Angry Birds Creator Rovio Has Snubbed Acquisition Offers, Sees IPO in 2 to 3 Years
PARIS (Reuters) - Mikael Hed is unrepentant about the 200 million minutes per day that people around the world fritter away playing Angry Birds, the iPhone game created by the company he heads. "It's great. Think of all the other stuff they could be doing that's so much more boring," said the CEO of Rovio Mobile, a Finnish startup almost unheard of before it unleashed the addictive game on an unsuspecting world in 2009. Hed spoke at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in Paris this week. Angry Birds, the most popular paid-for game in the Apple App Store's four-year history, has just passed 200 million downloads. The deceptively simple puzzle game in which players use a slingshot to fire birds at green pigs hiding in buildings has hooked a whole new audience, many of whom were never interested in video games before. "These new touchscreen portable devices have changed the way that people behave," said Hed (pictured). "Nowadays, people have to be
