Category: Tech news

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

For being less than a decade old, London-based Rapha Performance Roadwear has had a sizable impact on the cycling apparel game, turning out merino jerseys and accessories that befit its native climate.

Recently, though, the company has been venturing into lightweight territory, and its recent Pro Team Jersey promises comfort on the hottest rides. An upper-70s day in Sonoma County was perfect, but you’re not going to want to wear this in anything too much under 75. But you’re not here for meteorology, right? Unless you are, in which case the best I can do is point you to this crazy-looking map of all the current wind patterns in the U.S. It looks like hair!

So the jersey. The first thought I had when I put it on was NOT, “Well, this is going to look absolutely ridiculous” — which is important, because that’s a thought I have about almost every single jersey I’ve owned. On aesthetics alone, it’s a thing of beauty. It’s got a slim fit, but it’s somehow forgiving enough to find room for and camouflage my last couple of burritos. And for those of you, like me, who cringe at the garish all-over prints of most jerseys, the off-white/cream with a single black band on the left arm is nice fresh breath of minimalism. Details abound (sorry for just saying “abound”): The very top of the placket, when unzipped, exposes a subtle black-and-white pattern that’s as close to a color splash as you’re going to get. An eyesore it ain’t.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Functionally, it’s got all the hallmarks of a true race-fit jersey (rare for Rapha, which tends to opt for boxier “club cuts”). The sleeves are snug, but not so tight as to leave marks after a long ride. The front is cut higher than usual — when you’re low in the saddle, the logic goes, all that extra material is just going to bunch up and make things uncomfortable. There are radio cable loops, which 99 percent of us are never going to need, but give the same feeling of craftsmanship as the label in one of the pockets featuring an odd little meditation on the joys of cycling (“Tongues hang, like those of dogs, and the gang breathes fast and heavy”). The pocket placement was significantly higher than most other jerseys, which I didn’t love — it certainly inhibited the usual in-and-out inventory transfers of a long ride (vest, arm warmers, food, etc.).

Above all, though, the jersey’s raison d’être is heat dissipation, from the superthin fabric to the mesh side panels and collar, and it accomplishes that in spades. After a two-hour ride in the surprisingly hot late afternoon — one that featured a few heartstopping (and legstopping) 25 percent grades — the jersey was absolutely soaked, but I felt cool and comfortable.

So wear it, but don’t hand it to anyone afterward, lest they drive you from their village with pitchforks for being some sort of heretic water-creature.

WIRED It’s a departure for Rapha, to be sure, but one that bodes well for trimmer cyclists riding in warmer weather. A head-turner on the road.

TIRED Beware the high pockets, and the high price.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The night I brought these kicks home, I found myself lounging around the apartment in them as if they were just another pair of house slippers. That’s the first time I’ve had that experience when trying on a new bike shoe. Sure, the Factor’s super-stiff carbon-fiber soles aren’t made for walking. But as I sat there with the uncleated shoes strapped to my feet, they felt about as comfortable as a sneaker.

The Factor achieves that comfort level without any noticeable sacrifices in terms of efficiency. The 6.5mm soles come from corporate sibling Easton, a maker of some of the sickest carbon wheels, stems, bars and forks on the market. Cadel Evans rode Easton wheels to victory in last year’s Tour de France. I felt absolutely zero unwanted flex, even when mashing the pedals on 12 percent climbs in my testing grounds of Marin County, California. These are bona fide race shoes.

The comfort starts with Giro’s last. Shoe companies create proprietary foot shapes to build shoes around — these molds, called lasts, keep the fit consistent from shoe to shoe. Giro spent a year going through 16 revisions to its last before it settled on a shape it felt would benefit the widest range of riders. Not crazy-narrow like some Italian shoes, and not rowboat-wide. These are Goldilocks-style just right — no hot spots on the balls of my feet, no wiggle in the heel cup.

