GigaOM » Angry Birds

The internet of things: a market landscape

Jon Collins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:55:20 +0000

What can we expect the IoT landscape to look like, and how will its impact be felt? And is the attention being given by governments, manufacturers, and industry players merited, or is this just a fad? In this paper we look at the trends leading the growth of the internet of things, its components, and its characteristics. We examine the scale of the different opportunities and early examples of use cases. Finally, we look at potential inhibitors to adoption and potential challenges, notably around security, privacy, and system failure.

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With $1.8M in funding, Hullabalu reinvents and re-imagines kids entertainment on the iPad

Om Malik — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:00:08 +0000

Hullabalu, a New York-based startup founded by Suzanne Xie is launching an astonishing new experience on the iPad that is focused on kids called Pan: The Fearless Beribolt ($3.99 on the iTunes store). If you look at the package, then it is merely an app. But peel the onion, and you start to see an experience that is tailor made for the tablet generation.

Xie started the company a year ago with the idea of creating a line of toys based on characters she had imagined. She quickly realized that while toys seem like a great idea, what was needed was a brand new story telling experience for kids. She found that most of the kids-focused content on the iPad was simply re-purposed from books and television shows. It didn’t really leverage the amazing capabilities of the iPad.

So she raised $1.8 million from a whole lot of angels and seed funds (such as SV Angel; Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of Reddit; Gokul Rajaram, Head of Ads at Facebook and Brian Sugar, Founder of Sugar) and started building this new experience. It involved watching kids for hours playing with iPad and learning what made them happy. A lesson she learned and that all of us should remember: These tablet native generation think of the screen in front of them differently.

With that knowledge, she and her team of six worked on this app which went live in the app store this morning. It is an experience so stunning and beautiful that even my jaded old eyes lit up and brought a smile to my face. And as Xie gave me a demo of Pan: The Fearless Beribolt in a New York coffee shop last week, I could feel the eyes of the collective coffee shop on us (or more likely on the screen.)

Just like comics and stories, it has characters – in this case a cute little Panda can Pan. Just like television shows it has episodes (it called them chapters) and it has memorable lines for kids to remember. If things go well, there will be future seasons (apps), and in the near future there’s even the possibility to license the characters to, well, those who make toys. But it has a lot more — it allows kids to use the iPad in the unique way only they do to explore the story. It allows them to shake, rattle and scroll and find new plots and new graphics. It has a cute photo camera that allows one to take photos with your favorite character and share them with friends and family. They call it Pandagram, by the way.

Being old like I am, one thing I don’t know: will kids stay engaged, and is there enough story telling to keep them addicted to this little app? And if they do, can Xie and her team keep producing new content to keep those fickle toddlers from flipping to the next app?

That said, when I was watching the demo, I was thinking back to the early days of Angry Birds, which captured iPhone’s touch capabilities perfectly and became a phenomenon. This one goes a step further, for this shows what future of kids entertainment looks like in the age of the tablet.

Just like we had television and computers, the babies today are going to think of tablet as their only screen that is relevant to them and touch as their default way to interact with the screens. I mean, sure, there are cartoons on television, but if kids are growing up with the iPad, then it is the only screen that matters and the idea of cartoons and story telling has to start from this baby screen and then extend to the big screen.

PS: I hope Disney corp-dev is paying attention. And I really hope Apple features these guys on their app store, for it is a great testimonial of the iPad’s capabilities.

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Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:46:59 +0000

Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room.

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Angry Birds, fat pigs and the future of television

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:01:04 +0000

Rovio’s Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times, and are played by more than 263 million active users per month. The company is now targeting those hundreds of millions of players with a weekly animated show called Angry Birds Toons, which launched in mid-March.

Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

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MobileTechRoundup podcast 283: Nexus 10; Lumias; Angry Birds!

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:43:24 +0000

MoTR 283 is 55:20 minutes long and is a 33.4 MB file in MP3 format.

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Nexus 10 – great hardware (superb actually), but software experience still feels slightly lacking compared to iOS.
Kevin’s first Kickstarter delivered and he loves it: Solar charging 54 WHr (9,000 mAh) battery with USB ports.
HTC event in NYC this coming week: does HTC need a 5-inch phablet?
Speaking of HTC: they’ve settled with Apple on patents. 10 year license agreement.
First thoughts on Nokia Lumia 822 and 810
AT&T not prepared for WP8 launch? Verizon launch event in Seattle
Angry Birds Star Wars: best game ever?

