Microsoft has announced the long-awaited successor to the Xbox 360, naming it the Xbox One, but news does not stop there. Major game announcements at E3 were alluded to during the presentation, and today subsidiary Skype officially throws its hat in the ring, announcing it will bring additional functionality to the next-generation console.

This may not be a surprise, but Skype explains its plans for the new Xbox and those ideas are ambitious. "Skype for Xbox One lets you enjoy your Xbox games, apps and live TV with friends and family as if they were right there with you in the living room, all through features such as group video calling and Snap", says Microsoft's Tony Bates.

The competition for your cloud business continues between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and other competitors. Today Google takes its next step, with an attempt to make the experience better for Android customers with, what it terms, a "smoother" experience.

The search giant claims that Drive files will now be displayed in a clean, simple card-style. This will allow users to swipe between files to see large previews that will permit them to quickly review and discover the information they are looking for. If a customer wishes to keep some Drive files on his or her Android device, they will now be able to "download a copy" from the actions menu inside settings.

iOS may well have a halfway decent keyboard, but it is still far slower to use than a regular desktop or laptop keyboard. Anything that can be done to reduce the amount of typing that has to be done on a daily basis is to be welcomed, and this is something that TextExpander has offered for some time. Type a few letters and they can be expanded into longer words or even entire sentences. With version 2.0 things just got a whole lot better.

There are a couple of key enhancements to be found in this latest release, not least of which is support for formatting. The context menu can now be used to add richly formatted text so you can save even more time.

Starting today, the Nokia Lumia 521 is available at the third-largest carrier in the US. And you better sit down for what follows next. T-Mobile offers the entry-level Windows Phone 8 handset at a very attractive price-point -- $149.99 when purchased outright or $29.99 down coupled with $5 monthly installments over the course of two years.

What do you get for the money? The Lumia 521 packs a 4.0-inch IPS display with a resolution of 480 by 800, which can be operated using gloves. Power comes from a 1.0 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor backed by 512 MB of RAM and a 1,430 mAh removable battery.

Microsoft certainly seems to be ramping up the help for its new operating system at the moment. First it uploaded a "Get to know Windows 8" video to YouTube, and late yesterday it published a "Windows 8 End User Training Brochure" in its Download Center.

Unlike the video, the 36-page PDF guide is definitely new (there’s a screenshot from April 2013) and will prove a godsend for anyone struggling to get to grips with Windows 8 or Surface. Each of the multi-colored pages clearly and concisely explains how to use a particular element of the operating system, with the aid of large, friendly illustrations.

Connected living room devices are here to stay. Smart TV's, set-top boxes like Apple TV, Roku and Google TV all aim to make sure of this. Opera, known mostly as a web browser, has been branching out into this market as well, with its Mediaworks project. However, instead of apps, and despite the name, Mediaworks is an advertising network.

Now the company's subsidiary, AdMarvel, announces what it calls "a forward step in the evolution of online video advertising into the connected TV space". Opera explains that "AdMarvel for Connected TVs will provide publishers and advertisers with a dynamic, rich ad-serving platform combined with sophisticated ad exchange, ad serving and ad management functionality on connected TVs".

Any old security suite can protect your PC with a firewall and an antivirus product so the big players are increasingly looking for new angles to try to get us to buy their products. BullGuard’s flagship offering already has parental controls, spam filtering and PC tuning tools, so the latest release -- out today -- goes for the personal protection approach.

No, it doesn’t come with a goon in a dark suit and sunglasses to follow you around. It offers safeguards against identity theft and data leaks, plus it has social media protection. As an added bonus the amount of online backup space included with the package is increased to 25GB.

Last week at Google's annual I/O conference in San Francisco the web giant launched a new feature called quick actions for Gmail which recognizes certain types of messages and lets you take immediate action on them directly from the inbox -- RSVP to an invitation, or quickly see flight info for example.

Third-party developers are able to add their own actions, and OrangeScape announces it is doing exactly that with its self-service workflow builder, KiSSFLOW.

On Wednesday, cloud storage provider MediaFire, which now boasts 30 million users, launched support for native music playback and video streaming in its Android, iOS and web apps. The new feature is available through an update that is rolling out today.

MediaFire currently offers three plans -- basic (free), Pro and Business -- which come with 50GB, 100GB and 1TB of cloud storage, respectively. However, users who do not wish to shell out for a premium plan (either Pro or Business) are stuck with a 200 MB limit for uploaded files, which suggests that they are not able to take full advantage of both music playback and video streaming support.

You can buy plastic guns designed to add a touch of realism to first person shoot-em-ups on the iPhone. Just slide in your device, and use the screen to view the action and pull the gun trigger to fire. The Inteliscope is kind of like that, but instead of letting you attach your iPhone to a plastic gun, it’s designed to be used on real tactical firearms.

To clarify, it isn’t a game, rather it’s a "combination of a tactical rail mount for an iPhone or iPod and an app that brings critical ballistics and environmental insight to the shooter in real time". Among the features on offer is the ability to "shoot around corners with no head exposure". Handy.

The lack of an official Instagram app for Windows Phone opened the door to many third-party offerings looking to make their mark on the ecosystem. Itsdagram, released little under a week ago with a comprehensive feature set, seized the opportunity and climbed to the number one spot in the top paid category in the US Windows Phone Store.

Daniel Gary, the developer behind the app, decided to further build on Itsdagram's success by releasing a free, ad-supported, version which comes with unlimited photo uploads and the same feature set as its paid counterpart. Previously, the trial variant only allowed users to post a single photo to Instagram.

Despite Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's promise not to "screw up" Tumblr following its recent acquisition, the move has caused some disquiet in the user community.

Posting on Tumblr, of course, many users are worried about the impact advertising may have on the Tumblsphere, others that Yahoo will change the ethos of the site. There was disquiet about rumors Yahoo would push to make it more family friendly by filtering content too -- around 1 in 6 Tumblr pages is reckoned to contain porn. Despite assurances, and the fact that the circulating message about the clean up has been exposed as fake, there's a lot of distrust out there.

Irish security firm Safer-Networking Ltd has announced the release of Spybot +AV 2.1, a major reinvention of the package which sees the addition of virus protection for the Home ($13.99) and Professional ($25.99) versions (the free build removes malware and rootkits only).

A great deal of this new release is about delivering the framework necessary to support the antivirus engine. An update mechanism delivers antivirus signature files multiple times a day, for instance. The system offers real time protection, too, although this can optionally be turned off if there’s a chance of it conflicting with something else.

Veteran UK developer Xara has released a brand new version of its acclaimed creative design tool, Xara Photo and Graphics Designer 9.1.0. Version 9 concentrates on revamping the package’s photo tools, with the introduction of Photo Healing, Background Erase and new masking tools and photo FX plug-ins.

Version 9 also adds other new features including a Shape Painter tool, support for graphical bulleting and numbers, and improved font support, with multi-weight fonts now accessible from the Fonts menu and direct support for Google Fonts implemented.

Microsoft yesterday took the wraps off its next generation games, TV and entertainment console at a special event held at the Microsoft Xbox campus and we streamed it live right here.

Don Mattrick, President of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, kicked off the event unveiling the Xbox One, a name that dispelled many myths about Infinity, 720 and 8.