Communications Technology

Microsoft has unveiled a slew of videogames for play on smartphones running its new Windows 7 mobile software and said the devices will link to its Xbox 360 videogame consoles.

“We’re really approaching this as we would a console, so we have to deliver the breadth of games and the quality people expect from Xbox,” Microsoft senior director of mobile gaming Kevin Unangst said.

“We’re going to bring a set of high-quality games and experiences, all using Xbox Live, to bear at the launch of the Windows Phone 7.”

Xbox Live is an online community where people can play or get downloadable content using the Internet-linked Microsoft videogame consoles.

Microsoft used a major Gamescom conference in Germany as a stage to introduce 50 titles ranging from virtual board games to extensions of popular Xbox 360 action games.

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Google Australia managing director Karim Temsamani has been appointed as the new head of the internet company’s global mobile ads strategy.

Temsamani joined Google in 2007 from Fairfax Media where he had been the company’s commercial and group magazine director.

Over the past three years, Temsamani has overseen the growth of Google’s search and display advertising business in Australia, built relationships with agency partners, grown the company’s YouTube operations and established major partnerships to provide great content and services for local users.

Temsamani takes up his new position at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California on October 1. Google said it will announce a replacement soon.

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Norway’s Opera Software ASA on Tuesday launched a new feature for its internet browser allowing users to share photos, music and files directly with one another, without needing to go through outside services such as Facebook and Flickr.

The company said its Opera Unite service can also be used to access personal files stored on a home computer from a laptop, office computer or a mobile phone. Unlike traditional Web services, the files are never stored on any external servers, but move directly from one computer to another.

The Opera browser was once a strong alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Time Warner’s Netscape. But its relative usage has diminished with the rise of Netscape’s successor, Mozilla’s Firefox, despite Opera’s knack for innovation and the company’s decision in 2005 to drop a $US39 fee for an ad-free version.

Tony Cripps, a senior analyst at London-based software consultancy Ovum, said the new feature was “an interesting concept” that could pave the way for similar inventions by other internet browsers. But he said Opera’s share of the browser market was too small for it to have any larger impact on Internet behaviour.

Opera Software spokesman Tor Odland said Opera would like to see the application as a tool that gives users back the control of their content from social-networking sites, such as Facebook and photo-sharing site Flickr from Yahoo.

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