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Confirmed: A million Apple TVs sold
All Things Digital has confirmed that rumor last week that Apple expected to sell a million of the new Apple TV units. One million of those little black boxes have wandered out the doors of Apple Stores everywhere, and have presumably been plugged into televisions to stream content from iTunes, Netflix, and any other videos wandering around out there. Looks like the lower price point of under US$100 combined with that new functionality and the AirPlay tricks have turned this "hobby" into an actual business. The question now will be exactly what that means. When the iPhone took off, Apple transformed itself somewhat into a mobile device company, and many people (including Apple leadership, probably) believe that's where the future, especially the financial one, still lies. Not to say that a million Apple TVs compares to iOS device sales yet, but Apple has a growing hit on its hands here, and it'll be interesting to see how and if the company steps out to support it, or if the TV just remains a relatively cheap and easy way to bring iTunes content to the living room.
Angry Birds nets 50 million downloads, still not enough for a three-star rating
And yet the pigs go marching on. Rovio's Angry Birds is just over a year old now, and in that time it's racked up 50 million in downloads, with 10 million of those from Android. An impressive number in its own right, and that puts it in a very elite group of gaming franchises that counts Bejeweled (50m) and Legend of Zelda (59m) among its members. (Membership includes fancy jackets and fezzes.) Our guess is that includes the iOS "Lite" version, which does downplay the milestone, but with new versions coming to PC, Mac, and the big three game consoles still on stores shelves -- as well as a sequel -- we doubt that asterisk will matter for long. Watch your ever-propagating back, Tetris. [Image Credit: Penney Design via Gizmodo]
New Kindle sells 'millions,' bests all 2009 Kindle sales
Amazon has left us with no choice: making sales conclusions based on a single additional letter. The company, notoriously vague on Kindle sales, has announced that "in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles." In other words, at least two million, and more for Kindle overall if you consider DX (still on sale) and the recent lightning deal blowout of the Kindle 2. Amazon's Department of Creative Statistics also noted that this elusive sales figure is greater than all its Kindle sales in 2009. How many is that, you ask? No idea -- we know "millions" were sold between 2007 and 2009, but parsing it out further would only unravel a mystery Encyclopedia Brown has been spending pages and pages to solve -- and still has a ways to go.
Angry Birds hits 10 million iPhone downloads, coming to gaming consoles
Angry Birds creator Rovio has announced that the game has fetched a whopping 36 million downloads so far, including ten million paid downloads on the iOS platform alone. Those are some pretty incredible numbers -- there's no question at all that Angry Birds is as legendary an app on the iPhone as they come. In the larger mobile picture, Rovio still has a way to go -- the company itself wants to do 100 million downloads on the Android platform (where the game is a free download, and allows for premium purchases within the app), and even then will have to go a bit further to match up with Tetris' 100 million paid downloads on all mobile platforms. But the game has definitely found its place in mobile app history already. Not only is there still that Christmas version planned for the coming holiday season, but Rovio has also announced that it will be releasing versions of the game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii sometime in 2011. Next year will bring another smartphone version, not a full sequel, but one where the pigs will apparently get a little more of the spotlight than the birds have given them so far. Talk about a bulldozer of an IP -- as big as this game has gotten, we haven't seen the last of it yet.
Optimus One is LG's fastest-selling phone ever: one million in 40 days
One million units sold in the realm of smartphones isn't quite as impressive of a feat as it once was -- especially if your phone is available on numerous carriers around the world. Still, there's something to be said for the pace at which it reaches the milestone, and for LG, the Optimus One managed Seven Digits in just 40 days after initial launch. Given that it's still rolling out globally -- Verizon's about to pick it up November 18th as the Vortex -- we doubt that number's letting up anytime soon. On a related note, given the success of this budget-minded Android 2.2 phone, something tells us LG will be focusing much heavier on that market segment.
