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#angrybirds Here's an entirely made-up figure for you: Every five seconds, 700 people launch an Angry Bird at a hog-lined structure. More »

Out of the variety of numbers included in this morning's Rovio 2011 financial report, one line stuck out to us as particularly insane: the employee count. Rovio wasn't a very large company before Angry Birds exploded in late 2009, having only produced a couple dozen under-the-radar mobile titles. But by 2011, the need for expansion was clearly there.

Resultantly, employee numbers similarly exploded - from just 28 employees in early 2011 to a whopping 224 at year's end. In case that isn't a dramatic enough statement unto itself, Valve Software employs 293 people, and Valve has quite a few more things to manage. Our biggest fear - a fear that many Rovio employees likely echo - is that the massive upscaling of jobs will result in a massive downscaling should the Angry Birds franchise lose its foothold as king of mobile distractions. Not exactly a new business model in the game industry, unfortunately.

For now at least, Rovio's employing a ton of Finnish devs to craft its bird flingers and related products. Someone's gotta think of these clever marketing vices, you know!

The Angry Birds are quite a catch, it seems. Franchise creator Rovio announced this morning that earnings in 2011 topped $100 million, which it owes solely to sales of the Angry Birds franchise. "The heavy investments made in 2011 to all business areas will be seen in future products," Rovio CEO Mikael Hed noted in the press release. "To ensure continuous success we need to be creative and stay focused on entertaining our millions of fans by continuously developing new and innovative products and services."

Hed doesn't necessarily mean branching out from his company's most popular franchise, of course. Especially not after such a big year for merchandising surrounding the Angry Birds - Rovio's "consumer products" unit took in "about 30 percent" of 2011's total earnings (approximately $31.9 million). That's a lot of Angry Birds gummy snacks!

Rovio's $106.3 million in revenue (not profit, mind you, but revenue) is owed primarily to growth in the Finnish company's Angry Birds games catalog, which expanded by just one game in 2011: a movie tie-in named "Angry Birds Rio." The games have been downloaded approximately 648 million times across all platforms as of Dec. 31, 2011, and have a monthly user base of approximately 200 million.

[Image credit: Flickr user 'Nearsoft']

#angrybirds Angry Birds remains big business. The original, now-classic game continues to expand, and the sequel, Angry Birds Space, just hit the 50-million download milestone in 35 days. You can get Angry Birds fruit snacks, costumes, playground equipment, and any other kind of irritated avian-themed merchandise you can possibly think of. More »

#angrybirds A few years ago, in 2006, Erin Catto created some code called Box 2D. It was a simple, free physics system the "math-obsessed PhD gamer" came up with in his spare time and gave away for free. More »

Rovio's focused assault on the casual gaming public continues to pay off big time, as Angry Birds Space surpasses 50 million downloads in 35 days, breaking all previous records and making developers of big-budget console titles feel reevaluate their careers. More »

Antti Stén and Tuomas Erikoinen have broken free of Angry Birds developer Rovio to start their own studio, Boomlagoon. Stén, Rovio's former lead server architect, and Erikoinen, former lead artist, want to make "convivial and intriguing games," according to Boomlagoon's motto. We bet they were tempted to throw "non-fowl-related" in there, too, but figured it was unnecessary.

Stén is chief executive officer while Erikoinen is chief creative officer; they refer to themselves as "Mr. Plan" and "Mr. Action," respectively. They plan to make games for web and mobile platforms, starting with HTML 5 titles.

"If we play our cards right, we just might end up with the next Angry Birds," Stén told Venture Beat.

A fresh infusion of frustration-focused fowl flinging has made its way into the iOS and Android versions of Rovio's immensely popular game, Angry Birds Space. The free "Fry Me To The Moon" pack adds 10 new icy planets and, if you're an iOS user, 20 complimentary space eagles.

iOS users also receive one additional free space eagle every day for an unspecified amount of days, meaning that while both iOS and Android users were equally important in making Angry Birds Space "the most popular Angry Birds game yet," iOS users are more equal.

A fresh infusion of frustration-focused fowl flinging has made its way into the iOS and Android versions of Rovio's immensely popular game, Angry Birds Space. The free "Fry Me To The Moon" pack adds 10 new icy planets and, if you're an iOS user, 20 complimentary space eagles.

iOS users also receive one additional free space eagle every day for an unspecified amount of days, meaning that while both iOS and Android users were equally important in making Angry Birds Space "the most popular Angry Birds game yet," iOS users are more equal.

A free new update is available today called "Fry Me to the Moon." Ten free new levels! Lots of space eagles! Android and iOS! [Rovio] More »

#privacy USA Today reported yesterday that the Facebook version of Angry Birds had a flunking score of 65 in terms of respecting users' privacy, according to a group called PrivacyChoice. More »

#angrybirds These two capuchin monkeys, Sasha and Thor, are mascots for Houston's Gallery Furniture. Here, some brave iPad owner handed them Angry Birds Space to play. Not only did they not completely break the device, Thor even three-starred a level. See for yourself in the video above. More »

Shigeru Miyamoto loves Angry Birds, telling Edge that the 2009 mobile slingshot game is his favorite of the past year - which may come as a shock to those who consider smartphone games a dangerous threat to systems like Nintendo's 3DS.

"What I like about Angry Birds is that it has a traditional videogame [feel] to it, but also a very creative side," Miyamoto said. "And you can really feel that they're having fun developing the game. That's what I like about it." Miyamoto admitted that he doesn't typically talk in interviews about non-Nintendo games he's enjoying.

Rather than express deep fear about the fact that phone games can be enjoyable, Miyamoto said he pays little attention to the medium. "I check up on them sometimes, but I don't have a lot of time," he said, before comparing the medium to his company's work. "I think we also have a history of having certain fun ideas and making a game out of it, and there's lots of other people also doing this [now]. This kind of environment inspires us to try even harder, and create even more unexpected new things."

You might not like Angry Birds. You may think it's crap—or that it's not a real game. But you are not Shigeru Miyamoto. He thinks Angry Birds is fantastic. More »

#watchthis In a weird, oxymoron twist of a story, two loving Angry Birds characters come together to celebrate Easter. More »

#politics If there's one good thing that has come from Angry Birds, it's this: Korean politician Jeong Hong created an Angry Birds themed re-election video called "Hong-ry Birds". Geddit? Hong-ry? Hilarious! More »

#angrybirds Swedish artist Giorgio Cantù has imagined what it would like if Nintendo had come up with the idea for Angry Birds and, instead of releasing it on a phone in the 21st century, had released it on a Game & Watch device in the 1980s. More »

#angrybirds Ever wonder what happens to the pigs in Angry Birds after they're toppled? In the game, they go "poof" into a cloud of smoke. In real life, they end up on dinner tables. More »

#drawsomething Let's pretend, just for a moment, that mobile juggernaut Angry Birds and social darling Draw Something weren't products of the 21st century, but the 20th. That they weren't delivered wirelessly, but on floppy disks. More »

#watchthis Angry Birds is everywhere. The A-Team used to be everywhere. Put them together, and you've got 30 years of pop culture condensed into one minute of flash animation. More »

As if there wasn't already enough Angry Birds in your life, Rovio has announced a weekly cartoon series will debut later this year. The news comes from a media conference in Cannes, France, as reported by the BBC, where Rovio animation head Nick Dorra revealed the 52 episode series will be coming to "all possible platforms."

Dorra noted that the cartoon would provide fans with a new way to take part and would also draw newcomers to the franchise. Furthermore, Dorra stated that "Angry Birds is not just about the gameplay," elaborating that the franchise will evolve to be "less and less about the slingshot and more about the characters and their adventures and all different kinds of games in different forms." That's good news, because we've always felt that the blue bird's motivation is unclear.

Rovio has confirmed that Angry Birds will be animated this fall, with 52 three-minute episodes made available for download on "all devices possible". [Guardian UK] More »

#blip Here's a look at one of the new free levels coming to Angry Birds Space. It was Tweeted by the game's creators. We should have seen this coming, given their obvious love for Seattle's Space Needle. More »

#angrybirds It's almost an inherent quality to want to 100%, perfect, full-star, whatever you want to call it, for each game. Especially when the tasks are fairly simple ones, like those many mobile games employ, it's hard to fend off that desire to achieve perfect completion. More »

#angrybirds When performing artist Lady Gaga fell off her flaming piano during a concert last month in Houston, TX , the media were far too willing to accept that it was a mere slip. Here's what really happened. More »

Rovio's bird-flinging physics game hit the 10 million mark this weekend, the developer said on the official Angry Birds Twitter account this morning. Angry Birds Space came out on March 22. [Angry Birds] More »

#minecraft It hasn't been downloaded nearly as much, but the $80 million in revenues that Minecraft has delivered to Mojang compares well to the $100 million its Scandinavian neighbors Rovio have pulled in from Angry Birds. And that figure looks to get larger once the game arrives on Xbox Live Arcade in May. More »

We used to think the Seattle Space Needle was erected to keep aliens from landing their ships, lest they get the poking of a lifetime. Turns out it was always meant to fling angry birds into outer space.

#angrybirds Windows Phone just can't catch a break when it comes to video games, can it? Consider the fact that the biggest mobile games franchise in the world isn't showing Microsoft's mobile software any love. Angry Birds Space debuted on a slew of platforms yesterday, but WP7 wasn't one of them and Bloomberg News thinks that's a big problem. More »