Julie Uhrman, the CEO/Founder of the smash Kickstarter-project-turned-gaming-console known as OUYA, was the third keynote speaker at SXSW Interactive 2013. Interviewed by The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky, the two dove in the intricacies and challenges of crowd funding and creating a new hardware startup.

For the uninformed, OUYA is a $99 gaming platform/console — based on Android OS — that is an alternative to major gaming platforms by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony.

As the conversation began, Julie and Joshua discussed how games and gaming are changing and that OUYA wants to make it possible for developers to bring many more kinds of games to the living room.

Following the announcement in February that Rovio would be introducing a cartoon series called “Angry Birds Toons” later this month, the company today revealed that the cartoons would actually be bundled inside Rovio’s Angry Birds mobile games.

Starting the weekend of March 16-17th, the new cartoons will appear in a dedicated channel in Rovio’s gaming lineup, as well as on select on-demand channel providers, smart TVs, other connected devices, and on select TV networks around the world. In the U.S., the company has partnered with Comcast, which will run the cartoon on all its video platforms, including Xfinity on Demand, online at Xfinity.com/tv, and in the Xfinity TV Player app on Samsung Smart TVs, with Roku and other platforms to follow.

Elsewhere in the world, Angry Birds toons will run on FOX8 in Australia, JEI TV in Korea, ANTV in Indonesia, Cartoon Network in India, MTV3 Juniori and MTV3 in Finland, the Children’s Channel in Israel, 1+1 networks in Ukraine, Gulli and Canal J in France, SUPER RTL in Germany, TV2 in Norway, Canal 13 in Chile and Gloob in Brazil. Activision, Paramount Pictures, BlackBerry, and Sony Pictures are partnering with Rovio at the launch of the Angry Birds Toons channel.

Gaming isn’t quite cyclical, thought it would seem that the big trend this winter is to remake old-school games from the 90′s for newer platforms. EA just released a brand new version of a personal childhood favorite, SimCity, and now it would appear that Age Of Empires II HD is coming to Steam’s platform.

Steam is an online game seller that acts quite a bit like an App Store for PC game titles. The company has evolved past the desktop to mobile apps, as well as offering Windows non-gaming apps, but remains focused on bringing the best of gaming to the cloud.

That said, Age Of Empires II HD will be available exclusively on Steam starting on April 9, with a price tag of $19.99. However, those who are itching with anticipation can pre-order and start playing on April 5, with a 10 percent discount. The game was originally developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft, but unfortunately Ensemble is no longer assembling.

Angry Birds may be one of the most popular apps of all time, but it’s also not exactly a spring chicken. And so, to boost its downloads, publisher Rovio is now making the original iOS versions for iPhone and iPad free and getting named the App of the Week on the App Store. According to Ouriel Ohayon of Appsfire, who was the first to have spotted this, this is the first time Rovio has taken down the paywall on these versions.

The moves come as some have observed that Rovio has of late fallen out of the top 80 highest grossing iPhone apps — for the first time since May 2010. This, too, may be a reason why Rovio has chosen the above image, touting it as the number-one app of all time, as the splash page for the app as it appears on the App Store.

Back in late 2009, Zynga quietly acquired a startup called MyMiniLife, a maker of virtual worlds that allowed players to outfit their characters and homes with virtual lamps, furniture and so on.

You couldn’t see it at the time, but the MyMiniLife acquisition was a company-making deal. It spawned FarmVille, the monster hit that put social gaming and Zynga on the map. At the same time, MyMiniLife was starting to run out of money. Ultimately, it turned out to be a win-win.

“While Zynga had some success with Mafia Wars and Poker, they weren’t necessarily in a dominant position,” said Amitt Mahajan, who was one of FarmVille’s co-creators. “They were not yet known for building these isometric worlds. Playfish was catching up, but the reusable game engine behind FarmVille gave them a leg up.”

Kristian Segerstrale, the EA executive who was in charge of leading the company into a games-as-a-service era, has just left the company. CEO John Riccitiello just announced it in an internal memo and said that EA COO Peter Moore is taking on his responsibilities.

Segerstrale came into EA through its $400 million acquisition of Playfish, a social games developer that he co-founded with a high school friend Sebastien de Halleux.

That deal was a watershed moment for the social gaming industry and an acknowledgment that virtual goods and currencies could represent a significant new revenue model for the industry. Disney quickly followed on with a $750 million deal to buy Facebook games developer Playdom. Although Zynga has had a rocky year following its debut as a public company, most of the largest and highest-grossing developers on iOS and Android employ a free-to-play model that includes purchases of virtual currencies and goods.