HipChicas.com members can create and customize avatars and living spaces, as well as purchase items with virtual currency called Hip Change. Girls can chat in English, Spanish, Portuguese or French, with an automatic translator that displays the appropriate language for each user.

The world is modeled after real locations in North and South America, including cities like Miami and New York, as well as habitats like the Everglades and the Amazon. Girls learn that their actions directly affect the environment through games and challenges. Adding plants and cleaning up a habitat, for example, will cause a native endangered species to flourish.

According to Lazaro Fuentes, founder and CEO of Hip Venture Co., the creative team spent about a year figuring out how to help girls understand the connection between their everyday activities and the environment without being "preachy." The plan was also to develop a world that would be popular with girls, their parents and potential brand sponsors.

As it stands, brands can sponsor in-world games, but the messages get sent to parents, not the girls themselves. A game like "Lights Out," for example, that focused on energy conservation, would likely be sponsored by a home furnishings or hardware store shilling fluorescent bulbs.

"We felt that there was a need for content that kids would like and parents would approve of," Fuentes said. "It's as if somewhere along the line, someone decided that being hip meant that girls had to dress or act inappropriately, or had to fit into a specific mold and that their only interests are picking hair colors or shopping for clothes. They are far more than that and are looking for content that gets them; a higher level of engagement. These are kids that want to save the world, be in a band and start a blog all in one day." Fuentes said that though the world was designed from a Latina-centric perspective, HipChicas.com would likely have multi-ethnic appeal, much like Nickelodeon's Dora the Explorer property. "The girls that were five when they first started watching Dora the Explorer in 2000 are thirteen now," Fuentes said. "And they've already had an unprecedented amount of exposure to Latin-themed content."

Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, director of digital media and gaming at Parks Associates, said that the industry could expect to see more demo- or ethnically-targeted virtual worlds emerge. "Virtual worlds are evolving much in the way that social networks evolved," Cai said. "At first you had these mega, super-social hubs like MySpace that targeted everybody, and now there are a bunch of niche networks targeting people with business interests, baby boomers, Asians and African-Americans. Targeting a specific ethnicity can definitely be a way for a property to differentiate itself from the rest."

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