“If you buy a digital book you should be able to read it on anything you want to read it on.”

Learn more from the full Q&A embedded below:

Stalbow, who will continue to be based in Los Angeles, reports to Rovio CEO Mikael Hed as does Vesterbacka, who is Rovio’s Mighty Eagle and has been its ambassador to the U.S.

Much of Stalbow’s mission at Rovio will be similar to his role at Fox: developing partnerships but this time the target is the entertainment industry. Stalbow told me by phone from Helsinki that he’ll also be looking for video animation distribution channels to further Rovio’s plans to grow the franchise beyond games, keying off interest in video shorts on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) that suggests a potentially valuable audience. (His portfolio doesn’t directly include the Angry Birds movie in development but he expects to work with that team.) He’s also be looking for ways to piggyback on the current success of Angry Birds to develop new revenue streams.

Stalbow explained the move: “They’ve recently bought an animation studio in Finland, and they’ve got some aggressive plans around video. For me, this is just a really exciting opportunity to work with a super-fast growing property. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

While Angry Birds Rio — with more than 65 million downloads and a heavy News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) marketing campaign — got the most attention, Stalbow led other recent mobile efforts at Fox that stand out including the preload deal to put Avatar on Samsung and the development of app Glee Karaoke.

He insists that this is not a reflection on the direction of mobile at Fox, which has seen more than its share of ups and downs. A Fox spokesperson said: “We wish Andrew the best and look forward to continuing to work with him as part of our incredibly successful partnership with Rovio. We have no announcements to make regarding a replacement at this time, but remain very committed to extending Fox’s leading TV and film content to mobile platforms and will continue to do so in the future.”

The latest research from Nielsen, launched at paidContent Mobile yesterday by Nielsen mobile media VP Shivjen Ramji, shows that less than five percent of U.S. consumers surveyed by the company own tablets today, but those consumers who do have them certainly living up to their name. They watch more video and read books; are more accepting of advertising; and are more likely to make a purchase after viewing an ad, than users on smartphones or other devices. [Editor's Note: Nielsen provided an edited slide deck today that has replaced the full deck presented at paidContent Mobile.]

Read our full analysis here and see the slideshow below:

paidContent Mobile: Nielsen On Devices Today

Today is a two-horse race between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS when it comes to apps: the two are nearly level when it comes to metrics like user engagement, even if Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is still dominating the game in terms of embedded apps and users of them. Peter Farago, VP at Flurry, took the audience at paidContent Mobile through some of the key stats (our post analysing those stats is here)

paidContent Mobile 2011: Flurry On Trends In Apps

That doesn’t mean it’s not presenting original content, though: the company has created its own “Caption bomb” check-in service for TV viewers (a kind of home-grown GetGlue), while hugely popular apps like the tosh.0 app, riff on the same forces in social media that are the backbone of the comedy show of the same name.

Yesterday at paidContent Mobile, MTV’s Colleen Fahey Rush, took the audience through the MTV’s strategy and the research that it has done to back it up:

MTV: The Mobile Lives Of MTV’s Audiences

»  Here’s an interesting debate: “This Is Your Brain on Twitter,” a defense of the micro-blog from New York Times‘ Nick Bilton, was written in response to his boss Bill Keller’s The Twitter Trap, an expression of anguish over whether it was a good idea for the NYT editor’s 13-year-old to join Facebook. (NYT Bits Blog, NYT Magazine)

»  Comcast’s Cohen on former FCC Baker hiring: Nothing inappropriate (B&C)

»  The Celebrity 100: Social Media Over- and Under-Achievers (Forbes Mixed Media)

»  Condé Nast’s Glamour may be looking for new publisher (Adweek)

»  Why Is It Still So Hard to Get Some Media Outlets to Link? (Mathew Ingram/
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/18/why-is-it-still-so-hard-to-get-some-media-outlets-to-link/
GigaOm)

»  Bonnie Fuller 2.0: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Famous Magazine Editor! (NY Observer)

»  Patch editors told to post more stories to boost traffic (Street Fight, Romenesko)

»  How To Sell an iTunes Subscription: Charge a Few Bucks a Month, Or Nothing (MediaMemo)

»  Here Are Wall Street’s Real Estimates For LinkedIn (Business Insider)

Our second full-day mobile conference drew speakers and participants from across media, finance, tech and e-commerce. (If we handed out prizes for the most distance traveled, Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka edged out Bonnier’s Sara Ohrvall, who came in from Stockholm, by using a Helsinki-Berlin-London route.)

Thanks to Bob Bowman and Mike Kelly for insights on Major League Baseball Advanced Media and The Weather Channels Co. respectively, to Vesterbacka and Fox’s Andrew Stalbow for an informal case study in co-branded success and to all for stimulating discussions on today’s challenges and the opportunities ahead. We’ll post the full research presentations from Nielsen’s Shiven Ramji, MTVN’s Colleen Rush Fahey and Flurry’s Peter Farago soon, as well as event video.