Evernote hits 5 million users
Cloud memory service Evernote has reached 5 million users and continues to grow, according to an official statement on the company's blog. The service is gaining tens of thousands of new users per day and has recently seen its highest daily revenue from premium users, plus big jumps off of Apple platforms, on Windows, Android, and BlackBerry. The five millionth user also marks the fastest million users the company has earned, as you can see from the blocked-off sections in the chart above. That's pretty phenomenal growth; it's on an exponential scale, too, so there's probably more where that came from. Meanwhile, Evernote also promises updates are coming on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad side of things. Just a few weeks ago, the company raised a round of US$20 million from some venture funding. 2010 has been a good year for Evernote -- we'll have to see what happens in 2011. [via TechCrunch]
Deal documents show Ngmoco's 50 million downloads, $10m losses in 2009
Stuart Dredge of MobileEntertainment did some digging into the paperwork behind the Ngmoco sale, and came back with some interesting figures about the company's financials. Turns out that rumored $403 million purchase price is true -- kind of. The deal includes a $100 million bonus, if Ngmoco keeps its numbers up to certain standards. The actual payment now is $303 million, which consists of $146 million in common stocks, $27 million in DeNA investments, and $128 million cash. That cash payment, Dredge reports, is about a third of DeNA's total cash balance, so this is a significant deal for both companies. Meanwhile, the documents state that Ngmoco has seen 50 million downloads on the App Store as of last month, and has 12 million users on the Plus+ network across 119 games (as a comparison, OpenFeint announced 25 million users this year, although of course that service is spread across many more titles). And perhaps most interesting, Ngmoco is growing, but has spent a lot of money for that growth. In 2008, its revenues were only $484,000, and it lost $2.46 million. 2009 went better on the revenue side, jumping up to $3.16 million, but the company's losses came out to a whopping $10.89 million. Pretty amazing that financials like that led to a sale of $403 million -- both Ngmoco and DeNA must expect a lot from this partnership in the future.
Ping reaches a million, attacked by spam
Apple's new social network, Ping, has been around for about a week now, and all of the pundits have had their chance at weighing in on what Apple got wrong and right. And what's the result? Not bad, but not great -- more than a million people joined the network in just 48 hours. That's not terrible at all, but it's a far cry from the millions of people who actually use iTunes, presumably every day. Apple's success in this area, in other words, isn't going to come easy. The company has already had to put in a little more work. In addition to all of those members, the network was also hit by spam early on, with fake accounts for people like Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, plus links that led off to contact-stealing scripts and other trouble like that. Apple has already cracked down on most of the offenders, but clearly it was an issue early on that they didn't foresee. The interface has already been updated a bit -- Apple has added "back" and "forward" buttons to the service, to match the rest of the in-app browsers in iTunes. I still maintain that Ping won't reach its full potential until you can actually "like" songs and albums in your personal library, so hopefully a few more updates and tweaks are on the way.
iPod touch makes up 38% of iDevices shipped
Blogger asymco did a little calculating from last week's announcement numbers, and has hammered out a rough estimate of just how many of each iDevice are floating around the world today. According to Steve at last week's event, there are 120 million iDevices total in the world, and we already knew from SEC filings that 59.6 million of those were iPhones. The current number of iPads in the hands of customers around world is 3.2 million, which (with estimates for the past month on both of those devices added in), means that there are likely 45.2 million iPod touches around. That's 37.7% of iOS devices at large -- not as big as it used to be, as the iPad's arrival shook things up a bit, but still a very significant total. It's somewhat surprising to me that the touch is so popular, given that the iPhone and the iPad have gotten most of the press for iOS. But then again, it makes sense -- the iPod touch, as Jobs himself joked during the event, is like an iPhone "without the contract," and it's the cheapest of all the devices. While it's lacking a bit of functionality, iOS, the main selling point, is still there and running, so all of the super popular apps like Angry Birds and Doodle Jump are able to be bought and played. It makes a lot of sense that the iPod touch would be so popular -- maybe what's surprising is that Apple has waited until now to update it with the iPhone 4's big features as well.
Disney acquires social game firm Playdom
Stick with me on this one -- it's not strictly Apple-related, but I think it will have a big effect on the App Store in the future. Last week at Comic-Con, I saw the head of Disney's mobile gaming division, and I had to congratulate him; the company's Toy Story 3 app nabbed over 1.7 million downloads from the App Store. That's huge for them; as he'd originally told me at GDC earlier this year, the Toy Story app was part of a test to see if "selling" an app for free would increase its audience (which could then be sold on in-app purchases and add-on content). That test was apparently passed with flying colors. Then, of course, Disney purchased Tapulous a while back, and now they've picked up Playdom, an online social game developer, for a whopping $563 million. Connect the dots there, and it's pretty apparent that Disney has big plans for both gaming and the App Store. Social networking games are the hottest thing around in terms of in-app purchases, so I would not be at all surprised to see Disney combine its brands and marketing experience with Playdom's online gaming savvy and Tapulous' iPhone development talent in order to go big on some major free-to-play titles for the iPad and iPhone. And let's not forget that a certain black-turtlenecked CEO happens to be on Disney's board of directors, too. I doubt that he's solely masterminding any of these purchases, but Jobs would definitely have the access and intelligence to see the power of free downloads on the App Store, and how those apps can use programs like iAds and in-app purchases to make a big splash. I expect we'll see some really big initiatives by Disney thanks to these Tapulous and Playdom purchases -- it's only a matter of time.
