Category: Tech news

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, NEA’s Jon Sakoda joined us in the studio to discuss his views on big data, seed investing and more.

For background, Sakoda joined NEA in 2006 and focuses on investments in SaaS, infrastructure software, and big data applications. His investments include Blue Jeans Network, Desire2Learn, Hearsay Social, OPOWER, ScienceLogic, Suniva, and WibiData. Sakoda also co-manages NEA’s seed investment program.

Sakoda talked about why NEA’s $2.6 billion fund makes seed investments, and how the firm approaches these investments in founders. Sakoda also gave us his thoughts on where the next wave of innovation will take place with large-scale data processing.

Tune in above for more!

AddThis has released a new platform called Smart Layers, which it says can improve traffic and engagement by just adding a single line of code.

President and CEO Ramsey McGrory told me that Smart Layers both improves on the publisher tools that AddThis was already offering and introduces some new ones.

In terms of new features, Smart Layers introduces a “toaster” at the bottom of a page that recommends content based on a user’s past activity. It also allows publishers to follow-up with users after they’ve engaged on the site.

On the existing side, Smart Layers takes the AddThis sharing buttons that publishers could already include on their sites and it gives them an adaptive design, so that their appearance will be optimized for whatever device they’re viewed on, whether it’s a desktop, smartphone or tablet. The company says it can also optimize the social options that are presented to each visitor.

And all of these tools are now offered together in a package that should be easier for smaller publishers to integrate. As the name implies, they’re presented as a layer that doesn’t change any of the content on the site itself. McGrory said the platform is built on top of the data that AddThis has already been collecting, so it can deliver a personalized experience even if someone is visiting an AddThis publisher for the first time.

“The great example is, Zappos knows a tremendous amount about people that have been to the site, but the very first time, they have no idea who those users are,” McGrory said. “It’s called the cold start problem” — and AddThis is supposed to solve that problem.

The Social Layers are already being used by dating site eHarmony. When you look at this post about “Five Ways to Deal with the ‘Why Are You Single’ Question” you not only see sharing buttons on the side, but also a section at the end called “Recommended For You.”

AddThis says that publishers who pilot tested the system saw more than a 60 percent increase in on-site content engagement, a doubling of follows across all devices, 70+ lift in mobile shares, and 50+ percent lift in desktop shares.

Moving forward, McGrory said that Social Layers will probably become the main toolset for smaller AddThis publishers (as well as the vendors that sell to smaller publishers — GoDaddy will be including this as one of its Site Builder products). Some larger publishers, on the other hand, will probably continue using AddThis data to personalize their own custom tools.

You can read more about how to set up Smart Layers in this company blog post.

Hey, Cricket customers! You’re about to become AT&T customers.

AT&T has just announced that they’ve agreed to acquire Leap Wireless, the parent company behind Cricket Wireless.

As part of the deal, AT&T will be acquiring all of Leap’s towers, stores, and all 5.3 million of their subscribers.

For the time being, it sounds like AT&T will keep Cricket running as its own brand. Cricket stores will continue to be Cricket stores — the two carriers will just share spectrum, which should increase network quality for everyone.

So, why would AT&T make this purchase? It’s all about the spectrum. While AT&T was spending the last few years trying to snatch up access to more wireless frequencies to be able to handle more users and more voice/data traffic, Leap CEO Doug Hutcheson was saying that huge chunks (as in, 60%) of their own spectrum was going unused. At the time, he valued their chunk of the spectrum alone at around $3 billion.

If the deal goes through, this will bump AT&T from 107 million subscribers to 112 — still just behind Verizon in the battle for the biggest US carrier.

AT&T says that they plan to pay $15 dollars per share. With 79 million Leap shares outstanding, this works out to just short of $1.2B.

It’s not quite the massive T-Mobile merger they were hoping for (before the plan went south in late 2011), but it’s something.

Nokia has apparently reinvented zoom with the newest addition to the Lumia family, the Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 1020, with a 41-megapixel PureView camera. It lets you zoom after the fact and still see ultra high resolution detail and sharpness. Meanwhile, Microsoft underwent a huge reorganization moving most of the company’s high-ranking leadership into new positions.

