Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Microsoft Looks to Rovio’s Angry Birds to Give Bing a Boost

Microsoft is teaming up with those lovable Angry Birds to show Bing in action.

A series of videos on YouTube shows the villainous pigs using Microsoft’s search engine in their quest to locate and steal the birds’ eggs. Redmond also has a series of ads showing up in Angry Birds Seasons that will offer stumped game players some Bing-themed clues on how to get past the levels they are stuck on.

Of course, the cynical might note that Microsoft is using Google’s YouTube along with an app available only on rival Android and iPhone devices to gain attention for its search service.

But Mobilized is trying hard not to be cynical, so I’ll just note that it is good to see Redmond and Angry Birds maker Rovio getting along better.

The two companies have had a “complicated” past. Microsoft erroneously included the popular game on a list of Windows Phone 7 launch titles, when no such game was ready. Rovio has since said Angry Birds is coming to Windows Phone–as first reported by Mobilized.

Microsoft is certainly not alone in trying to fly along with the Birds and their soaring success. Google, for example, highlighted Angry Birds in a developer video last year, while Fox has a tie-in for its upcoming movie “Rio,” which will include a new Angry Birds Rio game due out this month.

In any case, the new Bing ads are certainly entertaining and worth a gander for Angry Birds fans.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald