Last week I attended the Nordic Game event in Malmo, Sweden. There's no doubt about how much cool mobile development is currently going on in the region. What was once ascribed to the "Nokia effect" could perhaps now be better described as the "Rovio effect"!

It was gratifying to walk the small show floor and see that most developers were either evaluating or actively using Marmalade. Our partners are also feeling the effect of the growing awareness of Marmalade. Exit Games are finding more and more people are using their Photon multi-player networking tech together with Marmalade as well as other new partners wanting to integrate with Marmalade as many of their target developers are already using our tech.

I took the stage to assist with the BlackBerry gaming presentation from Anders Jeppsson, RIM’s Global Head of Gaming Category, providing some case studies of existing Marmalade developers taking their iOS and Android games across to the new BlackBerry devices and how quickly and easily this was achieved. I was able to demonstrate applications running on the new BB10 prototype devices kindly provided by BlackBerry at their recent Florida developer event and afterwards there was a huddle of eager developers having a play themselves on the devices. There is so much good stuff coming from the BlackBerry gaming camp right now and I really hope they can start shipping the devices in good numbers soon!

I saw a great presentation from Wilhelm Österberg, Lead Product Manager at Wooga, on how developing social games for Facebook is not all about evil empire building and sucking the lifeblood from players. I was particularly impressed with the fact that you can have an idea for a new feature over the weekend, implement it during the week and push it out to 10 million daily active users by the Friday!

The gala dinner was true Scandinavian style, from the food all the way down to the long tables and wide prevalence of Viking facial hair. It wouldn't have taken much to Photoshop it into a still from Lord of the Rings. All in all a jolly good event.