Is the Lumia 1020 worthy of its $299 price tag? Are we excited Microsoft is streamlining its leadership and services?

We discuss all this and more on this week’s TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, and Natasha Lomas.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

We reported yesterday that the most unproductive Congress in history may kill high-skilled immigration reform. Despite a comprehensive immigration bill being passed in the Senate, top Republicans in the House of Representatives say the Senate version is a “Pipe Dream” and they plan to aggressively pursue their own (right or wrong).

Here’s why Republicans and Democrats could continue their unproductive, uncompromising ways, in four graphs.

More Partisan, Less Productive

Congress passes one-third the number of laws it did in the 20th century and is nearly twice as partisan, as measured by the ideological slant of each member’s voting record (data compiled from Norm Ornstein’s Vital Statistics at the Brookings Institute).

Republicans Don’t Want Compromise

Sixty-eight percent of Republicans would rather have a representative that “sticks to his or her principles”  than one who “compromises to get things done”

White Districts Oppose The Current Immigration Bill

Republicans fear that voting for a bill with weak border security and a relatively easy path to citizenship will spell political suicide. “It would hurt Republicans, and I don’t think you can make an argument otherwise,” said Representative Steve King (CrunchGov Grade: C).

BuzzFeed has a fun piece on just how white those districts are, especially of the most anti-immigration-reform Republicans. Here’s the demographic layout of Representative Steve King’s district in Iowa:

They Keep Getting Elected

Incumbent re-election has been steadily over 80 percent, despite the chaos:

*Methodology notes: partisanship was calculated by finding the difference between ideological voting records of Democrats and Republicans in Vital Statistics, Table 8-10, subtracting column 4 from 3.

Now that the 4th Amendment is no longer a guarantee against broad government spying, the floodgates have opened for tech companies to give users their privacy back. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde’s text-messaging app Heml.is already reached its funding goal, while the Skype-like Unsene platform launched its own Indiegogo campaign today.

Just in case the Pirate Bay hadn’t ticked off enough people in government, Sunde wants to build a spy-proof messaging service as an alternative to text-messaging or Apple’s iMessage, which are reportedly monitored by intelligence agencies. Heml.is (“hemlis” is Swedish for “secret”), uses a security protocol known as End-to-End encryption, meaning that only the user and sender have the keys to descramble messages as they are sent over the Internet.

“We’ve decided to build a messaging platform where no one can spy on you — not even us,” Sunde explains in the video.

Sunde has decided not to sell advertising on the service, so he’s soliciting $100K in startup funds from users.

Apple also claims that its iMessaging service is NSA-proof, thanks to end-to-end encryption, but the good folks over at Ars Technica found a few exemptions that would allow a government agency to spy on text messages. Apple can both backup iMessages and enable apps to interact with them, allowing a hacker to gain access.

Sunde also warns users that their app is not 100 percent spy-proof, but will hopefully be less susceptible to spying. As of this writing, Heml.is is already $54,000 in to its funding goal.

Back in the good old U.S. of A, another secure communications platform called Unsene has launched an Indiegogo funding campaign to raise $30,000.

Unsene currently offers encrypted web messaging, video calls, and file sharing — essentially, an alternative to Skype. Once the Indiegogo campaign ends and the service opens to the public in mid-August, the plan is to expand to provide individual firewalls and a messaging system that could be used in place of email.

Chris Kitze, the CEO and co-founder of Unsene, tells us that the problem with Skype and email services is that messages go through a central server, rather than moving peer to peer. Google or Yahoo will hand over your emails if the government asks. Much like Heml.is, Unsene puts the keys to encrypted messages in individuals’ hands instead.

Unsene does not protect an existing Skype or Gmail account, so two people must both have the system in order to communicate. Fortunately, Unsene’s standard messaging package is free, so that shouldn’t be a huge deterrent to potential users. The questions are if Unsene will be able to pull users away from Skype and Gmail, if people will use the two systems for different purposes, and if they even care that much about protecting their communications in the first place.