CONTACT US: Email us or leave us a voicemail on our SkypeLine!

SUBSCRIBE: Use this RSS feed with your favorite podcatcher or click this link to add us to iTunes

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Rovio announces Angry Birds book app: Live from Frankfurt Book Fair

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:32:54 +0000

Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company whose “Angry Birds” app has now been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, an iPad cookbook app called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO, to a crowd of people that included not just press and book fair attendees but also teenagers and children wearing Angry Birds sweatshirts. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale in the iTunes store for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.69 (an Android version is expected soon). The app includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

“Look at the implications of Rovio getting into the book business,” Vesterbacka said. “With ‘Angry Birds’ the game, we have built the biggest distribution format on the planet, with more than 1 billion downloads. For us, it’s very, very easy and very fast to cross-promote the book in all our games.”

“We’re not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads,” he continued, “we’re looking for millions of downloads of this book…We’re going for massive, massive volume.”

On pricing, he said, “there’s no reason why you should price book applications any differently [from other kinds of apps]. There’s no reason why something should cost more just because it happened to be a book before it turned up on one of these digital platforms.” So the app is $0.99 for now — it will later go up to $4.99 — while the print version of “Best Egg Recipes” is $9.99 on Amazon.

Here’s a short video of the app demo at Rovio’s stand at Frankfurt.

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Forget Bad Piggies, check Angry Birds in augmented reality

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:13:38 +0000

Rovio may have launched its Angry Birds follow up, Bad Piggies, on Thursday, but I’m actually more impressed by a version of Angry Birds that’s a proof of concept. PendAR, a company that specializes in augmented and virtual reality solutions, created its own vision of what mobile gaming might look like in the future.

Here’s how it works. Using an integrated camera, a mobile device can “see” the world around it. PendAR’s technology looks for a certain image — in this case, a printed Angry Birds startup screen — and then superimposes the virtual game on top of the physical image. The game then becomes 3-D-like and part of the gamer’s actual environment. Take a look:

VentureBeat caught up with PendAR CEO, Mojtaba Tabatabaie, and learned that this version of Angry Birds isn’t coming to an app store near you. That makes sense, since the original game’s development shop, Rovio, would surely — and correctly — accuse PendAR of taking certain illegal liberties with the Angry Birds franchise.

So don’t expect to play Angry Birds with your home or office in the background. However, this technology demo has me thinking that we should see more augmented reality games in the future. Mobile device hardware is quickly improving to the point where any flagship phone can handle a virtual reality app with ease.

To date, the only type of apps to truly benefit from such technology are generally navigation-based, showing virtual directions and point of interest information on screen. We’ve gone from 2D to 3D gaming graphics some time ago, so what’s the next big step? Augmented reality games on mobiles makes sense to me; at least until we can project interactive holographic games, that is.

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With Bad Piggies, Rovio strays further from Angry Birds success

Ryan Kim — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:43:24 +0000

Rovio has been under a little pressure to come up with a gaming title that shows it can win over fans with something not named Angry Birds. This past summer, it released the Amazing Alex, a rebrand of acquired IP Casey’s Contraptions and the title did pretty well, initially, though fell well short of Angry Birds success. Now, it’s out today with Bad Piggies, which takes the viewpoint of the pigs from the Angry Birds games.

The physics-based game requires players to build contraptions and vehicles for the pigs that get them to their beloved eggs. Once the device is built, the player guides it toward a map of the eggs, with physics taking over. The title is available today on the iPhone (99 cents), iPad ($2.99), Android (free) and Mac ($4.99).

The game is built in the same art style of Angry Birds and should be familiar to fans of the series. But the title is more like Amazing Alex, which also let users set off physics-based chain reactions and create their own over-engineered devices. That title got off to a strong start but has fallen to #112 on the overall iTunes charts and #58 on the game charts, according to App Annie. Meanwhile, the original Angry Birds, three years old now, is #25 overall in the iTunes App Store.

Bad Piggies will likely do better because of its Angry Birds heritage combined with the Rovio brand. But in playing the game this morning, I feel like it will also fall short of Angry Birds success, ultimately.

