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In an on-stage interview at Le Web 10 in Paris, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed talked about one of the most popular games ever to hit mobile phones all around the world: Angry Birds.

Our notes:

What’s the story behind Angry Birds?

It started off with a screenshot from one of our game designers. He drew a picture of some really angry-looking birds. He explained the game mechanics behind his idea. I didn’t understand any of it, but everybody really loved the characters, so we started developing a game around it.

Can you share some of the latest numbers?

We’ve sold 12 million copies of Angry Birds to date, and we’ve seen about 30 million downloads of the free app. The majority of revenues comes from the iPhone, and a lot of that is from advertising.

Did the success of the advertising model take you by surprise?

We had a pretty good idea of how well it could do, but I do think the future will hold many more apps that will be getting most of its revenue from advertising. It’s just a great way to capture users for the long term.

On the iPhone, the commercial model works really well – there’s only one shop, you have to register for iTunes, everyone can buy, etc.

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the Android version, about the severe performance issues and so on. Can you talk a little about that? Is Apple right in saying that there’s a huge fragmentation problem? Is it a big issue for you?

not too much, we’ve done a lot of games in Java over the years, so we’re good at porting our games. It’s familiar to us. But it does take manpower to do it, and in some cases we can’t support all the handsets, because of their respective specifications.

Is it mainly the hardware, or which version of Android the handsets are running?

Everything Android 2.0 and upwards is really good.

What about some of the other platforms? Windows Phone 7 for example?

We’re actively looking at WP7, we have a very good relationship with Microsoft. They just announced it a bit early.

What about the Chrome web store?

Chrome is very interesting, and we’re looking at that also.

Would that be an advertising-driven model as well?

It remains to be seen how wide the payment coverage is, but I must say the revenue split is very interesting.

Are you expanding to Facebook at some point?

It’s an interesting time to get on Facebook, so we’re definitely looking at that.

What’s with the toy aspect?

We were introduced to a licensing agency early on, and we thought of ways to use the brand for other things like merchandise. The results so far have been very encouraging.

We’re actually waiting for more toys to arrive from China, and we’re already selling inventory that will only arrive in January or even February 2011.

(Updating)

Source: Angry Birds: More Than 12 Million Copies Sold (Le Web)

c0lo writes “Not only did China decline to attend the upcoming Nobel peace prize ceremony, but urged diplomats in Oslo to stay away from the event warning of ‘consequences’ if they go. Possibly as a result of this (or on their own decisions), 18 other countries turned down the invitation: Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Reuters seems to think the ‘consequences’ are of an economic nature, pointing out that half of the countries with economies that gained global influence during recent times are boycotting the ceremony (with Brazil and India still attending).”

Source: China’s Influence Widens Nobel Peace Prize Boycott

SunTech Power Holdings Co. (NYSE: STP) — the largest solar panel maker in the world— delivered an optimistic 2011 forecast to investor analysts on Monday.

The Wuxi, China-based company with significant market share and operations in the U.S. expects its sales next year to grow by a minimum of one-fifth, and its revenue to reach $3.4 billion to $3.6 billion, up from $2.78 billion to US$2.83 billion this year. Its 2010 revenue represents growth of 64 percent over 2009.

The president of SunTech America, Steven Chan, projected that the U.S. market for solar should reach 1,114 MW by the end of 2010; SunTech’s share of that should end up around 210 MW. He expects SunTech to sell 410 MW in the U.S. in 2011 as domestic demand for solar overall rises to 2,058 MW by company estimates.

Competition in the U.S. — especially from First Solar, Sharp and SunPower(NASDAQ:SPWRA) — took some market share from SunTech this year.

The Chinese solar manufacturer lacks the large-scale utility projects that SunPower, for example, has signed on to develop in California and elsewhere. Instead, most of SunTech’s sales have been generated by light-industrial and residential projects, and European customers to-date.

The company’s forecasts for technological developments were reasonably rosy.
Chief technology officer of SunTech, Stuart Wenham (image, below) said on the guidance call that the company’s solar modules, used in large-scale commercial applications, should demonstrate 22% conversion efficiency in the field within three years, conservatively.

SunTech currently offers solar modules that demonstrated a 19.2 percent conversion efficiency as measured at one of their installations in Australia. Solar modules with a higher conversion efficiency deliver more power per square inch of solar power-generating materials.

An increase to 22 percent, Wenham explained, would lower the cost of systems for potential buyers, and help SunTech meet demand for clean energy without increasing its costs to produce the modules.

The company’s newest products are made from “Pluto efficient crystalline silicon solar cells.” A 72-cell module, 5-inch wafer made by SunTech today has a power output of about 195 watts. The company’s newer Pluto modules will have a power output of 200 watts, Wenham said on the call.

The CTO bragged light-heartedly about one rooftop installation at the Sydney Theatre Company in Australia. Film star Cate Blanchett did the honors of switching the system on to promote clean energy, the theater and SunTech there in November.

(Blanchett, like Wendham, is Australian.)

Shares in SunTech traded 9 percent higher by the end of Monday, over the previous business day. But they were beginning to dip in after hours trading.

Source: SunTech Power Forecasts Brighter 2011

Hertz Rent A Car is set to offer electric vehicles at an hourly rate starting December 15th in New York City, with expansion of the service to San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, up to 50 college campuses in North America, and markets in Texas and China by the end of 2011.

For what it calls the ConnectByHertz “car sharing” service in Manhattan, the company aims to make 20 electric vehicles (EVs) available by the second quarter of 2011. In total throughout the U.S. next year, Hertz plans to have 500 to 1,000 all-electric cars available.

The number of EVs that Hertz purchases for its rent-by-the-hour fleets will depend upon the availability of the cars, many of which have not begun to ship yet the company’s head of communications, Rich Broome, said Sunday.

Hertz has committed to purchase: the Nissan Leaf, the Mistubishi i-MiEV, the Chevy Volt, and electric cars from Coda and Smart, Broome verified.

The company will work with a variety of charging station makers, EV manufacturers and electric utilities to ensure there are enough chargers available to drivers where Hertz rents EVs and plug-in hybrids.

Broome explained the company’s decision to invest in and promote EVs and the “car sharing” model:

We spend in the billions a year on our fleets, and only keep cars in [them] for eight to twelve months… chang[ing] them out before a service or maintenance issue ever comes up.

At the same time, we serve customers who need cars for all different reasons. They may be families on vacation together, or people on business by themselves, people who want to enjoy a luxury vehicle, others who want something more economical.

Offering EVs is a continuation of a trend for us, of diversity and being first to market with new and interesting models. We were the first [rental company] to offer the Prius.

Traditionally in the U.S., a mark of adulthood is owning a car. Those habits are changing in some places, especially cities and college campuses for some good reasons. They’re not just environmental but personal financial reasons. We can help people think around the question: do I really need to own a vehicle?

We want people to be able to try these new EVs out, for something around or less than $10 an hour. When they do, hopefully they’ll see the cars are fun to drive, they handle nicely, the braking is smooth and they have nice acceleration.

Clean energy catalyst, investor and serial entrepreneur, Jack D. Hidary— who was a cofounder of Vista Research, Dice.com and a co-architect of the federal Cash-For-Clunkers program— worked with Hertz to set up the new EV service.

Hidary told TechCrunch:

“This will be the first car sharing provider in the country with a scaled EV program. There have been small-scale tests of EVs, but nobody has said we’re gonna launch EVs into our mainstream fleet, in multiple cities around the world.

One thing that made this possible [for Hertz] today, is information technology. We have the digital commons. But there is an evolving ‘EV-commons,’ too. It includes the smart grid, and smart cars and information about where are the charging stations, are they available now or when will they become available.

That did not exist back when we saw the first EVs. Now you can look at a web app or a mobile app and see it easily as a consumer.

If you were interested in an EV before, you had to buy it and spend money on the charging station at home to drive a zero emissions vehicle.

Renting the EVs by the hour, and ensuring enough charging stations in those markets is a business model innovation. I see the business model innovation as something that is at least as important as the technological innovation.”

Source: Hertz To Offer Electric Vehicles By The Hour

Radcliffe_V writes “According to a leaked cable via Wikileaks, the Chinese government views the internet as very controllable, despite western views otherwise. The New York Times article also sheds light on how involved the Chinese government is in cyber attacks against US assets and companies such as Google.”

Source: China Views Internet As “Controllable”

Ask a child if there is a shortage of ice cream in the world, and no doubt, the response will be an emphatic yes—there certainly is. And ask a tech CEO if there is a shortage of engineers, and you will get the exact same answer.

That’s the story I used to tell, based on my research on engineering graduation rates and outsourcing trends.  In 2005, my team shattered the myths about India and China graduating 12 times the numbers of engineers as the U.S. (we found that the U.S. graduated more than India did in 2004, and the quality of Indian and Chinese graduates was not comparable to that of American schools). And our survey of 78 executives from companies that Lou Dobbs (remember him?) harangued for “Exporting America†revealed that they weren’t going offshore because of shortages of U.S. talent or deficiencies in the skills of Americans, but because it was cheaper and these companies needed to be closer to growth markets.

The argument that I made, and that the opponents of skilled immigration also make, is that if there was, indeed, a labor shortage, then engineering salaries would be rising and companies would be paying huge bonuses to attract and retain talent. This wasn’t the case a few years ago. But with Google giving 10% pay hikes to all of its employees and offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in retention bonuses, this appears to be happening today. In Silicon Valley, there seems to be a talent crunch: most startups, venture capitalists, and big company executives say it is very hard it is to hire the right talent; they claim that wages are rising.

But national unemployment rates are hovering around 10%, and tens-of-thousands of highly experienced computer programmers and technical specialists can’t find work. How can this be?

I believe I know the answer. But to be sure, I asked several experts and even my Twitter followers to share their opinion on my website. I received many insightful responses.

Sanjay Subhedar, a VC at Storm Ventures, says that in Silicon Valley, there is a shortage of Objective C developers, analog engineers who understand low power design, and good user-interface designers. There are also shortages of radio-frequency engineers in New York City and in Indiana.

Edward Alden, Senior Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, explains that before the current downturn, computer programmers and software engineers were two occupations that had “something pretty close to full employmentâ€. There was very strong wage growth during the tech boom (1999-2001), and then a leveling off—but not a decline—in wages from 2001-2007. Complaints of shortages continued post-recession, however, even when the overall unemployment rate of engineers was much higher. Alden postulates that employers are looking for very precise skill sets that are not readily available either because of inadequacies in U.S. education and training, or because of insufficient mobility in the labor force.

There is clearly a mismatch between need and skill availability. There are other problems also:

• Many engineering graduates aren’t becoming engineers or joining startups, as UC-Berkeley engineering masters student Rahul Barwani noted. Most of Rahul’s classmates became management consultants or took other non-engineering jobs. That’s because they received higher salaries than what engineering firms or startups offer.
• Startups don’t hire students fresh out of college because they can’t afford to train them.  As Robert Shed, CTO of Three Screen Games, explains, startups need people who can hit the ground running. And that is why college graduates in places like Tampa, Florida can’t get jobs, as IT consultant Roy Lawson observes.
• American companies don’t invest in training their workforce any more like they used to. They expect workers to have all the right skills.
• Nearly 60% of U.S. engineering post-graduate degrees and 40% of graduate degrees are awarded to foreign nationals. In the past, most of these students would remain in the U.S. after graduation and eventually become U.S. citizens. Now, because of flawed U.S. immigration policies, most buy one-way tickets home.
• The world’s best and brightest aren’t beating a path to the U.S. any more. In previous years, H-1B visas for foreign nationals were in such high demand that they had to be awarded by lottery. This year, the annual quota of 65,000 hasn’t even been used yet. Instead, these workers are staying home and entrepreneurship is booming in countries like India and China.

So there are many issues here. But the national debates about competitiveness, immigration, and education, typically focus on the issue of supply and demand of engineers and scientists. They paint this issue in black or white when it is shades of gray.

On December 7, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is releasing a detailed report which analyzes Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and worker shortages from a historical perspective. It finds that the standard indicators of salary growth and unemployment rates are not the best metrics for assessing shortages. The authors of the report say it is better to measure the length of time it takes for companies to hire STEM workers; analyze global job growth in a given sector; and compare the U.S. position in the global job market to other countries. They prescribe more skilled immigration and greater investments in the education and skills of American-born workers.

All of this is very important, because many countries in the world are moving faster than the U.S. They are learning to innovate and will provide stiff competition in the future. Just when the U.S. should be opening its doors wider to skilled foreign workers and be focusing on nurturing startups, it is turning protectionist and xenophobic. We need to give Silicon Valley every advantage it can have rather than handicapping it with uninformed and misguided policies.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Source: Shortage of Engineers or a Glut: No Simple Answer

While a certain bacterium that can thrive in arsenic has dominated the science press this week, the big story in the world at large is on the ongoing WikiLeaks saga. The release of an enormous trove of confidential documents from the U.S. State Department has provoked plenty of fall-out: there’s governmental embarrassment and anger, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now wanted in Sweden on alleged sex crimes. But we’re most interested in how the never-ending story touches several science and tech stories, some of which have unraveled here on 80beats.

Get That DNA

One embarrassing revelation of the leaked diplomatic cables was that American diplomats were supposed to be part spy; they were asked to try to gather genetic material from foreign governmental officials. Once the cables leaked, the State Department couldn’t exactly deny that this happened, but it now says that these suggestions came from intelligence agencies. And relax—the requests were voluntary.

A senior department official said the requests for DNA, iris scans and other biometric data on foreign government and U.N. diplomats came from American “intelligence community managers.” The official said American diplomats were free to ignore the requests and that virtually all do. [Washington Post]

China Source of Google Hack

Early in 2010 we reported on the large cyber-attack against Google. Though rumors swirled, the Chinese government denied its involvement; the country and the search engine giant went through months of tension before arriving at a truce in the summer. According to WikiLeaks, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were directly connected to the hack.

China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. [The New York Times]

Copenhagen Pressure

Yesterday, while discussing the ongoing climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, we mentioned the disappointment that came out of last year’s event in Copenhagen, Denmark. But now we know that the United States was attempting to apply the pressure behind the scenes to get something done at Copenhagen: WikiLeaks documents show American diplomats pushing Saudi Arabia to accept the agreement.

In a memo summarizing the trip of Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman to Saudi Arabia in January, [U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia James] Smith wrote that Feltman urged the country to send a formal notice to the United Nations indicating its acceptance of the climate pact. “A/S Feltman noted the importance that the President places on climate change, and the Copenhagen Accord,” Smith wrote. “Given that Minister of Petroleum Al-Naimi was involved in crafting the final agreement, A/S Feltman noted the United States is counting on Saudi Arabia to associate itself with the accord by January 31.” [The New York Times]

The Saudi leaders, understandably, were hesitant to embrace an agreement, fearing it would harm the nation’s petroleum-dependent economy. And to be fair, this isn’t the only reason the Copenhagen meeting flamed out.

Nuclear Iran

Speaking of Saudi Arabia, its king was one of many Middle Eastern leaders to privately petitioned the U.S. to do something—anything—to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. According to the king, it was time to “cut off the head of the snake.†(For more on this and Iran’s ongoing nuclear drama, check out our update from earlier this week.)

WikiLeaks Hacked, Then Dropped

After kicking up a media storm, WikiLeaks’ ensuing Web traffic—plus a huge denial-of-service attack—disabled its Web page. WikiLeaks moved operations over to Amazon Web Services. Then, government types like Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut found out, and went nuts about it.

He said that no “responsible company” should host the material. He also said that he intends to ask Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and about what it will do in the future to make sure that its services are not used to distribute stolen or classified information. Since Amazon prides itself on the ease of using its cloud services, that could be tricky. Anyone with a credit card and an Internet connection can sign up for and start using Amazon Web Services. [PC World]

Nevertheless, Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot. That action has short-term consequences for WikiLeaks’ data, but has much longer-term consequences for the future of cloud computing. If all the info is in the cloud, who gets to decide what’s objectionable, illegal, or obscene?

Bearing in mind that cloud computing is a radically different prospect compared to simple Web hosting, will cloud computing need its own set of laws and regulations? Will the wise IT manager wait until various lawsuits have proved what is or isn’t acceptable when it comes to the cloud? [PC World]

After WikiLeaks left Amazon, its troubles continued. The American company providing its domain name, EveryDNS.net, cut off service when cyber attacks against WikiLeaks threatened the rest of its system. It’s now at a Swiss address, wikileaks.ch, but who knows how long that will last.

Source: WikiLeaks Science: DNA Collection, Climate Talks, & China’s Google Hack

wiredmikey writes “The Internet’s leading architects have considered the rapid growth and fragmentation of core routing tables one of the most significant threats to the long-term stability and scalability of the Internet. In April 2010, about 15% of the world’s Internet traffic was hijacked by a set of servers owned by China Telecom. n the technical world, this is typically called a prefix hijack and it happened due to a couple of wrong tweaks made at China Telecom. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown, but such routing accidents are all too common online. While BGP is the de-facto protocol for inter-domain routing on the Internet, actual routing occurs without checking whether the originator of the route is authorized to do so. The global routing system itself is made up of autonomous systems (AS) which are simply loosely interconnected routing domains. Each autonomous system decides, unilaterally, and even arbitrarily, to trust everything it hears from any other AS, to use that information without validation, and to further transmit that information to its other peers…”

Source: Internet Routing, Looming Disaster?

The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP16 kicked off yesterday in Cancun, Mexico. Delegates from 192 nations are attending through December 10 hoping to determine a collective, international approach to slowing and preparing their countries for an increase in global temperatures.

Conference goals— laid out at an opening address by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)— include the establishment of: commitments from countries to stop deforestation, a fund worth approximately $100 billion-a-year by 2013 to help poor people cope with climate change, and mechanisms that facilitate technology transfer between nations.

Last year’s COP 15 conference in Copenhagen failed in its primary mission to draw countries into a legally binding agreement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. After the event, however, seventy countries signed the Copenhagen Accord, a voluntary political agreement to address climate change. As part of the accord, the U.S. said it hoped to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 but made no firm promises.

Studies published today by the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A journal predict that world temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2F) as soon as 2060 if humanity’s contributions to climate change go unchecked.

The effects of warming that aggressive would include everything from drinking water shortages, to the loss of marine life (and important seafood supplies) as oceans become more acidic. The costs for nations to cope with such changes would be astronomical.

Climate change deniers continue to shrug off studies illustrating how people exacerbate climate change. Although the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century, skeptics still believe a rise in global temperatures is all natural, or that there’s little we can do about global warming save to accept it and adapt.

NASA rsearchers, however, have confirmed that the world has been warming up more quickly in the last thirty years than ever before, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years, thanks in measurable part to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human energy consumption and industries.

The executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) in Washington D.C., Carol Werner, says that even climate change deniers should hope for some COP 16 outcomes:

We would like to see a formal agreement between countries and companies to curb black carbon, or soot, produced from diesel, inefficient cookstoves and open burning heat and energy sources. And we would like to see continued, respectful negotiations led by the United States and China that will shape the way that countries agree to monitor, report and verify their energy consumption, production and emissions.

Transparency helps businesses and trade policy makers not just environmentalists, while soot in the air has preventable negative health impacts besides contributing to climate change, Werner notes.

If nations do not make concrete promises and legally binding agreements to address climate change, the private sector may outpace them quickly enough to make an impact. Hundreds of c-suite level executives are attending COP 16 and ancillary summits such as The World Climate Summit, Green Solutions, the World Business Council For Sustainable Development’s Building Bridges event, and the Climate Group’s Climate Leaders Summit.

EESI’s Werner says the COP has become a place where companies— perhaps even more than countries— now go to showcase their own clean technologies and environmental best practices, while lobbying for policies that will benefit, or at least not adversely effect their industries.

Source: Countries And Companies Talk Climate Change At COP 16 In Cancun

eldavojohn writes “Techdirt brings word that China-based MIC Gadget, the maker of a a four inch “SJ figurine,” is being sued by Apple to stop making the product. The fairly well detailed figurine went for $80 and the manufacturer offered updates as it quickly sold out of the first 300 and was subsequently sued before starting a second batch. The glasses, the black turtle neck, the salt and pepper beard, the blue jeans and the new balance sneakers — that is Steve Jobs’ look and you don’t even have to consider the smug look or the iPhone 4 in his hand while standing in a classic press event spotlight pose. So far, this notice for copyright infringement only exists for the “SJ figurine” (no mention of Apple or Jobs in the store listing) but it appears other companies are allowing MIC Gadget some leeway with trademarks or perhaps they just haven’t noticed yet. Could it be that Apple is just concerned that their followers are purchasing lead painted false idols?”

Source: Apple Sues Steve Jobs Figurine Maker Over Likeness