The world’s most popular computer game will become live attractions for children next year when the first Angry Birds playgrounds appear in Finland.
The developer of the Angry Birds app found on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers said on Monday that two Finnish towns would get the first playgrounds kitted out with equipment inspired by the game’s characters, as it signed a global deal with playground equipment manufacturer Lappset Group Ltd.
Mobile gaming firm Rovio Entertainment Ltd, which plans to go public within a few years, said last month its hit game had reached a record 500 million downloads less than two years after its launch.
Unlike most mobile game crazes, Angry Birds, in which players use a slingshot to attack pigs who steal the birds’ eggs, has stayed atop the charts since it was launched for Apple Inc’s iPhone in 2009.
Rovio is expanding the brand across traditional merchandising, to items such as toys and baby products, and is taking the birds to the big screen with film studios.
Lappset will manufacture play and activity equipment and ready-made playgrounds or activity parks inspired by the Angry Birds characters.
“The playgrounds fit perfectly into the Angry Birds world and our way of thinking,” Rovio marketing chief Peter Vesterbacka said in a statement.
The Angry Birds playground product range features animal spring riders, swings, sandpits and a range of climbing towers with slides, and a unique Angry Birds arcade game.
Earlier this year, Rovio raised US$42 million from venture capital firms including Accel Partners, which previously backed Facebook and Baidu, and Skype founder Niklas Zennstroem’s venture capital firm Atomico Ventures
Rovio was founded in 2003 after three students including Niklas Hed — CEO Mikael Hed’s cousin and now Rovio’s COO — won a game-development competition sponsored by Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia Oyj and Hewlett-Packard Co.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts