LONDON (Reuters) – Angry Birds maker Rovio is teaming up with a major U.S. retail chain to put its branded toys, books and T-shirts in dedicated areas of thousands of stores nationwide, the Finnish company’s marketing chief told Reuters on Tuesday.

The maker of the world’s most-downloaded game plans the launch to coincide with the debut later this week of Angry Birds Space, the latest in the series of puzzle games currently being played for a total of 300 million minutes per day.

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) – Mark Thompson is to step down
as the director general of the BBC after guiding the
world-renowned state broadcaster from one of its lowest points
to again providing leading entertainment and news through a time
of enormous technological upheaval.

Thompson, who will step down after the London Olympics and
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations this summer, said on Monday
he had decided to leave after almost eight years in the job.

LONDON (Reuters) – A growing dissatisfaction among office workers with the clunky computers their employers force them to use, in contrast to the sleek Apple devices many have at home, could yet benefit incumbent suppliers like Dell, a top Dell executive said.

As Apple’s third-generation iPad went on sale on Friday, accompanied by the now traditional scenes of fans queuing round the block , Dell’s chief commercial officer Steve Felice said the tablet market was still wide open.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s press has a good chance of avoiding new legislation to curb its freedom despite a phone-hacking scandal that shocked politicians and the public, David Hunt, who has a key role in reforming press regulation, said on Thursday.

Hunt told Reuters he was confident that compliance with a code of ethics could be enforced by commercial contracts voluntarily signed by Britain’s newspaper and magazine owners, as could the power to impose fines for breaking the code.

LONDON (Reuters) – Trinity Mirror Plc (TNI.L: Quote, Profile, Research) chief Sly Bailey has had her pay frozen this year, she said on Thursday, after the newspaper publisher posted a sharp drop in yearly earnings and forecast a drop in sales in the first quarter of the current year.

Bailey had been criticised by both shareholders and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) for taking a pay package of 1.7 million pounds in 2010 as chief executive of the publisher of the Daily Mirror, the People and a host of regional titles.

LONDON (Reuters) – James Murdoch made a last ditch appeal to a parliamentary committee investigating phone-hacking at his company, ahead of a report expected from the committee in coming weeks that could determine whether he has a future in Britain.

The committee, which hauled James and his father Rupert before it for a three-hour grilling in July, is expected to criticize the younger Murdoch for failing to uncover the scale of the problem, threatening his role as chairman of pay-TV group BSkyB.

LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. start-up Roku is gearing up for a major funding round as it seeks to export to other countries the success of its mini-set-top boxes that stream Internet video to televisions, founder and Chief Executive Anthony Wood told Reuters on Wednesday.

Roku, which competes with Apple TV, has already sold 2.5 million of its palm-sized boxes in the United States, persuading some to ditch cable subscriptions in favor of a $60 box as more and more quality content is available online.

LONDON (Reuters) – Two senior journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News International have apparently attempted suicide as pressure mounts at the scandal-hit publisher of the now-defunct News of the World.

Three sources close to the company told Reuters on Tuesday the two journalists at the Sun daily appeared to have tried to take their own lives. Investigations sparked by a phone-hacking scandal continue to expose dubious practices by present and past employees.

LONDON, March 6 (Reuters) – British Web users face
having their Internet connections throttled or suspended if they
are found to have downloaded music or movies illegally after
Internet service providers (ISPs) BT and TalkTalk
lost a court appeal on Tuesday.

The ruling by Britain’s Court of Appeal means that ISPs will
have to send warning letters to customers suspected by film
studios or record labels of having illegally accessed material
to which they own the rights.

BARCELONA (Reuters) – For Facebook it must look like a no-brainer — exploit its huge consumer loyalty and half a billion mobile phone users as a way of opening up the mobile market to blue chip advertisers.

Trouble is, there are reasons for the limited success so far of mobile advertising and none of them have completely gone away. Even if Facebook succeeds, others eyeing this potentially massive market may still struggle to cash in.