Granted, this blog entry’s headline is not the most creative one – but I will try to make up for it in the following paragraphs:

While Thomas and Diane are already visiting panels and having meetings at the GDC Europe in Cologne, the rest of ICO’s crew is making the final preparations for their flights to the following gamescom convention starting on Wednesday. In fact, we are pretty much set and ready to go, staring at the planes taking off outside our office window at Gatwick Airport and looking forward to being on one of them tomorrow afternoon. We also finally got the confirmation for the catering service at our booth at Hall 4.1, Aisle H, Booth 055 – and as we are looking forward to seeing many of you in person, this means you can enjoy snacks and drinks while dropping by.

Like us, you may already have a busy schedule but even without having arranged a meeting you’re welcome to visit us and talk about business or finally meet in person. Whether you plan on publishing a video game in Europe, want to talk about partnerships with us or are just eager to collect the full set of our shiny new business cards, you should memorize the location of our booth.

Here is how I do it:

Germany-England 4:1, Hungary was the best team in ‘55 (before Germany won the world cup in ’56)

(EDIT: This is actually not true, but it works and could keep you busy to spot the error in the sentence)

Of course, that’s my way, easy for a German but might work for others, too.

(Now I’m back at nervously checking volcanic ash forecasts one more time)

We have been busy for the past few months — busy enough that we decided it was time to look for a helping hand (or two!). We were lucky enough to find some very capable hands indeed. Starting today, we have a new team member, joining us from NCsoft’s Aion team: Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl.

We’ve had great experiences working with Martin in the past (especially Jen, who worked directly with him for many years), and we are very happy to have his skills and enthusiasm in our Gatwick office. He’ll be helping us to build on the work we are doing on communication and social media for our clients, as well as bringing his valuable expertise on everything German, both as a professional and as a native.

Please join us in welcoming Martin to the team!

Like every year, Diane and I will be in San Francisco for the Game Developer Conference from the 9th to the 13th of March. We’ll be there the whole week, so please contact us if you’d like to meet up.

Jen will be at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX from the 12th to the 16th of March, so you can talk to us there, too!

We will be attending the Lyon Game connection this December. You can find more information about the event on their website:

http://www.game-connection.com/

In a few words, this a “speed dating ” event between different actors of the game industry. Historically, it has been very focused in match-making developers and publishers, but the last couple of years has seen different service providers joining the event as well, from localisation providers to advertising networks and billing solutions.

Don’t hesitate to ask us for a meeting through the system.

The past week in Korea has been very busy for us. We attended the KGC event for the first time this year, and it has been a very nice experience.

Thomas spoke at KGC, presenting not one lecture, but two! Both went very well, with a very attentive audience that was thirsty for knowledge on the European market and the European players.

The presentations are on SlideShare now:.

This presentation is similar to others we’ve done during the year. Some of the numbers have been updated, and as always we have provided additional information from previous iterations. The section on how to enter the European market, and related advice, has been fleshed out more thoroughly.

This is quite a new angle for us. We prepared this lecture at the request of the KGC organizers, and we can honestly say it was a lot of fun to prepare. We’d like to develop it even further, but we hope that in its current form it has enough material to be useful to its intended audience (non-European developers).

As ever, feedback on both presentations is very welcome!

[You may have noticed that those presentations feature a different logo than our previous materials. We'll talk more about that soon, but for now let's just say that we felt the need to move on to an image that's more representative of ICO's spirit.]