Kitze tells TechCrunch that it’s difficult to understand the scope of Internet spying, but that the goal is to put privacy back in the hands of individuals. How intensely they want to protect their information is up to them, so Unsene is monetizing on a higher-grade premium package for those who want more security. Kitze said Unsene has received interest from people in Turkey, China and the Middle East. Wall Street, political organizations and attorneys have also expressed interest.

Eventually, the aim is to enable app developers to integrate their products into Usene’s API, such as payment systems.

Kitze recognizes that Internet security is a fallible system, though.

“I don’t think anyone can make the marketing claim that their lock is unbreakable, but it’s going to be a cat and mouse game. We’ll put bigger locks on and people will find ways in.”

[Image Credit: Flickr User rhodes]

Lyft is announcing this morning that it has sold off its legacy ride-matching business Zimride to rental car giant Enterprise Holdings. The sale will allow Lyft to focus on its fast-growing, on-demand ride-sharing business, while also adding to its war chest as the company expands into new markets and competes against the likes of Uber and SideCar.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed — we’ve asked and will update this post if we find out elsewhere — but disruptive car companies exiting to large, hulking incumbents looking to get more innovative can be big business. As a point of comparison, earlier this year Avis bought car-sharing company ZipCar for $500 million.

Founded in 2007, Zimride was all about connecting users for long-haul rides and carpooling for universities and businesses. The service made the vast majority of its money from SaaS-based ride-matching software that was run privately through individual schools and companies. The company had more than 130 university and corporate campuses signed up to offer ride-sharing and carpooling through Zimride.

For Enterprise, the Zimride assets will fit nicely with certain pieces of its business. While it’s best known for owning rental car agencies such as Alamo, Enterprise, and National, it has a couple of products in the car-sharing and carpooling space.

One is called Enterprise CarShare, and is geared toward car-sharing, while another is called Enterprise Rideshare, and provides carpooling and vanpooling for commuters. The acquisition of Zimride will give it the technical infrastructure to complement the physical infrastructure — i.e. cars and vans that it already owns — and grow that part of its business.

For Lyft, the decision to sell its Zimride assets was made after it shifted focus to a faster-growing portion of its business. While Zimride had steady revenues, it didn’t show anywhere near the growth trajectory of Lyft’s on-demand ride-sharing business, which was launched early last year. Built to connect users for short rides around major metropolitan areas, Lyft grew to provide more than 30,000 rides a week after operating for just a year.

With that in mind, the startup began putting all of its efforts into developing the new product and growing that business, to help get people around cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and San Diego. In May, the company solidified the move by shedding its legacy Zimride name and re-incorporating as Lyft, Inc.

The sale to Enterprise will allow Lyft to focus just on its local on-demand service, especially as it looks to aggressively expand into new markets over the next nine to 12 months. “We’re a startup, and it’s hard for us to be running two businesses,” Lyft president John Zimmer told me by phone this morning.

There’s another side benefit to Lyft selling the Zimride assets: While terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the sale will no doubt add to Lyft’s large — and growing — war chest as it looks to expand and compete against Uber in the on-demand transportation space.

Since the start of the year, Lyft has raised $75 million through two new rounds of funding. The first was for $15 million and was led by Founders Fund in the early part of the year. Then in May it announced an additional $60 million funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with general partner Scott Weiss joining the board.

Now live in six cities, Lyft is looking to enter new markets. The company has 80 employees, most of which are operating out of San Francisco, and it plans to rapidly expand into many other cities over the next few months.

Home remodeling and inspiration platform Houzz is one of those secret gems of Silicon Valley that has avoided the hype cycle in favor of quietly building an innovative, compelling company. And the brains behind the idea and operation originate from co-founder Adi Tatarko, who started Houzz with her husband Alon Cohen, because of the design challenges they both faced renovating their own home. And we’re excited to have Tatarko join us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to tell us about how she is disrupting the $300 billion home remodeling market.

Tickets are on sale now, with our extra early-bird discount going until July 15.

Houzz provides homeowners with an inspiration platform for their projects and connects them with the designers, architects and contractors who can turn their ideas into reality. The startup just raised $35 million in new funding from all-star investors such as New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital, Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Yammer founder David Sacks.

