More people from America bought tickets to this World Cup than any other country and it seems the game has taken off in the US over the past month. We've been providing a fantastic range of prizes to Fox Soccer Channel, who have been broadcasting a post-game show across the US throughout the tournament.

The vuvuzela is probably the biggest talking point of the World Cup so far. Love it or loathe it, it's certainly making itself heard. However, outside our hotel is quite literally the biggest, and loudest, vuvuzela in the world.

It's about 40 feet high and 200 feet long, perched on a bizarre discontinued flyover and brought to us by our corporate sponsor friends at Hyundai. Every time a goal is scored it goes off and it sounds like a containter ship announcing it's docking into your hotel room. As we type that means 53 times. And you thought the noise on TV was annoying. Still Hyundai have got a blog entry mention out of it so I suppose they're happy. We're hoping there are no more goals in the whole tournament and every knock out game is settled on penalties.

We're proud to launch the brand new 2009-10 icons.com brochure. The aim is to showcase all the major players we have signed memorabilia products for and to re-emphaize that icons.com is the leading suppliers of signed football merchandise in the world.

Check out the full brochure here

Cover

Torres page

Kaka page

Signings page

If you would us to send you one in the post or a low-res version by email let us know at icons.com

Today we've launched icons.com on Flickr, the global photo-sharing website. Icons.com on Flickr

First to go up were our photos from most recent signing session with Lionel Messi. And while we were at it we've also uploaded the photos from the last two signings we've done over the past 18 months with the Barcelona legend.

In total we've done four signings with Leo, but we can't currently locate the pics of the first session we did with him back in May 2006 when he was only 18. Bare with us, we're trying to find them and we'll upload them as soon as we work out where we've put them!

From now on we're going to upload the images from our signings sessions so you can see behind the scenes of what goes on when we meet the players. We have to take lots of photos in order to create our Certificates of Authenticity so we there should be a decent collection once we get them up.

We're also going to go back into our archive and bring out the photos from signing sessions we've done with legendary players who we currently don't sell products for on the site. We've conducted signings sessions in the past with the likes of the Brazilian Ronaldo, Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos and Xavi Alonso but as we have sold out of their stuff we don't have them on the current site.

Unfortunately due to some people ripping off our signing photos and product images we've had to add an icons.com watermark to all the photos we upload off our site. Hopefully it doesn't get in the way too much, we just want to protect our images from turning up in unexpected places.