MediaFile

There won’t be birds, eggs and green pigs but Rovio is all set to release its next new franchise after a hugely successful run with “Angry Birds.” “Amazing Alex,” a physics-themed puzzle game, is coming to iOS and Android devices July 12.

The trailer released by Rovio shows a little blonde boy experimenting with a Rube Goldberg-like machine. The game will have 100 levels and players can build their own.

The Finnish mobile game maker’s new game is a revamped version of “Casey’s Contraptions,” an IP it acquired in May from developers Mystery Coconut and Snappy Touch. The original “Casey’s Contraptions” game was available on the App store.

With over one billion downloads since December 2009, Rovio created a strong brand with its “Angry Birds” franchise that has become a pop-culture phenomenon. We’ll soon find out if “Amazing Alex” will follow suit.

The business elite who make the annual pilgrimage to Allen & Co’s media and tech conference in Idaho every summer make time for leisurely pursuits between meetings. On Wednesday, we spotted Xerox CEO Ursula Burns returning from a tennis match carrying a racket , while Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus was headed for a bike ride with venture capitalist Bing Gordon and Scripps Networks’ CEO Ken Lowe was on his way to play golf.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, sported a backpack, which made him look like he was going day hiking, but really, he was just going for a coffee with Netscape founder-turned-VC Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura, pictured here.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, wasn’t seen doing any activities on Wednesday but after meeting Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, he did take a brisk walk alone from Sun Valley’s coffee shop to the main lodge, carrying an iPad.

Disney CEO Bob Iger arriving at Allen & Co conference, Sun Valley, Idaho

On the first day of the mogul fest, the parade of arrivals on the steps of the Sun Valley lodge did not disappoint. Disney CEO Bob Iger smiled for the cameras while later, Warren Buffett stayed in his car while someone checked in for him.

Some of the braver execs who approached the media were Discovery CEO David Zaslav who, for the second year in a row  talked up Oprah Winfrey’s struggling OWN network and said Oprah herself would be landing in Idaho soon to attend the event organized by investment bank Allen &  Co.

“OWN”s looking great really showing a lot of growth, growth in day time, growth in prime time. Oprah is coming. She’s going to be here,” said Zaslav to the journalist scrum. “The network is making a ton of progress.”

“Do you want to play Atari?”

Mark Pincus is sharing an inscription from his high school yearbook with a roomful of journalists at his company Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters.

The purpose of this event, called Zynga Unleashed, is to reveal the roadmap of one of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing companies – but right now Pincus is looking back.

“I spent my youth trying to get everyone around me to play games,” he continues. “But somewhere between high school in my first job, games stopped happening. I think that video games were too complicated for the people around me and I couldn’t rationalize sitting and playing alone.”

Innovative games on mobiles and tablets are the rage these days as console makers and traditional video game publishers scramble to keep gamers hooked. But a new startup is embracing the openness of mobile and Internet platforms and developing Ouya, a $99 gaming console for the television with software and hardware that is designed to be hacked.

The Android-based console is being built by a project founded by Julie Uhrman, a former executive at video game website IGN. Microsoft Xbox veteran Ed Fries is an advisor and Yves Behar of design firm Fuseproject will design the console. The device will include a controller with a touch pad and a free software development kit.

“The current console market is closed, it’s expensive to develop and it’s expensive to buy games. And we really wanted to turn that idea on its head by creating an open game console where it was inexpensive and affordable for gamers both on console side and game side.” Uhrman said.

Adele and all those Grammys (Photo: Reuters)

Adele, the soulful British songstress, has broken all kinds of records with her hugely successful sophomore album ’21′ since it was released in the US in Feb 2011. The album, which picked up 6 Grammys this year,  was by far and away the biggest selling album of last year with 5.8 million copies sold. And in 2012, at the halfway mark, despite endless plays in supermarkets, gyms and your dentist’s waiting room, it’s still burning up cash registers, moving another 3.7 million units through the end of June, or more than four times the next best-selling album (Lionel Richie’s Tuskegee in case you wondered).

Combined, “21” has sold 9.5 million copies in 15 months, putting it just 500,000 copies shy of the magical 10 million-mark. That’s unheard of in today’s music business. To put that figure in perspective, consider that the most recent album to cross the 10 million sales threshold was Usher’s “Confession,” which only broke that barrier this year. “Confessions” was released eight years ago, in 2004!

In fact, overall album sales for the first half of 2012 were down 3.2 percent, according to Nielsen Soundscan, as fans buy fewer and fewer albums — probably in favor of streaming and other forms of entertainment away from music.

