This past week-end in Austin, Texas at SXSW an interesting, casual meet-up took place at the Belmont as a gathering of tech pros, bloggers and others had an up-close opportunity to listen to a Q&A with Tero Ojanpera, executive VP at Nokia and Peter Vesterbacka of Mighty Birds acclaim.

The 2 fielded questions and shared opinions on mobile gaming. The discussion seemed very appropriate and timely, particularly as much of the "hype" of technology at SXSW this year surround social location and in particular, the social checkin. Interesting to note, that while social checkin may be all "the rage" at the moment, the numbers of checkins regarding users and usage pale int comparisson to the impressive and staggering number of mobile gamers in the World, in particular, those that are flinging Angry Birds!

Peter shared some interesting numbers regarding Angry Birds and they are impressive to say the least! With over 100 million downloads and a user base that is more than 40 million strong, Angry Bird users are quite sticky, spending more than 200 million minutes per day online playing the game! Birds will continue to evolve, with continued support on Symbian, penetration into the console gaming space (although Peter is not a fan of that space, or so it would seem judging from his lack of enthusiasm for the space) and we can also expect enhanced "social gaming" from the "platform" to come in the near future as well as Angry Birds on your Nokia / Windows Phone 7 device when one comes to market. Users can be excited in knowing that the ability to build custom levels will come in the "socially enhanced" update this year.

Angry Birds has scored Big Time in the 99 cent application market space, truly a winning price point - even within the Q&A session it seemed that over half in attendance were admitted Bird gamers and most of them using the paid for "pro" version - no doubt many buying enhanced features as well. Angry Birds is a true technology power house and with some $42 million in venture capital recently raised Vesterbacka doesn't hold back in using figures in the billions when suggestion future numbers - I think I believe him!  

Tero Ojanpera (left), executive VP at Nokia and Peter Vesterbacka (middle) of Mighty Birds 

Author: @gletham