Angry Birds has just hit a milestone no other tablet/mobile game has hit before - 500 million downloads. That's right.

Since its debut in December 2009, in the nearly 3 years the game has been around, over 200,000 years of gameplay has been played by fans worldwide. To put it in a different perspective, as the video page points out, the game has more than 300 million minutes of daily playing time, 266 billion levels played, 400 billion birds launched, and over 44 billion Stars collected in the process. Compared to a classic like Super Mario? Super Mario doesn't stand a chance with only 160 million versions of the game bought globally. Maybe Nintendo could ...

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Kelantan prince Tengku Muhammad Fakhry Petra is suing the publisher of the Malay Mail and three others for allegedly implying that he was involved in a conspiracy plan to assassinate his brother.

Tengku Muhammad Fakhry filed the defamation suit on Friday at the High Court civil registry on the 42nd birthday of his brother, Kelantan Sultan Sultan Muhammad V.

Speaking to reporters later, Tengku Muhammad Fakhry said he just want ...

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The chief executive officer of Maxus Worldwide fields questions on Maxus playing second fiddle to Mindshare, the India-China growth story, and other trends.

Kelly Clark, the first worldwide CEO (chief executive officer) of Maxus, started his career with JWT New York, and has held several prominent positions including that as CEO of Mindshare UK and Mindshare Asia-Pacific. He has worked on several multinational brands such as Unilever, PepsiCo, Nike, IBM, Nestlé, Kelloggs, Ford Motors and HSBC. Maxus currently has ...

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DDB Worldwide Chairman Bob Scarpelli has announced he will retire at the end of 2011.  Bob has spent nearly 35 years at DDB, beginning his career as a copywriter at what was then Needham Harper & Steers in Chicago, which merged with DDB in 1986.

He became Chief Creative Officer of DDB Chicago in 1994, DDB US Chief Creative Officer in 2000, and Chairman of DDB Chicago in 2001. He was promoted to DDB Worldwide Chief Creative Officer in 2004 and added the title of Chairman in 2006. DDB CEO and President Chuck Brymer said ...

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Increasingly demanding marketers and technology changes are being blamed for a massive shift in the way Australian advertising agencies are staffed.

McCann Erickson is the latest agency to ditch the tiered system of account managers, creative teams and production staffers in favour of a workforce of all-rounders. The changes are aimed at better serving its clients, which include Holden, Nestle and Coca-Cola.

McCann's incoming agency chief executive, Ben Lilley, has slashed middle and senior management roles in recent weeks, blaming the death of the ...

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The Islamic finance industry in Malaysia has received yet another tonic from the Malaysian government in the country’s 2012 national budget and at the same time Kuala Lumpur is urging investors to leverage Malaysia’s strength in Islamic finance to promote Shariah-compliant venture capital, considered by many as a classical Islamic financial product which has direct relevance to the real economy and to boosting entrepreneurship.

The 2012 budget based on the theme “National Transformation Policy, Welfare for the Rakyat, Well Being of the Nation” was delivered in October 2011 by Malaysian Finance Minister Najib Abdul Razak, who is also the prime minister, to the Dewan Rakyat (National Assembly).

The budget in some respects was a typical pre-election budget with several handouts to key sectors including the ...

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The new model to be introduced by national carmaker Proton Holdings Bhd next year is not a replacement model for Proton Persona, managing director Datuk Seri Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir said today.

He said the new model, tentatively called "P3-21A" was a new car totally, with new design and has no carry over from Persona at all.

Designed to meet legislative requirements of all possible markets, the world-class vehicle would be powered by ...

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CREATIVE technologist Scott Prindle and renowned interactive game designer Kip Voytek will discuss the power and potential of new media in the context of branding at a two-day workshop next week.

The Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia (4As), which is organising the workshop, says in a statement that Prindle has been identified by AdWeek as one of the world’s top 10 technologists while Voytek, currently Rapp New York senior vice-president (communications and experience planning), earned his stripes as a games designer for licensed properties such as X-Men, Spider-Man and Scooby Doo.

The workshop, to be held in Petaling Jaya on Nov 11 and 12 is organised in association with ICOM.

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ADVERTISING spending on media in the country maintained a good growth momentum in the third quarter (Q3) even as consumer confidence began to wane. According to market research firm Nielsen Malaysia, it grew 11.3% year-on-year to RM2.8bil in that period.

The double-digit growth came at a time when consumers seemed to be more cautious in spending. The Nielsen Consumer Confidence Index registered a nine-point drop during the same quarter the biggest quarterly decline in three years. Less than a third of online consumers polled felt that the next 12 months was the right time to buy items they wanted.

Girish Menon, chief executive officer of media specialist GroupM Malaysia, says advertisers do not cut their spending based on consumer confidence numbers. “But they will be forced to review their spending if the revenue numbers are not meeting expectations,” he tells StarBizWeek.

“If there is a drop in confidence, usually the impact will be first seen in some leading indicators like real estate and automobile purchases. Usually, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and basic services like telcos' will not be seriously affected, as people will not sacrifice their daily basic' requirements.”

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Now that you know "pizza and beer" is too simple a solution to a problem that has plagued digital marketing since day one, how can marketers and the tech team play nicely -- even productively -- together, without snits, tantrums, attitude, and seething?

It's a problem that runs wide and deep. After all, technology (and by extension, technologists) is at the core of all digital operations. To work effectively, to create beautiful and effective sites, campaigns, apps, ad serving, email functionality, search optimization, you name it, the marketers and the dev team have to work together as colleagues, not as enemies. They must make an effort to ...

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