Kiosked Showing Funding Ties Through Partnership With Rovio


    Rovio has launched a 48 hour competition to win signed and personalized prints of the new Angry Birds All Star Athletes posters featuring NBA All-Star player, Andrew Bynum and NHL All-Star player and Stanley Cup Champion, Anze Kopitar. The competition on the Angry Birds blog is only able to be won in the United States, making this news item uninteresting to the majority of our readers. But what is noteworthy is that the imagery on the blogs are tagged with Kiosked’s technology, allowing anyone to hover over the photos and be led to an Amazon store, where they can purchase these posters or other Angry Birds gear.

    This partnership shows the ties between the two Finnish companies. Last June, Kiosked raised €4.5 million in funding in a round led by Kaj Hed, the majority investor in Rovio who held a 69.7% stake in Rovio Entertainment a year ago.

    Cooperation is likely a win-win for both companies – Rovio is spitting out tons of Angry Bird related web content every day, and needs to drive visitors to purchase their toys, clothing, and sugar water. Merchandizing accounted for roughly 30% of Rovio’s revenues in 2011 and must have grown larger this year, considering Angry Birds Star Wars toys and every other noun they’ve put ‘Angry Birds’ in front of.

    Putting an online web shop into each image or video that finds its way to the net could then help Rovio massively drive traffic to their online stores – if Kiosked’s ubiquitous selling hypothesis is correct. And I imagine it is once they partner with enough publishers to get Kiosked images on the net.

    Kiosked’s ‘webshops everywhere’ strategy can be likened to the phrase, “if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick.” Right now they have plenty of mud, but not many mud throwers. With Rovio’s momentum, perhaps replacing mud with birds is not such a bad idea. They have the arm and enough birds to throw to potentially make ubiquitous selling work.