Over the last few weeks I've been speaking at BlackBerry's BB10 Jam World Tour events across Europe, including London, Paris, Moscow and Berlin. These were 1 day events bringing the best content from the BlackBerry World show in Orlando directly to developers around the world, plus giving a deeper look into technical aspects and showing off new BB10 OS features, including some very cool new UI ideas.

BlackBerry very kindly brought a team of us from Marmalade along to show off the best-in-class games we have brought to PlayBook - and soon to BB10 - and also to give some deeper tech info on how to use our tools. My demo of Hot Gen's Tofu was a big crowd pleaser (cute tofu warrior searches for fortune cookies in medieval Japan!), and I used a Marmalade build that was originally created for Playbook but ran perfectly on the new DevAlpha devices with zero changes. To show off the tools and ease of porting with Marmalade, I also did a live demo of pulling a cocos2d game from the web, building and then deploying directly to a BB10 DevAlpha device live on stage.

What really struck me as cool was that the BlackBerry team clearly understand that a lot of developers want to work cross-platform and just want to get their content onto as many devices as they can and as easily as possible. They are very actively encouraging this by providing a very broad and non-restrictive toolkit (C++, JavaScript/HTML5, the very cool Cascades Qt UI kit, etc.) and are promoting Marmalade as the route for creating and porting high end games onto the new platform; we were the only 3rd party tool provider on stage.

The audience was a pretty diverse mix from city to city. In Paris we met a lot of BlackBerry developers keen to try out new tools. It was gratifying to see that in London and Moscow there are a lot of cross-platform developers already using Marmalade for games plus a lot of new interest from enterprise app developers. Thanks to all the guys who came to talk to us afterwards and to the various people who helped bridge the Russian-English language gap for me!

All in all a very interesting, not to mention fun, tour. A big thank you to the BlackBerry team for having us along - I felt like basically a groupie by the end - and for sponsoring a set of free Marmalade licenses for lucky attendees.