Angry Birds Rio will be an Amazon Appstore exclusive for Android

Well this one’s a shocker! Apparently Amazon will carry the new Angry birds movie based game in their new AppStore. Amazon’s has recently announced that they will be launching their very own AppStore. Hoping to establish marketshare, Amazon did a great job of snatching up the launch exclusivity for the new hit tittle Angry Birds Rio. The game is said to be available for Android, but will soon be headed to the Apple App Store as well. We wrote awhile back about the upcoming Angry Bird’s movie and game. Now more information is out, including a trailer!

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Rovio Gets $42 Million in Funding

Rovio is all over the news these day, but they deserve it! Because of the successful brand they have built around Angry Birds, Rovio is now considered the Apple of Game Development companies for the iOS. Now according to GigaOM reports, Rovio has managed to receive$42 million in funding round from Accel Partners, Atomico, and Felicis Ventures. Niklas Zennström, who founded Atomico, will be joining the board. With Niklas’s success over at Skype you can bet that the company will continue to juice the franchise. 40 million active users are currently playing Angry Birds daily, and over 2 million plush Angry Birds toys have been sold! Their plan is to move into other platform based markets, and expand their well know brand even more! To do the process correctly they will need more cash. Now thanks to this funding, Rovio will start taking over!

Bottom Line: Rovio will continue to move into other big markets like Facebook, Cartoon series, and other gaming platforms!

Angry Birds headed to Facebook

As of today, Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka has confirmed that the smashing hit Angry Birds will be headed to Facebook. The game will be released sometime in May. From the recent rumors that have been floating around about the release being earlier are false. Peter stated “to do the full release in May, not March” adding to that statement, he was “not sure how the March date got in there.” The new game on Facebook is set to have “completely new aspects to it that just haven’t been experienced in any other platform.” CEO Mikael Hed also mentioned that the game would take advantage of Facebook’s ‘collaborative nature’, giving the pigs “a more prominent role”. Rovio is about to launch their next Seasons update for St Patrick’s Day. The iOS and Android update will hit the App Stores shortly.

Bottom Line: Get ready to play Angry Birds on The Social Network in May!

33% of US and UK Adults are Mobile Gamers

A new survey from PoCap, the makers of Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled 3, and Feeding Frenzy, shows an incredible percentage of adults from U.K. and U.S. are strongly into mobile gaming. Due to the recent growth of Android and iOS, over 31% of Americans own a smartphone. In the US research 52% of 2,425 respondents, have stated that they have played a mobile game on their friends or own device. The survey gathered 2,425 respondents, of those 73% were from U.K. and 44% from U.S. The most engaging part of the survey was that 83% of smartphone-owners said they had played at least one mobile game in the past week. Unlike the console market, where the male gamers are dominant over females, there is no much of a gap between mobile female and male gamers. The survey mentions that smartphone users spend $25.57  a year, compared to $15.70 from feature phone owners. Check out the other stats from the press release:

* 84% of all mobile phone gamers, and 97% of avid mobile phone gamers say they play games on their phone at least once a week; 92% of smartphone owners who play mobile games say they play at least once a week, and 45% say they play daily (compared to 35% of all mobile phone gamers). In the 2009 survey, only 13% of mobile phone gamers said they played daily, and 40% said they played weekly or more often. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 50% said that the amount of time they spend playing games on their handset has increased over the past year, and among smartphone owners the figure climbs to 63%; in the 2009 survey, only 20% of mobile gamers indicated their consumption of mobile games had increased. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 78% indicated that playing mobile phone games had become a regular part of their weekly activities, and more than half (59%) indicated that they saw such games as a regular part of their daily activities; for smartphone owners the figures were 84% and 68%, respectively. * When asked which gaming-capable device they play games on most often, 44% of mobile phone gamers chose their phones, catapulting handsets past video game consoles (21%) and computers (30%) to the top of the list. 51% of avid mobile gamers and 55% of those mobile gamers who own smartphones indicated they played games most often on their phones. This compares to just 17% of mobile gamers who chose their handset as their most frequently used gaming device in the 2009 survey. * 43% of all mobile gamers, and 49% of smartphone gamers, said they had upgraded a free trial game to the full (paid) version in the past year; more than a quarter (27%) of all mobile gamers, and a third (34%) of smartphone gamers, said they had paid for additional content for an originally free game in the past year. * Among mobile phone gamers, the average smartphone owner purchased nearly twice as many games as those with other types of phones (5.4 games vs. 2.9 games) in 2010, and spent almost $10 more ($25.57 vs. $15.70) on phone games. * 19% of all mobile phone gamers said they played one or more social networking games via their phone daily, and more than a third (37%) said they play a social networking game via their phone at least once a week. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 23% of all mobile phone device usage time (excluding phone calls) is spent playing games.

Bottom Line: With these encouraging stats, mobile gaming development will be growing rapidly in the next few years. Kind of like gaming consoles, i feel that in the future we will have exclusive games for different mobile software devices. For example, Apple paying Rovio to create Angry Birds for only iOS devices.

Lucky 6 year-old kid got a fully playable Angry Birds cake

I wish my dad would go this far out for my birthday. As you will see below “the father of the year” in the video created a working simulation of Angry Birds birthday cake. Ben, who  just turned 6-years-old over the weekend got a very special surprise that he will not forget. We hope this video makes you jealous!

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