In an effort to win back some search market share from rivals Google and Yahoo, Microsoft on Friday kicked off a nationwide advertising campaign designed to spread the word about the recently launched Windows Live Search.

Currently positioned in third place, Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up and the company is making no qualms about the fact that it's delayed arrival has set it back. In a September interview with BetaNews, Live.com senior product manager Justin Osmer said coming in third isn't bad, but added Microsoft wants to grow.

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Opera said Wednesday that it had released a version of the Opera Mini browser compatible with Treo and BlackBerry phones. The company is responding to a growing segment of the wireless industry - analyst firm Gartner estimates 42.1 PDA phones shipped worldwide in the first half of 2006.

Since its launch in February of this year, the mobile version of the Opera browser counts some seven million users and over one billion pageviews. T-Mobile's European subsidiaries have already begun to include Opera Mini on select handsets.

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Just as it did with the PlayStation 3, GameStop announced today that on October 13, it will accept a limited number of pre-orders for the much-anticipated Nintendo Wii. The retailer expects the limit to be reached very quickly, most likely in only minutes, and no additional pre-orders will be allowed. The reservation fee is $50.

Nintendo expects to supply 4 million Wii systems to stores by the end of the year, and GameStop with its EB Games subsidiary has 3,600 stores nationwide. On Tuesday, the company rapidly went through its pre-order quota of PS3 consoles. However, the initial supply of units from Nintendo will likely be far higher than that available from Sony.

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Picasa, Google's free desktop photo management software, now has a new Web Albums photo sharing service available in beta. Similar to Flickr, Photobucket, and the like, it allows the user to upload photos from their desktop and conveniently share them via email or URLs.

Following its design mantra, Google wants to keep the Web Albums interface simple and clutter-free. Photos are presented in captioned thumbnail galleries and can be zoomed or viewed as a slideshow. Images are pre-fetched to allow for quick load times, and the site currently has no ads. Picasa Web Albums come with 250MB of free storage, with a paid storage upgrade option.

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Microsoft's new certification program, Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA), which has been in beta testing for over a year, went live Tuesday. MCA is a system of certification based on seven competencies as displayed to a four-member peer review board.

Microsoft says it has striven for an objective, vender-agnostic system that measures the candidate's ability against an ideal, rather than against the performance of others. Skills are assessed in areas of: technical depth, technical breadth, communication, organizational dynamics, leadership, strategy, and tactics.

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