Tatarko will be joining a top list of industry leaders at Disrupt. We’ve already announced Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and distinguished investor Doug Leone. And we have lots more to come.

The conference starts September 7 and runs until the 11 at our favorite location, the San Francisco Design Concourse. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements and a few surprises to be announced soon.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

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Adi Tatarko is the CEO and co-founder of Houzz, a platform for home remodeling, bringing together both professionals and homeowners via mobile, local and social tools. Adi and her husband and cofounder, Alon Cohen, started Houzz out of challenges that they faced during their own remodeling process. Tired of cutting pages out of magazines for their inspiration file and limited by word of mouth recommendations for professionals to help them with the renovation process, they decided to create an online photo database and gathering place for people in the process of building, remodeling and decorating.

Today, millions of homeowners and more than 250,000 architects, designers, contractors and other remodeling professionals are connecting through Houzz.com and its mobile apps every month, sharing their photos, advice and product recommendations. Earlier in her career, Tatarko founded a software company which developed products and services for the high tech industry. She worked in NYC before moving to Palo Alto, where she worked in an investment firm. Adi lives with her husband and two boys. In her spare time, she still enjoys looking at inspiring home design and renovating the rest of her own house one room at a time.

21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, and The Walt Disney Company just announced that they’re not selling online video site Hulu after all. They also said they’re making “a commitment to recapitalize Hulu with $750 million in new funding for future growth.”

The final bidders for Hulu reportedly included DirecTV, a partnership between AT&T and Chernin Group, and private equity firm KKR. It seems, however, that none of them made a bid that satisfied the current owners, who previously tried to sell Hulu in 2011.

In the press release, Fox President and Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey says:

We believe the best path forward for Hulu is a meaningful recapitalization that will further accelerate its growth under the current ownership structure. We had meaningful conversations with a number of potential partners and buyers, each with impressive plans and offers to match, but with 21st Century Fox and Disney fully aligned in our collective vision and goals for the business, we decided to continue to empower the Hulu team, in this fashion, to continue the incredible momentum they’ve built over the last few years.

The press release also states that Hulu has 30 million unique monthly visitors and brought in $690 million in revenue last year.

An iPad app called SoundBrush is out to make music composition accessible, even those who don’t play an instrument. After releasing a MVP in April 2012 to test out the concept of drawing music on a tablet, SoundBrush released a more sophisticated second version last month along with a sharing and collaboration platform, Discover.

Think of it as finger painting with music. Users draw lines across the app’s grid, with time and notes mapped onto x and y axes, respectively. Recorded instruments form the sound of each note; piano, ocarina, and harmonica come free with the app, and users can pay a few dollars to upgrade to different instrument packages.

Co-founder Basil Al-Dajane told us that SoundBrush is looking to differentiate itself from competitors like GarageBand by offering a wider range of notes and by making it easy to move and copy groups of lines. They’ve also eschewed looped samples, which Al-Dajane said limits the range of songs a person can create. Most importantly, drawing on a touch screen is simple and intuitive for users.

After the release of the original version, Al-Dajane said that he and co-founder Jayson Rhynas found that it was being used largely by people who didn’t play an instrument. Professional musicians of course have their own music-making means, so SoundBrush will win by keeping things uncomplicated enough for the consumer music market while still offering advanced composition options for those who get really into it.

As it stands, the app has been out for less than a month and is drawing about 2,300 users weekly.

Soundbrush is based out of the VeloCity Garage, the incubator that has worked with Thalmic Labs, BufferBox, and Couple. It’s entirely bootstrapped at the moment, but Al-Dajane said they would be looking to begin raising an initial round in October or November.

Check out SoundBrush in action below:

Every year I’m given the best job a guy could ever want: planning hardware alley, a one day extravaganza of some of the best hardware I’ve ever seen. This event, which happens on the last day of Disrupt, is a crowd favorite and I’d love to feature your gear.

What is Hardware Alley? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous Alleys have been roaring successes.

We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt SF, Sept 11, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you.

All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list.

To find out more please visit our pavilion page.
You can reserve your spot by purchasing a Hardware Alley Exhibitor Package. If you can’t attend Disrupt but would like to demo on the final day use promo code: H@rdwareSF13-1day.

