disney's Netpals ( a thinly disguised ASUS eee) and Nickelodeon's Slime Netbook  (a thinly disguised Dell netbook) --the PeeWee costs $499.  The burning question now is whether the Apple iPad is going to send kiddie computers into oblivion. Just looking at the specs there are certain advantages (like weight) and ease of use that make the iPad a winner.  But the netbooks are made to withstand kid-abuse, have built in USB and video cameras and can surf the web with child-safe browsers and Flash support.
If you're looking for a full-fleged, homework-capable device the advantage goes to a PC. If you're looking for a secondary device to play games, watch media, and read books Apple's iPad is, for the same price, a much wiser decision.