Angry Birds was pure simplicity when you first played it, but the payoff was visceral. It was so satisfying seeing the birds hurtling toward the pigs and seeing all their elaborate structures come tumbling down in different combinations. And all the unique birds with various capabilities created new game play that kept the title interesting.

Bad Piggies feels more complicated up front with less destructive joy. That’s by design, since you’re building something. But the whole act of putting something together in pretty much only one logical configuration and then pressing go is nowhere near as fun as just letting a bird rip in a slingshot. The results are less satisfying as well. If you deliver the pig to the map, you’re done. It’s a little fun to see if you make it there, but there’s not much variance in how a successful run goes. And there’s no glee in watching a big fortress come down.

This is not an in-depth review since I only played ~~a dozen~~ 20 levels this morning. But the early game play makes me doubt that Rovio will have a long-term success like Angry Birds. I haven’t played Amazing Alex in a long time and I don’t think I’m going to look forward to going back to Bad Piggies in the way that I did with Angry Birds. I could be wrong and this could turn out to be a huge hit over the long haul. That would be great considering Rovio raised $42 million on the premise it would be a hit maker. But increasingly, I’m seeing why Rovio stuck with Angry Birds so long: it’s a recipe that works.

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Fall of Angry Birds & some other posts you should read

Om Malik — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:03:47 +0000

The fall of Angry Birds – Trey Smith, a San Diego, CA-based game developer crunches the numbers on Angry Birds, and offers up an explanation to why it has fallen in the app store ranking. He argues that mobile gaming is becoming all about “free to play.”
Telcos and their subscription myopia: Dean Bubley argues that telcos are so addicted to the concept of subscription that they can’t really think beyond it.
The Portuguese technology exodus: Tao of Mac’s Rui Carmo bemoans about the quiet exodus of technology people from Portugal, which apparently is a great place to have a startup. I am thinking about visiting Porto, by the way. I hear they have startups there!
The Acqua-hire disease, startups and failure was the “big blog debate” this weekend. Three different takes from Nick O’Neill, Sarah Lacy and Michael Arrington and all make valid and interesting points.

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Amazing Alex: Rovio tries to prove it’s a hit factory

Bobbie Johnson — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:05:57 +0000

And so it’s unleashed: Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, has launched Amazing Alex, its follow-up to the smash hit game.

On Thursday it made its debut on iOS and Android, with PC, Mac and Windows Phone versions apparently on the way.

To be honest, there’s not much to say about Amazing Alex itself. It’s a physics puzzler in which you use a variety of objects to construct Domino Rally-style pathways that complete a task — such as moving a ball from one side of the screen to the other, or bursting a balloon. Cue comparisons with a million other titles out there, including big ones like Cut The Rope, and of course, Angry Birds.

In fact, it might look even more familiar than that: As rumors suggested, it does seem to be a pretty much a re-badging of a game called Casey’s Contraptions, which proved popular with players and was bought by Rovio recently. The art, design and most other things seem the same.

In fact, the core mechanic is pretty similar to Angry Birds, and the rest of the game owes it a great debt too. My first impressions were that it was a fairly strong example of its type, but didn’t quite have the destructive, chaotic element that makes Angry Birds so addictive. Plus on the iOS versions it was hit with a glitch that meant it couldn’t connect to Game Center, a problem which caused a bit of consternation.

@amazingalex I bought it half an hour ago. It won’t let me on game center.

— Cole Miller (@colewmiller) July 12, 2012

But generally reaction seems pretty good so far. It’s already selling well in the app stores: currently No3 in the iTunes paid apps as I speak.

So the big question: does it have staying power? That’s not clear. Very few games do.

But of course, Amazing Alex doesn’t need to be a megahit: Rovio is already making a ton of money. But it still has something to prove.

The company does need to show that it can generate success away from the Angry Birds franchise if it’s going to live up to its billing and become something of real significance. In this case, it seems to be trying to do that not by building a new game (remember, it infamously produced 51 non-hit games before Angry Birds) but in trying to use its marketing power to push existing IP into the stratosphere.

I’ve argued before that Rovio really needs to show it’s got more in the tank if it wants to meet its ambitions and go public — as it has said it wants to on many occasions.

Sure, it’s milking the Angry Birds brand for everything it can get, including games, toys, theme parks, the rest. But if it wants to build a Disney-style business, and not just burn on the bonfire of single-franchise entertainment properties, then it needs Amazing Alex to be right up there.

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