If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at [email protected] with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you.

Hope to see you in SF!

Ebay is hopping on the 3D printing bandwagon. This morning, the company announced the debut of a new iPhone application called eBay Exact which allows users to browse and buy customizable print-on-demand merchandise from three top 3D printing companies: newly acquired MakerBot, Sculpteo, and Hot Pop Factory.

The app features roughly 20 categories at launch, mainly jewelry and tech accessories like iPhone cases. The items, which start at around $9 for an iPhone case and go up as high as $350 for a metal ring, can be configured then ordered directly in the mobile application. Ebay’s partners will then ship the products directly to consumers within 7 to 14 days.

3D printing technology is now gaining mainstream interest and awareness. A wide range of creatives are making art – not just guns – using 3D printers and software, then selling their wares everywhere from offline shops and museums to online storefronts and personal websites.

Ebay’s move to promote 3D printed goods comes at a time when other major retailers are also buying into the trend. Staples announced in May it would begin selling 3D printers, for example, and Amazon launched its own 3D printing store in June. But in order to buy the output of the devices, non-geeky consumers are often still shopping sites like like Shapeways or Etsy, or maker marketplaces like Custommade, Makeably, or recently launched Mixee Labs, for example.

Shapeways, which raised $30 million in Series C funding this April, has been especially instrumental in making 3D printed goods accessible to more of a mainstream user base. Even if you’re not interested in the still somewhat complicated process of designing original products, the site lets users shop a variety of print-on-demand goods, or even turn their own ideas into products using one of many ready-made apps.

Meanwhile, though eBay sellers have offered a variety of 3D printed items for purchase on the site, there wasn’t an easy way to browse those items or figure out which ones could be further customized. The new eBay Exact app changes that, though eBay’s choice to launch it as a standalone application may limit its exposure.

The app also serves as another potential revenue stream for the company, which could grow the more popular 3D printing becomes. Though eBay didn’t disclose the terms of its deals with its 3D printing partners, it’s likely that it’s seeing a portion of those sales it facilitates. In addition, eBay-owned PayPal is integrated for easy checkout.

It used to be that you had to pay a bunch of money to get basic information about private tech companies, like how much they’ve raised and who they’ve acquired. CrunchBase made that free. And it used to be that you had to spend lots of time and money trying to network your way into some angel investor money. AngelList made that free.

Now, the two have a deal.

Here are the basics. If you have a company on AngelList, you can choose to sync it with CrunchBase — once a day, any public information you provide will automatically be exported over to your CrunchBase company profile. This will save you time entering the data in both places and help CrunchBase offer a more comprehensive data set for the public. The setup here is similar to the CrunchBase Venture Program, where more than 240 investment outfits provide public updates about their portfolios in exchange for better access to the CrunchBase API and team.

This feature has been in testing for a week, and more than 300 AngelList companies have already opted in, so the teams working on the feature expect it’ll be pretty popular.

Meanwhile, CrunchBase is linking back to AngelList for every company that has an entry in both places (example here). One link will go to their main AngelList page, which could be particularly useful for companies that are actively fundraising, and the other link will direct CrunchBase users to the company’s AngelList job listings page. While the teams aren’t disclosing a revenue-sharing agreement around the job listings part, I’ve learned that there is one.

“We’re putting up the scaffoldings of the marketplace,” AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant tells me. “The startup ecosystem is getting mature enough that it’s able to interconnect with APIs — like how stock markets, financial data service providers and analyst firms work for public companies.” He cites Mattermark and Dashboard.io as two startups using all this publicly accessible data on startups to help companies and investors find the right partners.

“Hiding your data makes no sense when investors are using services like AngelList to find companies,” adds CrunchBase president Matt Kaufman. “We intend for CrunchBase to be the common data platform here, because we think greater transparency will help everybody make better decisions.”

Expect lots more to come from both organizations. Ravikant has been busy angling AngelList to take advantage of the new changes in crowdfunding among other initiatives. Meanwhile, CrunchBase is working on a major new version of the site, which the team says you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months.

