Shanghaiist

Is Angry Birds, the popular iPhone app, based on an ancient Chinese Shang dynasty wine container? A Chinese microblogger thinks there is an uncanny similarity and tweeted it out for others to see.

BEIJING – An enterprising Chinese blogger this week posted the discovery that Angry Birds, the wildly popular mobile phone app, was in fact descended from a Chinese species 2,000 years ago.

(Thanks again to Shanghaiist for spotting the post.)

For those unfamiliar with ancient Chinese history, that’s a Shang Dynasty (16th-11th century B.C.) wine vessel.

The "discovery" coincided nicely with news that China now numbers 889 million cell phone users – many of whom also do most of their social networking, web surfing, and gaming on mobile devices.

That's the kind of statistic to make cell phone app developers sit up and take note.

Oh, wait.  They have.

Rovio Mobile, the Finnish company that developed the Angry Birds game, said Thursday that it's going to launch a Chinese version later this year.

The game has been downloaded 140 million times worldwide, but Rovio reckons it can get almost as many downloads (100 million) of Angry Birds in China this year alone, according to a marketing official attending the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing this week.  (The current version has been downloaded 10 million times in China already.)

And that's not all.

Rovio said it wants to build Angry Birds into a major entertainment franchise, encompassing merchandising, comics, and a tv show.

Basically endure longer than its Shang Dynasty ancestor.