Stieg Larsson becomes the first author to sell a million Kindle e-books
Given the lovingly detailed descriptions of early-2000s computers and technology the late Stieg Larsson peppered into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, we're pretty sure he'd love to know that he's just become the first author to sell over a million Amazon Kindle e-books -- and we can only imagine what kind of trouble Larsson's Lisbeth Salander would have gotten into with a Droid X or an iPad. Considering the dominance of Amazon's platform and company's recent announcement that Kindle titles are now outselling hardcovers we'd guess that also makes him the first author to sell a million e-books period, which is fairly notable -- and with the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, we'd guess these numbers aren't going to slow down any time soon. Too bad we don't know the breakdown of where these million books went -- we'd love to know if Kindle devices are as popular as the Kindle apps on various other platforms.
More than 25% of iTunes users want the cloud
A new NPD Group survey says that if Apple ever does release its rumored cloud music service for iTunes, there will definitely be an audience. Over 25% of iTunes users polled say that they would be interested a free iTunes cloud service. And about half of those would be interested in actually paying $10 a month for services like music sharing and streaming their personal libraries through iTunes. Out of an estimated 50 million users in the US, NPD says that 15 million or so would be interested in a free service, and around 7 or 8 million wouldn't mind paying $10 a month to Apple. Keep in mind that this is a survey done in May of this year, Apple hasn't even worked their marketing magic on something like this yet, and it doesn't even exist. If a service like that was actually offered, it's not hard to think that word of mouth and/or a well-marketed feature set would drive that audience even higher. But NPD concludes, not too surprisingly, that there is an audience ready for any iTunes cloud plans that Apple wants to reveal. How 'bout it there, Steve?
OpenFeint hits 25 million users, announces 2.5 beta release
OpenFeint has announced that they've reached 25 million users on their social networking service for apps on the App Store. That's an astounding number, and not only does it represent an amazing achievement by the folks at Aurora Feint, but it hints at just how big Apple's official Game Center service will be (whenever they get around to, you know, implementing it). Just for comparison, location networking service Foursquare is still racing to try and hit 3 million users, so in just over a year's time, OpenFeint has picked up many times that number. Those users represent almost a third of the iDevice market and over 85 million devices across 1900 different developers. The service has also announced that they're bringing out the beta of version 2.5 for developers to implement in their iPhone apps and games. The new version includes a revamped API, which will allow for both turn-based and "action replay" multiplayer (a functionality that Game Center won't yet offer, as far as we know); it's also Game Center compatible, so developers who implement OpenFeint in their games will be able to easily transition to Apple's official service when it comes out (that's what we heard from Jason Citron a little while back, too). OpenFeint 2.5 is in beta right now and will arrive on iPhones later this summer.
Humble Indie Bundle moving towards $1 million, still being pirated
The Humble Indie Bundle that we posted about the other day is doing quite well -- they've raised almost US$800,000 by selling five indie games (playable on Mac, Linux, and Windows) for pay-what-you-will. In fact, they've done so well that they've added another game into the mix -- you'll also get Samorost 2 if you pick up the bundle. And a little birdie pointed out to us that if you pause their trailer video at about 1:16, they'll be adding another bonus to the mix if they reach a full million dollars raised. [Spoiler: They say they'll actually release the source code of Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture.] Is there any bad news about this giveaway? Well yes: people are still pirating it. The developers claim that 25% of the bundle downloads are "pirated" -- people who didn't pay anything at all for it. They didn't secure the link, authenticate the downloads, or protect the game with DRM (and they didn't ask users to pay any more than one cent for it), and people are still just rolling up and downloading the games for free. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve any arguments -- those for DRM would say that real security would prevent that, and those against DRM would claim that it won't. At any rate, those are five great indie games that are worth your money -- if you downloaded them for free, put a few bucks in the pot.
Wade McGilberry luckiest (and richest) MLB 2K10 player ever
When 24-year-old Wade McGilberry of Semmes, Alabama was less than 24 years old, his friends and loved ones probably gave him a hard time about his penchant for virtual baseball. "Wade," they would say, "why don't you go play real baseball? Heck, with a name like 'Wade McGilberry,' you're already well on your way to the MLB Hall of Fame." Little do they know, Wade wasn't just wasting his time. He was training. On the very first day of the MLB 2K10 Perfect Game Competition, McGilberry managed to take down 27 in-game hitters without letting one of them place their cleated toe upon first base. For this accomplishment, McGilberry won the competition and its $1,000,000 prize, reaffirming his decision to skip all of his high school formal dances to put a few more hours into Ken Griffey, Jr.'s Slugfest. A wise decision indeed, sir.
