Tag: Angry Birds

Angry Birds App Cook Book

Linda Reimer

It is rather quiet on the new tech news front today; I think all the news about upcoming Apple products and Windows 8 has died down just a little bit, although I expect the tech rumor mill to be buzzing with word of the iPad mini and Windows 8 features again soon.

Having said that, I did find a rather cool article about of all things…an Angry Birds e-Cook Book!  The cook book is called Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes

The new cook book is available in app form from iTunes and there will shortly be an Android app for it.

The cook book features recipes and interactive humor from everyone’s favorite green, egg-stealing pigs and costs ninety-nine cents. And it really does have egg related recipes in a number of categories – the recipes have step by step instructions, color photos of the food and some interactive sections with the pigs.

And the article that I came across that relays that information is titled Rovio announces Angry Birds book app: Live from Frankfurt Book Fair and may be accessed via the following link:

http://goo.gl/UlqJV

Have a great day!

Linda R.

The Future of Shopping & A New Angry Bird

Linda Reimer

The Future of Shopping: Technological change is happing so quickly today that it is literally transforming the way we live in ways both large and small. And so much technological change is happening so quickly that we sometimes lose track of how recently things have changed! For example, consider the fact that the iPhone, which one sees in the hands of many, many people seemingly on every street corner, subway station and in almost every store and restaurant didn’t even exist six years ago. Nor, correspondingly, did the mainstream persons’ expectation of being able to instantly connect to the Internet, watch videos, listen to music, type text message, play games, read e-books or simply check email instantly and at any time from just about anywhere in the world via a touch screen device. And yet today most of us do expect to be able to do just that; have the ability to access the Internet, communicate with almost anyone almost anywhere in the world and access a great variety of media items at any time we wish by using a smart phone or tablet.

And just as the way we communicate with others and access information has been transformed by technological progress so too will our shopping experience be transformed in the near future. Sometime in the next ten to fifteen years we will do most of our shopping online. Brick and mortar stores will still exist but only as places to go and check out products before ordering them online and having them quickly delivered to our homes and offices. Additionally, computer technology will advance to a point that we’ll be able to virtually try on sunglasses, clothes, make-up and other accessories and really be able to see how we’ll look wearing those items via an accurate, computer generated three dimensional image of our selves. And 3 D printers will eventually allow us to easily produce new clothes, household textiles and other items at home at the touch of a button. So in ten to fifteen years’ time we may be explaining to our children or grandchildren what it was like to actually have to go to a store and spend hours looking through racks and racks of clothes and then trying them on to find a new pair of pants that actually fit!

USA Today has a cool article on this subject, titled Why shopping will never be the same, and it can be accessed via the following link:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-08-05/future-retail-tech/56880626/1

A New Angry Bird: Rovio the makers of the hugely popular game Angry Birds are adding a new bird to their Angry Birds Seasons game. The new bird, aptly named Pink Bird, is pink with blue eyes and is able to produce deadly bubbles with which to combat those sheepishly laughing green pigs.

Information Week offers more in-depth information at the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/apple-sold-24-times-more-tablets-than-sa/240005268

Have a great weekend everyone!

Linda R.

How Angry Birds Saved Plush Toys & How Cord-Nevers Will Help Transform The Way We Watch TV

Linda Reimer

Happy Monday everyone! I came across two articles over the weekend that I thought I’d share. One of them I found vastly amusing! The first article regarding how the plush toy industry, which had recently fallen on hard times, has been offered a tremendous shot in the arm by an app game – titled, and you guessed it I’m sure! – Angry Birds! And the second article discusses how young people who are coming of age today, and have grown up with Internet access via portable Wi-Fi devices as a ubiquitous fact of their lives – are going to transform the cable industry in the near future because they won’t subscribe to cable television but instead will access all their video content online. 

How Angry Birds Saved Plush Toys: The Wall Street Journal has a neat article titled How Angry Birds Is Helping Rescue Plush Toys which relays the story of  how the Commonwealth Toy & Novelty Co., a small family business that sells plush toys, found a unique way to entice the public to buy plush toys again. It seems plush toys had fallen out of favor with kids desiring portable electronic devices instead of plush toys; and correspondingly sales of plush toys had fallen dramatically. And then, a new employee at the Commonwealth Toy Company had an idea – the idea was to license the rights to manufacture and sell plush toys made to look like the characters in a very popular game app called Angry Birds. And the far-seeing employee was right! When, Rovio the company that makes the popular Angry Birds game put game related merchandise on its website, the company figured it would sell out in a couple of weeks and instead everything sold out in two hours! So not surprisingly the Commonwealth Toy Company’s licensing of the rights to make and sell plush versions of the pigs and birds seen in the game has really paid off – the sale of the Angry Birds plush toys has become a great boon for the company; they sold around 200 million dollars worth of Angry Birds plush toys last year and are projecting that number will rise to 400 million this year.

And thus plush toys, at least in the form of green pigs and colorful birds, are popular once more!

Here’s a link to a Wall Street Journal article titled How Angry Birds Is Helping Rescue Plush Toys that offers more information on the subject:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/08/02/how-angry-birds-is-helping-rescue-plush-toys/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=

How Cord-Nevers Will Help Transform The Way We Watch TV: The Atlantic offers a cool article that sheds light on how growing Internet connectivity, specifically the way people increasingly have more ways to watch video content on portable Wi-Fi devices like smart phones and tablets, will change how we watch television shows and movies in the future. The article makes the point that the switch from watching television on a TV via a cable company connection to watching television on Wi-Fi devices via the Internet is going to be accelerated not just by people who already have cable television subscriptions and do the “Cord-Cutting” thing and drop those subscriptions to stream video content via the web; but also by “Cord-Nevers” a term they’ve coined to describe young adults who have grown up with Internet access and are used to watching video content on the web and will not pay for cable subscriptions in the future.

In fact, the article makes a solid case that cable companies should be more nervous about how the Cord-Nevers will quickly change the cable TV status quo by the simple fact that those young people will not subscribe to cable TV at all and the cable industry will lose its traditional continual influx of new cable subscribers.

The Atlantic article is titled Forget Cord Cutters Cable Companies Should Worry About Cord Nevers, here’s the link:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/08/forget-cord-cutters-cable-companies-should-worry-about-cord-nevers/55380/

Linda R.