But Giro didn’t stop with the shape. The Factor insoles feature an adjustable arch-support system that lets the user dial in the fit. The shoe comes with inserts in three different sizes, which attach via Velcro to the underside of the insole arch. A lot of people who might otherwise need custom insoles will be fine here.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The three-strap closure uses Velcro straps at the toe and mid-foot and a micro-adjustable ratcheting strap at the top — straightforward, but effective. The only real knock against the Factor is the thin walking pads at the heel and toe. Granted, these are race shoes; they’re not designed for long walks. Still, after just a couple of mid-ride café stops, mine were already showing some wear. And since they’re not replaceable, once they’re worn, you’ll be walking on bare carbon.

If you’ve got a moderate to wide foot or if the race shoes you’re wearing now give you hot spots, the Factor is definitely worth a look. Giro has really nailed the fit here. It’s hard to imagine a more comfortable performance-cycling shoe.

WIRED: Comfortable right out of the box. Wafer-thin, rock-solid platform. Customizable arch support for a wide range of feet.

TIRED: Red and white patent leather look ain’t exactly classic. Walking pads border on cosmetic.

A number of cable, satellite, and IPTV providers have introduced TV Everywhere services that let viewers watch TV content online. But satellite TV provider DISH will be the first to introduce a standalone subscription TV service over-the-top, with the launch of its new DISHWorld package of international channels rolling out on the Roku streaming box.

DISHWorld is made up of a series of international video channels from and makes them available on Roku for as little as $19.99 a month. The service allows DISH to take a bunch of content that doesn’t usually have a huge audience, and doesn’t cost a whole helluva lot to license, and make it available to niche audiences. And Roku is already a pretty popular device for watching international content.

According to the Roku blog, DISHWorld has more than 50 international channels, including:

• A bunch of Arabic channels exclusive to DISH, including MBC, Al Arabiya, and Al Jazeera
• Hindi channels such as aapka Colors, Sony, SET Max, Star Plus, Zee TV, B4U, and aaj Tak
• Willow Cricket and TEN Cricket, which includes eight Cricket Boards and more than 150 days of live cricket a year
• Seven popular television channels from Pakistan, including GEO TV, ARY Digital, and Hum TV
• Four channels from Bangladesh, including ATN Bangla, Channel I, ETV Bangla, and NTV Bangla
• TV Globo Internacional and PFC, which have Brazilian television programs and soccer events

So does this mean that DISH — or anyone else — could introduce a streaming package with some *ahem* more popular live channels? Like ABC, CBS or other broadcast TV channels? Maybe ESPN or cable channels like AMC or FX? Probably not. Think about it — these are networks that DISH spends very little to license, and it’s charging $20 a month. There’s probably no way that it could introduce a service of the content that most people watch and make it economically viable. That’s a bummer, but it’s just the way things are.

iOS and Android aren’t leaving much room for Firefox to burrow into mobile. “We knew there was going to be a transition from desktop being primary to mobile and tablet being primary” said Mozilla’s former CEO and current board member John Lilly today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. “What I worry about, the scary part is that for the first time the platforms and distribution are tightly controlled before innovation has really started”

Lilly explained that Internet Explorer once dominated web browsing and people said “How the hell do you break that?” But Firefox and Chrome came along and now the market is almost evenly split. But Lilly says “mobile’s not like that. Mobile is these tied-down vertical stacks that are controlled by Google and Apple, so we have a new impossible problem to become relevant on mobile.”

As the world spends more and more of its time on mobile, Mozilla will have to figure out how to inject itself there. Firefox for Android is a good start, but tests against Chrome in February saw Mozilla’s version loading pages much slower. There just might not be enough value for Firefox to add in order to pull Android users from their default browser. And thanks to Apple’s Draconian SDK agreement, Mozilla isn’t even allowed to release a full-version of Firefox for iOS.

Lilly is optimistic about Mozilla’s desktop browser, ”I think Firefox is about as good as it’s ever been right now. But unfortunately, the Google juggernaut is there too. ”I know a lot of people probably moved to Chrome” Lilly said.

David Lawee, Google’s VP of Corporate Development, sat down for an informative chat with MG Siegler at Disrupt NYC this morning, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Google’s track record with mergers and acquisitions.

“We’ve done 120 acquisitions since 2003, maybe one in 2002,” Lawee said. “And two-thirds of them have been successful.”

Doing the math, that works out to roughly 40 deals that didn’t quite pan out the way the folks in Mountain View had hoped. Of course, some them are more pronounced than others. When asked about Slide — the social gaming company that Google picked up for a cool $228 million only to shutter their services a year later — Lawee noted that Slide was “definitely” in that bottom third.

But what does it actually mean for an acquisition to fail (or succeed) for Google?

When pressed on the issue, Lawee pointed out that each deal has its own particular metrics that Google weighed before they chalked it up as a success or failure. Widevine, the streaming video DRM solution that Google acquired in late 2010 is measured for instance in how many devices it’s reached (and Lawee noted that number has doubled in a year, firmly ensconcing it that top tier of wins for them).

The teams attached to these acquisitions moved on to different roles within Google (and often very fruitful ones), but they ultimately didn’t meet the “four or five” key goals that Google had in mind when they inked their deal. Aardvark was a prominent example — Lawee mentioned that M&A team felt very strongly about the role social Q&A would play in search, but Google’s search organization felt differently. Though the Aardvark team (including co-founder Max Ventilla) found a new home working on Google’s Knowledge Graph, the acquisition is still considered a failure because those original goals were never met.

The pair also tackled Google’s recently-completed Motorola Mobility acquisition, and Lawee was quick to shoot down the notion that it was a spur of the moment deal. He was, though, a bit more hesitant to tackle the notion that the Motorola deal was put together because of their bid to nab Nortel’s patents.

“It’s a complicated area, and it’s not an area that one can just dabble in.” Lawee said.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, he says Google still doesn’t want to buy Twitter.

President Barack Obama is famous for his affinity for his BlackBerry and science fairs, but the tech love goes a lot further than that. Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer, today described the President as having a “very high geek quotient” with a “go go go” attitude when it comes to new tech initiatives — which, yes, he likes in and of themselves, but more importantly as a means to an end.

The comments were made during a fireside chat at TC Disrupt in New York, where Park along with U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel also announced the government’s big plans for opening up its data and courting developers.

“He is focused on how technology and data help you get the right healthcare for your family, pick the right college for your kid, help keep your kid safe, make the best decisions on save energy bill,” said Park. “It’s tech as a means to an end.”

At the sidelines of the stage, Park told me that when he and VanRoekel proposed the whole idea of open data to the President, he got very fired up and wanted to act fast. “He loved it. The first thing he said to us was ‘Go, go, go!’” he said.

But, yes, he is a bit of a geek, even still. On the subject of Obama and science fairs: “He hangs out five times as long as needed.”

VanRoekel noted also that how technology is an important factor in how people should conceive of economic recovery going forward. “When you look at U.S. history, the majority of Fortune 500 companies were founded in bad economic times,” he said, and at the same time they have been marked by “inflection points” in technology that helped to catapult these companies forward. “We have an opportunity to seize that [model] again,” he said.

As for the government itself, there is a general sense of risk aversion prevalent among of public servants when it comes to technology, VanRoekel admitted. That will play out especially with the proposed Data Act, which will put a lot of requirements on public servants. The two are trying to stem the possible tide of dissent early on with this: “I want to have conversations with Congress right now,” said VanRoekel, who wants to know: “What is the burden put on federal agencies in this process?”

But Park added, “If you can figure out a way to release their mojo, they can do amazing things.”

An interesting connection that he drew here was that public servants, by definition, are not motivated by money — something he said that he noticed characterized the best entrepreneurs when he was still in the private sector (he had a long carrer as a consultant at Booz Allen and also in health tech):

“When I was in the private sector one characteristic that differentiated the best entrepreneurs from the others was that they were not in it for the stock options but for a mission, to deliver something that was helpful… Every entrepreneurial journey it turns out is like this.”

President Obama has a “high geek quotient” according to his senior technology advisor, Todd Park. Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced five major federal initiatives at TechCrunch Disrupt today, along with a call to entrepreneurs to join in a new gold rush of data that will be released in the coming months. Like how the GPS industry helped pave the way for iPhone apps, Park and VanRoekel hope to catalyze new industries in energy, education, security, and the nonprofit sector with the new open data guidelines. Additionally, they’re opening up an application process for an executive fellows program (apply here; we’ll have a post soon with more details).

The five major initiatives are as follows:

1. Expand the one-click download program of “Blue Button” to energy, education, security, and the nonprofit sector. Blue Button was an early open data initiative from Park’s previous job at HHS to allow federal medical recipients (Department of Defense, Veterans, and Medicare) to access their health information in an easy, one-click process for use with all of their doctors. A relevant recent extension of Blue Button for energy, “Green Button,” is already in use by iPhone app makers to give homeowners feedback on their energy use. Additional energy info will be coming soon in the hopes that savvy entrepreneurs can make profitable, socially-beneficial use of the new data.

2. Expand Blue Button itself to private sector insurance companies. Right now, only federal beneficiaries have access to the data, yet many Americans would also like an easy way to track their medical history and share relevant results between doctors.

3. A PayPal for foreign aid, the “20% Campaign.” The federal government has a nasty habit of losing crates of cash and foreign aid while paying security forces and contract workers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Park and VanRoekel hope the new system can better track the money trail, and therefore reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. One study suggests that India could save billions with electronic transfers, and the savings could be just as significant for the U.S.

4. A small-business friendly process for securing government contracts, named RFP-EZ. Don’t have a DC-bureau or a cushy relationship with a senator? This program aims to give the small guy a shot at big contracts. Park argued in his talk that the government sometimes prefers savvy startups in Silicon Valley, who can save the government a lot more than the typical contractor.

5. MyGov, a user-friendly website to find government services. Currently, government services are organized by government need, not citizen, making many services difficult to find.

These initiatives will roll out over the comings months and we’ll update our audience with relevant details.

TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley is jam-packed with interesting startups and it’s always frustrating that we can’t get to film every single one. However, we do our best and you’ll find that Techcrunch Jordan Crook and I manage to get through plenty in this walk-through. Amongst the companies we caught were Wibbitz, UppSite, Tokkster, Drippler and Clinch.

You can view all of our Startup Alley companies from Tuesday here. And from Monday here.

And if you want more, here’s our previous Startup Alley coverage here, here, here and here.

Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone. Google completely overhauled the design of the app, which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches.

In line with last year’s iPad update, the new app now features the ability to easily swipe back and forth between your search results and the pages you clicked on. It’s also become significantly easier to switch between Google’s various search features like images, places, shopping and videos. Whenever you swipe up to the top of the search results page now, a new menu opens up at the bottom of the screen that lets you switch between the different search features.

The app, of course, also still support voice search and gives users access to all of Google’s other services like Google Goggles, Gmail and Google+. One interesting feature is its ability to detect which other Google apps you have installed on your phone and then allows you to switch to them instead of using the company’s HTML5 apps.

Overall, the app is a nice improvement over the previous version. It builds upon a trend we’ve seen lately from Google toward better mobile apps, including the recent  Google+ for iPhone redesign. For the most part, though, most users will likely continue to do most of their searches from their favorite mobile browser.

Online video advertising startup YuMe has picked up another $10 million in financing from China-based investment firm WestSummit Capital, closing out a $22 million strategic round that was first announced last November. The round was led by Samsung Ventures and also included Translink Capital.

YuMe founder Jayant Kadambi confirmed the raise, and told me by email that the funding will be used primarily to expand into more connected devices. YuMe provides a platform for delivering ads against online videos, but has recently been adding support for connected TVs.

“[W]e are using to expand our Connected TV business across OEMs and publishers globally. We are continuing to expand our business out of our Chennai development labs, as we see tremendous media business growth opportunities across all of Asia,” Kadambi wrote.

That’s the primary reason for Samsung’s interest in YuMe, as well as a previous strategic investment from Intel. Other YuMe investors include Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital, and DAG Ventures. Altogether, YuMe has raised nearly $75 million since being founded in 2007.

Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something that builds other things). Biggs kicked off the panel with a simple question: — can we bring manufacturing back?

Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries, has two shifts of workers putting together all of his Makerbots in Brooklyn, and had a bit of advice for hardware creators looking to shift production to China. He recommended that until makers need to produce runs of 50,000-100,000 units, they’re much better off keeping the production process in the United States. It helps to keep makers intimate with their tech, not to mention makes it easier for them to handle any unexpected issues faster.

The process of launching a product was tackled too — interestingly enough, Amol Sarva of Peek fame revealed that if he had to take his email gadget to market now instead of a few years ago, he would’ve gone a completely different route. Instead of going big and pushing to get his devices on store shelves around the country, he instead would have gone with the grassroots approach — making a few devices and trying to build buzz around them.

Another recurring theme of the panel was the notion that makers should embrace niches.

“There may not be mass market ideas, and that’s OK,” said Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs. He noted that people can put hardware and devices together that aren’t meant to reach millions and millions of people (they could even use a Makerbot if the production run size was modest enough), and these small markets were still worth going after.

Plus, you can never really tell just how niche some niches are. Duncan Frazier of Bit Banger Labs knows that all too well — he and his team developed a sleep mask that aims to help its users lucid dream, and put together a Kickstarter campaign for it. They expected they would have to make a few hundred units at most, but the niche was much bigger than they thought. By the time their campaign was over, they had exceeded their $35,000 funding request by orders of magnitude.

The discussion then turned to the question of whether or not we could build something akin to a sprawling Foxconn campus in somewhere like Iowa.

“Here in the U.S., as a culture, we’re not really focused on [manufacturing],” Pettis noted. “Our children are the only priority lower than manufacturing.”

There was little question that using Chinese facilities for manufacturing has its advantages — namely sheer output — but some were curious as to how long that would remain the case. Pettis pointed out that wages in China have doubled over the last year, a trend that (if continued) may eventually lead to a shift away from relying on China.

The panel ended on a slightly more inspirational note, with each of makers chiming in with advice for young upstarts who want to start making things. On this, everyone seemed to agree — the best approach is to just go out there and start going it. Ayah Bdeir, CEO of littleBits, specifically pointed out that a young person who had $50 and an Internet connection had no shortage of places to turn for inspiration — Instructables and Hack A Day, for instance.

“You learn by making,” she said. Pettis recommended that wannabe makers should just “jump in” to the process, and if they eventually decide to go the Kickstarter route, Frazier emphasized the importance of a solid video because that’s the only place the product exists as far as the users are concerned.

Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless, to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.”

With the new deal in place, Amazon Instant Video now offers over 17,000 movies and TV episodes for unlimited streaming by Amazon Prime customers who can watch online or on their Amazon Kindle Fire. For what it’s worth, “17,000+” is the same number that Amazon was touting earlier this year, so the increase via the Paramount deal didn’t include enough of a selection to warrant a new “milestone” announcement on the company’s part.

Prior to the Discovery deal, Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom in February, which then brought the number of titles up to 15,000. And in December, the count was 13,000. So yes, the service is growing, and relatively quickly.

Other popular movies you’ll know from Paramount which are now online include Star Trek, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, The Italian Job, and The Truman Show.

In total, the service offers 120,000 titles which Amazon Prime customers can either rent or buy. The videos will be available at no extra charge to Amazon Prime customers who pay the $79/year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere – an app that has allowed countless people to meet and greet each other in meatspace – has launched a video chat service that lets folks connect when and where they want.

The update embeds video chat into the standard text and voice chat already available through the app. Rather than allowing random video and photo encounters immediately, however, the system turns off most media sharing by default.

From the PR:

Although it will never replace seeing a nearly naked man staring at you out of murky darkness on Omegle, it’s definitely a step forward for mobile dating and chat apps.

Product Page

Beer may or may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about TechCrunch Disrupt, but today, CrunchFund’s MG Siegler took the stage at our New York conference to talk to Churchkey‘s founders: Adrian Grenier, who is well-known for his role in the TV series Entourage, Justin Hawkins and Ryan Sowards. Churchkey, which was founded in 2010 and is based in the Pacific Northwest with offices in the beer-loving cities of Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Ore., recently attracted a number of tech investors, including CrunchFund.

The company, which quickly made a name for itself thanks to its retro can with its flat top design, is currently only available in the Pacific Northwest, but the company has plans to quickly expand to new markets, including San Francisco, which as the founders announced today, will get its first taste of Churchkey on June 5.

After a short beer tasting hosted by CrunchFund founder and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, the obvious first question asked by Siegler, who is also an investor in the company through CrunchFund, was about why there is a beer company at Disrupt and why tech investors are interested in investing in a beer company. Churchkey, Siegler noted, had one of the best pitch decks he had ever seen. Investing in Churchkey, he said, was an easy choice because it has the potential to disrupt the beer industry with its new design.

As for the founders’ reasons for starting a beer company, Grenier noted that beer is a cultural thing and that the old-style beer, and with it, the beer cans from 50 years ago, had just disappeared. Over dinner with Ryan Soward, the two spontaneously decided that they were the right people to bring it back and disrupt the beer business.

Talking about the design, which is obviously one of the most remarkable aspects of the product, the founders noted that its obvious heritage allows it to be distinct and still easily recognizable enough on a store shelf. The steel can, the founders also noted, doesn’t just give it a distinctive feel, but is also environmentally friendly because it includes recycled material and because it’s easy to pick out of waste stream.

The company is expanding quickly and besides an forthcoming San Francisco launch, it is also planning to expand to Austin, Los Angeles and New York as soon as possible.

As Adrian Grenier notes, “a lot of tech is online, it’s not in the real world,” but the human experience in the digital world is being minimized. With beer, he said, you can pause and take time with other humans.

Well, well, well. As if you couldn’t get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (officially known as Angry Birds Friends) has finally done flown the coop and left the warm nest of its beta. Avian double-speak aside, what does that mean exactly?

It means that, having gone through the requisite user testing, tweaking, and multi-billion-dollar IPO-ing, Rovio’s Facebook app — with a handful of new features in tow — is finally ready for public consumption. As to those features, Angry Birds Friends brings a number of trendy social gaming features to Angry Birds, including tournament mode, new weekly levels, new ways to earn power-ups, rewards, and, of course, tons of social integration.

As Angry Birds fanatics are well aware, Rovio launched Angry Birds Friends in beta earlier this year. On top of those things I mentioned earlier, the beta version of Angry Birds Friends has also been a testing ground for Rovio to test out new business models, like offering $1 power-ups beyond pay-to-download options or the infamous Mighty Eagle.

The game’s port to Facebook likely had the social network excited, considering that Angry Birds has been a presence on Google+ and other Goog products for awhile now — not to mention the fact that massively popular games like Angry Birds could mean good things for Facebook’s revenue.

But, as to Angry Birds Friends’ (what an awkward and clunky name to say aloud, by the way) new features, they’re pretty much self-explanatory, but its new tournaments feature allows user to compete with their friends on four different levels — from Monday to Sunday. The pig-popping user with the highest overall score earns a gold trophy, with silver going to second, etc, etc. And, thankfully, unlike crowns, users get to keep their trophies for ever. For. Ever.

The “New Weekly Levels” refer, specifically, to those four new levels being offered in tournament mode, although Rovio hinted that it will be launching further levels every week. Third of all, there are those power-ups, which, on top of the daily rewards users can already collect, users can now earn power-ups in tournament mode. Earn three power-up bundles and you’ll receive a shiny gold trophy.

As for context, in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Angry Birds is popular. More than five people use it. In fact, earlier this month Rovio announced that its coven of Angry Birds apps had amassed 1 billion downloads. To date, Rovio has released the original, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, newer arrival Angry Birds Space, and now, what one might consider its newest arrival, Angry Birds Friends.

If you’d asked me two years ago if Angry Birds merchandising would be extremely popular, and that an Angry Birds movie would be in the works, I would have laughed at you. But, considering I’m wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt right now, eating Angry Birds cereal, and that Rovio’s 2011 earnings were about 10-times its estimated revenues from the year prior, with 30 percent coming from merchandising, well clearly I didn’t get the last laugh.

More on Angry Birds Friends in Rovio’s blog post here.

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