Here are how the key insights played out, as shared by our reporting team of mobile editor Tom Krazit, David Kaplan, Laura Hazard Owen and Ingrid Lunden:

Nielsen: Tablets Are Money Spinners, But Less Than 5% Use Them Today and the Slideshow

MLBAM’s Bowman On Paid Vs. Ad Support – You Need Both

How Time Inc, Zite, & CrowdFusion Manage Platform & App Fatigue

Sunny Skies Over The Weather Channel’s Mobile Strategy

Clearing The Hurdles On Golden Road To Mobile Ads

Angry Birds Hits 200 Million Downloads With Help From Fox

Warning: We May Need To Move On From The Android vs. iOS Debate Soon and accompanying Slideshow

Best Global Strategy Means Local Partners And Low Prices

Music Discovery Success Depends On Scale, Not Being First

MTV’s Rush: Tosh.0 Represents The Twitter/TV Bridge and Slideshow

Mobile Video And The Coming Bandwidth Crisis

Location Services Are Trying To Find The Right Place

Media R&D Teams Need Freedom, Flexibility

USV’s Albert Wenger: Mobile Phone Equals Personal Identity

Despite the fact that Android is adding more devices daily than Apple — 400,000 versus 375,000 — Apple still has a larger installed base, and is still the winning platform when it comes to developers and what they are choosing, particularly if you combine iPhone, iPod and iPad development:

But Flurry’s data also seems to indicate that the tides are changing.

Significantly, Android is giving iOS a run for its money in terms of user engagement, which has long been held as one of most attractive reasons for why developers flock to the iOS platform.

Apple still has longer user engagement for some app categories like productivity, books, games and social networking. But Android is winning in other categories: entertainment, lifestyle, sports and finance. The two, in fact, nearly mirror each other in terms of engagement numbers, in the following table, which measures minutes of engagement on different categories of apps between iPhone and Android devices:

It’s not too surprising, then, that Flurry’s numbers reveal another trend that could prefigure a mobile conversation that doesn’t immediately fall into “Apple vs. Android” camps. It looks like more and more developers are aiming for multi-platform apps. The number of these might be smaller, but they are growing at nearly double the rate of Android-only apps, and nearly three times as fast as iOS-only apps.

Given the cost of developing apps for multiple platforms, could this be another opportunity for the mobile web? Watch this space.

Mobile Phone as Personal Identity: “The only thing more stable than most people’s phone number is their social security number,” said Wenger, identifying mobile phones as “the first true single-user device.” Laptops were designed around the idea that multiple people might be using them, but “your phone knows it’s you.” While USV’s thinking on this issue is early, Wenger is looking ahead to a time when somebody figures out “how to create identity in a distributed fashion around someone’s mobile experience.”

Why Union Square Ventures hasn’t invested in content companies “Is there nothing that can be done for them?” Sander asked. Wenger said USV has found, in most cases, that the economics of the content business aren’t conducive to venture investments and “won’t make for venture-type returns” (one exception he listed is the Huffington Post). That’s because he sees a nearly infinite supply of content — and a fixed demand, with total attention “only growing by the number of people coming online….You have to build a business around scarcity, and the scarcity is attention.”

As for aggregation startups like Zite and Flipboard, Wenger said USV has met with most of them — and still doesn’t think most of them have “real value and real engagement from end users, where it’s not just another reading venue. . . . Whoever cracks the nut on that will have something very interesting, and making mobile part of that experience will be critical.”

Voluntary Contribution Models: The New York Times’ paywall model, Wenger said, could have been enacted in a more interesting way, by letting readers who get the most “emotional value” from Times content pay more for it. It’s still early, but sites like Kickstarter (which USV has invested in) have demonstrated that business models that “let people self-identify how much value they are deriving from a project” can work. And these contribution models “appeal to more fundamentally positive emotions than guilt.”

Bringing Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley: NYC has now reached a critical mass startups, said Wenger, though attracting product managers and interaction designers is still a challenge — but the initial hurdle is simply “getting kids excited about working for startups, as opposed to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or Facebook or Wall Street.” USV backs Hack NY, which brings computer science interns to New York, and Wenger credited Google for making “a conscious choice to put engineering in New York.”

More focus on consumer behavior now: “I think there’s a huge difference between developing for the tablet and developing for the iPad,” Adamson said — simply because there’s so little information available about customers’ usage patterns of other brands of tablets right now. Instead, both Adamson and Ohrvall are currently monitoring the ways consumers use iPads; Adamson said it’s too early to do focus groups on other types of tablets.

Ohrvall pointed out that the ways consumers use iPads have changed: They now use them more at home and treat them as personal devices rather than sharing them with family members.

Giving R&D teams freedom: The R&D team needs some degree of privacy, says Ohrvall. “Keep them separate or at least make sure that nobody can interfere with them” for awhile before they have to go back and explain their ideas to the organization. “Most innovative ideas within big companies have happened in that way.” Panelists agreed that some of the best insights occur when team members have the freedom to explore product concepts informally.

Even if you can’t think ahead three years, said Ohrvall, “there’s enough change right now to keep everyone pretty busy.”