We sometimes have this impression that anything worth paying attention to when it comes to technology is taking place in the U.S. and maybe the Pacific Rim. But this past week a huge event took place in Barcelona—Mobile World Live, and it featured a stellar list of keynotes including Google’s Chairman/CEO Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, and Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, to name just a few.
App World took center stage and gamers will find it a no brainer that Angry Birds, a 50 million plus-selling app, won the award for the Best App of the Year on the Apple platform. This is no small achievement because there are about 150,000 active apps in Apple’s App Store, and only about one percent of them ever make a lot of money. Looked at another way, more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from App Store by iPhone and that’s about 2 for every person in China! So if you want to be one of the winners, you have to bring your A game; that means giving users a great experience, and figuring out the best way to stand out from the crowd—otherwise known as effective marketing.
When you consider that if a "customer" spent five minutes trying out each app in the Apple App Store, it would take that customer an entire year nonstop to get through them all. That’s a lot of competition! So winning awards like those given at Mobile World Live and TechCrunch are extremely valuable –they get you free press and a lot of attention. And 50 million downloads can translate to a lot of money. Rovio Mobile, the company behind Angry Birds, is one of Europe's leading independent developers of wireless games. Actually their story is pretty interesting. In 2003, three students at Helsinki University of Technology, Niklas Hed, Jamo Vakevainen, and Kim Dikert entered a mobile game development competition and won with a multiplayer game called "King of the Cabbage World." Encouraged by this success, they set up a company, received their first round of minvestment capital in 2005, increased their studio headcount to 30 and started creating titles for hard-core gamers. In 2006, they acquired Pixelgene, a developer of 3D mobile games, and the rest is history.
Every 2.5 minutes another app is uploaded to Apple's App Store and the vast majority of app developers have no plan for how to create sales or keep new products in the pipeline. Make sure you’re not one of them, because Angry Birds has definitely raised the bar.