Here’s a neat hardware project seeking funding on Kickstarter. The Djoclate II — NB: Djoclate is pronounced ‘chocolate’ with a Dutch accent — is a portable, near pocket-sized music mixer. The idea is to enable the would-be DJ who brings it to a house party to pull tunes into the mix from any music storage device in the room, whether that’s a laptop, phone, MP3 player or tablet. Every partygoer’s music collection can potentially become part of the audio pool. So no more ‘it’s not in my record box/on my playlist/on Spotify’ excuses.

To act as a virtual record box the Djoclate II has two inputs, where music storage devices that have a 3.5mm jack can be plugged in (it will ship with two 70cm 3.5mm jack cables to connect music players, and also a mini-USB cable to charge the Djoclate itself, with no other power source required). There’s also a third input where headphones can be plugged in so the DJ can pre-listen to the next track before dropping it in. Tracks can be then faded in and out via the two faders on the device. There’s also bass kill on both channels.

The Djoclate II is, as its name suggests, the second iteration of the gadget. New features include the pre-listening feature and also Bluetooth connectivity so it can also integrate with a wireless speaker or sound system. When not being used as a mixer it can double as a Bluetooth sender to get tracks from your portable onto your sound system. The wireless connectivity option is only for outputting audio; inputs devices have to be plugged in via the cables provided.

Djoclate’s creators, Pepperdecks, are seeking $30,000 on Kickstarter to ship the sequel. With 23 days to go on their crowdfunding campaign they’ve raised more than a third of that. The device is expected to retail for $89 but a few early backers can still secure one for $55 or more.

The startup told TechCrunch it has sold around 2,000 of the first Djoclate model since December in The Netherlands, but has now also expanded its availability to Germany and Italy.

Rovio this morning teased the launch of its next gaming title due to arrive on Monday – a game that appears to be a sequel to the current Angry Birds Star Wars. An image accompanying the announcement features a bird dressed like young Anakin Skywalker, wearing racing gear, as in the 1999 prequel Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. It’s not too hard to then draw the conclusion that this is the direction Rovio is headed, especially after announcing an expanded licensing agreement with toy maker Hasbro, which will ship new toys and games based on the Angry Birds Star Wars lineup and a racing game called Angry Birds Go later this year.

The move to launch yet another version of Angry Birds into an already saturated lineup of similarly themed games — which over the past year have also included the arrivals of Angry Birds Space and Bad Piggies, in addition to the original Angry Birds Star Wars — is not surprising.

“Angry Birds” is nearly synonymous with Rovio’s brand, even as the company has been struggling to define itself as something broader. So far, those efforts have seen limited success.

Rovio’s launch of Amazing Alex, a physics-based game released in July 2012, was its first non-Angry Birds title in nearly three years. Initially, the game shot to the top of the App Store charts, even ranking No. 1, leading some to declare that Rovio’s days of being a “one hit wonder” were over. But Alex has not quite sustained the momentum of the Angry Birds line. For example, the paid version dropped to the 73rd most  popular game and 42nd most popular app in the U.S. later that fall, and today it ranks the top 250th most popular paid game in the U.S., according to AppData, or the top 205th per Distimo. It no longer ranks in the top 400 paid apps in the U.S., and the free version is also not currently ranked in any leaderboard, AppData also notes.

This March, Rovio followed up with another non-Angry Birds title with the release of “The Croods” in conjunction with Dreamworks. That game is not featured in the top 400 free or paid games on iOS in the U.S., also per Distimo. AppData, however, notes it’s No. 369 in the Top Grossing iPad games in the U.S.

Finally, this May, Rovio announced a new angle on its desire to move beyond Angry Birds: it would begin to publish and market third-party titles through a new program called “Rovio Stars.” The company hopes that transforming itself into a third-party publisher will help it shift its image from being a little too “one note” into that of a fully fledged gaming and entertainment company.

Though over the years, Rovio’s non-gaming revenues have continued to grow (up from 30 percent last year to 45 percent this April), games still account for over half (55 percent) of Rovio’s business. And in order to have more new toys, games or heck – even soda – to sell, Rovio will have to keep the hits coming, or at least sustain those it has today…even if that means yet another Angry Birds title.