Whyville.net Reaches New Heights With Over 2 Million Registered Users and Growing

PASADENA, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- January 23, 2007 -- Numedeon, Inc.'s Whyville.net, the leading immersive educational virtual world for children and young teenagers, today announces that it has surpassed over 2 million registered users. Launched in 1999, Whyville.net took 6 years to reach the 1 million registered user mark, but only twelve months to double registered users to 2 million. This rapid and accelerating growth, largely based on word-of-mouth, has extended the reach of the site to children all around the United States and the world. At current growth rates, Whyville.net will surpass 3 million registered users sometime during 2007.

"It thrills us to see Whyville's rapid and accelerating expansion," says Dr. James Bower, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Numedeon, Inc., which runs Whyville.net. "Whyville's kids can now boast that they are citizens of the fifth largest city in the U.S. behind only New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. And best of all, in many ways, they built Whyville themselves."

"When we launched Whyville 9 years ago, we hoped that it would catch the imagination of our young users," says Dr. Jennifer Sun, President of Numedeon, Inc. and Founder and Managing Director of Whyville.net, "but the site has surpassed all of our expectations."

About Whyville.net

Whyville (http://www.whyville.net) is the leading immersive educational virtual world for boys and girls, ages 8 to 15. 65% of Whyville's users are female, and the age of average users is 12 1/2. Inside Whyville, "citizens" learn & play, socialize & recreate, govern & earn, write & design, eat & dance, and much, much more. In formal education parlance, the education in Whyville is designed to be hands-on, inquiry-based and constructivist, embedded within motivational settings among peers. Whyville features interactive games and activities sponsored by partners such as NASA, John Paul Getty Trust, Toyota, Disney, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, EMI/Virgin, the University of Texas, the School Nutrition Association, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, among others. In 2006, Whyville received iParenting's award as the best website for kids, including the designation as best on the web for its safety features.

About Numedeon, Inc.

Numedeon, Inc. is based in Pasadena, California and specializes in the design of virtual worlds for education and interaction. Numedeon's founders are scientists, who combined research expertise in neuroscience with education experience from the internationally recognized Caltech Pre-college Science Initiative to conceive of an innovative way to harness the power of the internet for the purpose of engagement and education. In addition to Whyville.net, Numedeon also runs a virtual world for medical professionals at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and another world site for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Numedeon has also recently announced a collaboration to launch a version of Whyville.net in Italy.

Contact Information: Contact: Elina Heng Terpin Communications (310) 821-6100 x108 Email Contact