By Tomio Geron

While major Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. have recently been blocked by the government in China, start-up 8D World Inc. has gotten the government to promote its online business as a summer activity for kids.

8D World's English-learning virtual world game Wiz World Online, which recently launched with $7 million in Series A financing, is being promoted in a "Wiz World Cup" by six agencies in Shanghai in an English competition to prepare for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

The Series A led by Spark Capital was previously reported by VentureWire in July 2008, but the amount had not been revealed at the time. The company has now disclosed the $7 million round and named the Chinese firm that participated: Gobi Partners, whose limited partners include International Business Machines Corp., NTT Docomo, Sierra Ventures, McGraw-Hill Cos., Steamboat Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners. Valuation was not disclosed.

"Typically the government organizes activities in the summer to have a quote-unquote healthy summer vacation," said Alex Wang, founder and chief executive of 8D World, which is based in Woburn, Mass., and Shanghai.

With previous contests such as this one, human judges were required. This limits the size of the event, but because Wiz World is scalable, many more children can participate, Wang said.

Students play the game with a headset and speak during various "quests" or situations, and the game technology analyzes the speech to determine whether the spoken language was accurate. Because this is done by a computer, Wang said, it's much more accurate than with human judges.

The technology goes beyond typical speech recognition programs that automate call centers, by analyzing how accurate a pronunciation is, Wang said.

"For language learning, speech recognition is not good enough," Wang said. "If I want to book a flight from Boston to San Francisco, it's fine, but if I don't pronounce it correctly [speech recognition] is not going to give me feedback."

That analysis of speech is important for 8D World, which is launching in China and hoping to soon move into South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Spanish-speaking countries. Many Asian students have learned languages very well for writing but not as well for speaking, because of lack of classroom time and interaction with native-English speakers, Wang said.

Wiz World is a virtual world where people select avatars and play mini games and larger quests in real life situations such as conversing with people at a coffee shop - while getting taught and passing English tests - to advance in the game and get virtual items such as a house and pets. At the same time, the game has "rigorous curriculum" in its language learning, Wang said.

The service is free to use now and the company is not yet generating revenue, but the company plans to charge a subscription fee in the future. Because many Chinese parents send their children to private tutoring services after regular school, even if Wiz World charges about $10 a month, that will still be much cheaper than such services, Wang said.

Education - and language learning in particular - is a large market that has not been fully addressed, according to Alex Finkelstein, general partner at Spark Capital.

"The ESL market is huge. It's massive," Finkelstein said. "There are multi-billion dollar public companies focusing on ESL."

Wang was previously a founding team member of venture-backed supply and contract management software company Emptoris Inc. Rick Goodman, 8D World vice president and chief product officer, is best known as co-founder of Ensemble Studios, where he led development of the game Age of Empires. Heading up the company's education component is Jodie Waldesbuhl, creative content director, who was previously a specialist in ESL for the Brookline Public School system in Massachusetts.