The Rise & Fall of Flappy Bird

FEB. 10, 2014 • The pride of Vietnam’s mobile app development scene, Nguyen Ha Dong, has removed his hugely popular Flappy Bird game from distribution. The free title was released last May and existed in relative obscurity until November when iOS downloads skyrocketed. Soon Flappy Bird was getting between 1 million and 2 million downloads a day on Apple’s App Store, and roared past 50 million. The Android version followed the iOS original on January .....

Samsung Shifts to Vietnam

DEC. 16, 2013 • Vietnam is becoming the smartphone manufacturing preference for Samsung Electronics Co. The South Korean company currently has 13 manufacturing facilities in China but is leading a wave of Korean firms that are shifting their production to Vietnam. According to the Vietnamese government, South Korean firms had cleared 3,400 investment projects in Vietnam as of August, the fourth highest total. Last March, Samsung started construction on a plant a.....

Mobile Gaming Market in China is Growing

NOV. 26, 2013 • The mobile gaming market in China is expected to reach 10.9 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) in 2013, of which 74% of that revenue is generated on smartphones. The estimates were provided by Baidu, Inc. senior vice president of strategy Sun Zude in an interview with China’s Internet Data Research Information Centre. Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google that was founded in 2000 and is the leading search service in the country. The company is.....

Tencent Adds Game Center to WeChat

NOV. 19, 2013 • Last August Tencent Holdings Limited added a game center to its WeChat Messenger service. The mobile app was launched in 2011 and is available on all major platforms and features mobile text and voice messaging. According to Tencent half of all Chinese smartphone owners use WeChat. Somewhat like the arrival of social games on Facebook, WeChat is growing in popularity within China as a social network for mobile gameplay. Games on the service requi.....

Mobile Ad Revenue Spikes

OCT. 10, 2013 • Advertising revenue on mobile devices in the United States grew to $3 billion during the first six months of 2013, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau – an 145% increase in mobile ad revenue over the $1.2 billion generated during the same period last year. Internet advertising revenue overall increased from $17 billion during the first half of 2012 to $20.1 billion for the same period this year. .....