Apple sells one millionth iPad
Apple announced today that on Friday the one millionth iPad was sold. The figure does not break out Wi-Fi vs. 3G iPads, yet the number is still staggering considering it only took 28 days. For the original iPhone, the million unit milestone was not hit until 74 days after release. Apple also announced that iPad users had purchased 12 million apps and 1.5 million eBooks from its fledgling store. Friday was the release of the iPad 3G in the US; it's likely that this was the source of the final push that got Apple to the millionth unit. Those first-year sales projections from analysts are beginning to look a little conservative. Although Apple has not provided any details on which iPad models make up that million-unit total, a very conservative assumption of a $550 average selling price (weighting heavily towards the cheapest 16GB Wi-Fi model) means the iPad has generated well over half a billion dollars in revenue already. [h/t The Wall Street Journal]
Content company raises $2 million to develop for iPad
Thinking Screen Media is a content platform developer, putting together a content delivery system designed to bring information to "millions of connected screens worldwide." Now, it seems that many of those screens might be iPads. TechCrunch reports that they've raised a whopping $2 million just to switch their development aim to the iPad. They currently have an iPad app up and running in the store, and they've got a number of other investment sources already. However, according to the report, this money is specifically for the iPad. Of course, in the larger scheme of things, this is small potatoes. A content channel is pretty useless unless it's delivering content that people actually want, and $2 million is loose change for some of the larger content companies. This is a significant investment in terms of its scope, though. Even a smaller company like this is heavily investing in the iPad and Apple's platform as a major part of their business.
Heavy Rain sells one million worldwide
No one was exactly sure if Sony's gamble with Heavy Rain would pay off. With no aliens, no stealth kills, and no epic boss battles, the game strayed so far from the mainstream norm that some wondered if it could possibly succeed. Considering the incredible technical effort Heavy Rain represented, it's clear that this was also an expensive experiment for both Sony and Quantic Dream to take on. After seven weeks of release, Heavy Rain has managed to sell through a million units worldwide, according to an announcement on the PlayStation.Blog. No specifics are offered, but we'll deduce that Europe represents the largest piece of the sales pie; Heavy Rain was completely sold out in that part of the world. It's unclear if a million units sold is enough for Quantic Dream and Sony to break even on Heavy Rain's lengthy development. Undoubtedly, the game will continue selling through the year, which has us hopeful that the industry will be unafraid to invest in another game like it in the future.
Star Trek Online reaches one million accounts
If it's not too dated, you can feel free to do the Dr. Evil voice as you read the announcement in your head. Star Trek Online has reached one million registered accounts, an impressive milestone for any game. The announcement follows in the vein of Cryptic's announcement that players had created over one million characters in Champions Online, which was also an impressive milestone... well, until you started to do the math and ask why they were counting the number of characters created rather than players. There are similar questions to be asked about the latest Star Trek Online announcement, if you're the suspicious type. In short, we don't know the criteria that is being used to get the figure being thrown around. One million accounts could refer to open beta and head start accounts, or it could refer to everyone registered on the forums, even if they've long since stopped posting. It's an odd metric to use. Still, it's a sign of how strong the IP of Star Trek still is after all these years, and as one of the few major launches planned for the year it's bound to attract quite a bit of attention. Congratulations to Cryptic, and here's hoping that those million accounts stick with the game after a few months. Enter the Star Trek universe with Cryptic Studios' Star Trek Online. From hands on reviews of the early levels and space combat, through noob questions and developer interviews, we've got everything you need to know about the game trekkies are dying for. Check out Massively's Star Trek Online page for the latest!
Millions of app store downloads everywhere
Last year was a big one for mobile downloads, according to a number of sources. A Quantcast mobile trends report says that mobile web activity grew 110% in the US throughout 2009, and of course Apple was responsible for most of that, with a 65% market share, 41% from the iPhone and the rest from the iPod touch. Apple's market share slightly dropped in 2009 (due to increasing competition), but it's still head and shoulders above everyone else. App downloads are huge as well. Not only did Apple announce that three billion downloads, but Gameloft says they've reached 10 million paid downloads of apps by themselves, and developer Lima Sky (makers of Doodle Jump, one of our favorite games of 2009), says downloads skyrocketed after Christmas, with over 500,000 downloads of their app in December of 2009 alone. The App Store is doing big business lately -- it's probably a safe bet to say that 2009 kicked off a golden age of mobile web activity. And all indications are that 2010 will be even more interesting.