Twitter created a bit of a stir late last week by cutting off LinkedIn. Ostensibly this was to project a consistent look and feel for tweets as the company adds features like threaded conversations, which LinkedIn didn’t convey. People who have accounts on both services will no longer have their tweets appear on their LinkedIn profile pages. It’s hard to know how much these updates will be missed on the business-minded network, which distinguishes itself by hosting a more focused conversation than “anything goes” Twitter. But the practical effect is that if you want to be heard in both places you’ll have to repeat yourself, unless you choose to do all your updates from LinkedIn, which still feeds one way to Twitter. More likely, you won’t because it’s too much of a bother.

Bad for LinkedIn. Much worse for Twitter.

Twitter’s ability to pipe in to other networks is a big reason for its popularity, and in doing so it has aggrandized other networks. All this has been, to the outside observer, symbiotic: People like to share their tweets everywhere they hang out; networks benefit from all that chatter and Twitter gets its hooks into everything.

In cutting off LinkedIn, Twitter doesn’t seem to be adopting the “first taste is free” business model it has previously practiced. That’s what creates addicts who can then be charged through the nose. Now Twitter seems to be calculating that isolationism is a shrewd business strategy, that it has less to lose by pulling back on sharing agreements than the networks it drops.

Say you’re planning a business trip. If you knew you could get a very good glass of wine at your hotel at the end of the day, would that influence which hotel you book?

The people at Sheraton are betting that it will.

Earlier this year, Sheraton began holding “Sheraton Social Hour” events at a number of hotels, and 130 more Sheraton branches around the globe will add the social hours this week. From 5 to 8 PM, usually Tuesday through Thursday, Sheraton residents will be able to sample a selection of high-quality wines. At the larger Sheratons, such as New York’s, eight wines will be on offer, four scoring a Wine Spectator rating of 85 or higher and four scoring 90 or higher.

The Social Hour is also a media branding opportunity, since Wine Spectator is a partner in the program. “It’s the first time we’ve done something like this,” said Gloria Frazee of Wine Spectator.

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

As the embodiment of all that is great and good about Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen is surprisingly unassuming. He is the earnest, clean-cut Midwestern boy made good, the state school grad who built a better mousetrap—the Web browser—and saw the world beat a path to his door. If being on the cover of Time magazine at age 24 ever went to his head, he didn’t show it. Andreessen simply did what great entrepreneurs are supposed to do: start new companies, again and again. His subsequent ventures never achieved the notoriety of his first, Netscape Communications, but they put to rest any suspicions that his early triumph was a fluke.

Over the years, Andreessen has earned great respect around Silicon Valley as a true visionary who understands where the technology world is going. He sits on the board of leading companies such as Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, and serves as a mentor to up-and-coming entrepreneurs, notably Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And he’s a nice guy to boot, unpretentious and always excited to engage intellectually on technology, finance, company creation, and just about any other topic. What Andreessen has not done, though, is the one thing required for admission to the top tier of the Silicon Valley pantheon: build and lead a great company that defines the technology landscape for generations. Think of Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, or Microsoft, and you will also conjure up the names that head any list of great technology industry leaders: Steve Jobs, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, and Bill Gates.

Andreessen’s response to such observations is that he has no desire to run a big company. “I’m not psychologically wired for it,” he says. “All the people and process aspects of it, I can force myself to do but I don’t really like. When I was in management I never really loved it. I found it very stressful.” But even though he might sometimes claim to like nothing better than curling upwith a good book, Andreessen still has big goals. One might even say he is out to show that the very particular type of  Silicon Valley role-player that he embodies—the entrepreneurial technologist whose strength is vision rather than management—can be just as influential as the Fortune 500 CEO.

Google took another bite at the hardware apple with the announcement Wednesday of the Nexus Seven tablet. The tablet, very wisely, is not looking to compete with Apple’s iPad – the indisputable leader — but rather the smaller, cheaper tablets from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Outside of the iPad monolith, the Kindle Fire and Nook Color have been the most competitive entrants (albeit modestly) since Apple created the market in 2010.

Google’s Nexus Seven is a safe bet and, especially given Microsoft’s (sort of) foray into tablets, not entirely unexpected from the search and advertising giant.

And that’s why Google is smart to go after a part of the market where Apple doesn’t compete — the iPad is a “full-sized” device of 9.5 inches that starts at $500. There’s no reason to believe Apple is interested in making a 7-inch model, a size the late Steve Jobs derided. But both Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet are 7-inch models that retail for $200, the same as Google’s Nexus Seven. By going after less-entrenched – but still huge! – companies, Google’s success doesn’t have to be measured against Apple’s. It can start small – literally – and see if it makes inroads against two companies still trying to make inroads themselves.