Sega of America has poached Verizon Wireless's Tammy Robinson to be its new senior director of sales for Sega Mobile.

She'll be in charge of sales and planning initiatives for mobile games and digital distribution, working with mobile operators and handset manufacturers, as well as overseeing Sega's expansion onto "emerging platforms".

That presumably includes iPhone – Sega has already shown off Super Monkey Ball running on Apple's handset – but also possibly N-Gage and Android.

Robinson will report to VP Linda Chaplin, and joins from her role as manager of content programming for games, wallpaper and applications at Verizon.

She's the latest example of a games manager from an operator jumping ship to a publisher, a trend that's well-known here in Europe. She spent ten years at Verizon, so is a considerable figure in the US mobile games industry.

Sega appears to be getting more mobile traction in the US than it has in Europe. On this side of Atlantic, the publisher struggled to get direct relationships with the operators, before signing a licensing deal with Glu Mobile instead.

In the US, Sega is continuing to publish its games itself, although it didn't make it into M:Metrics' chart of the top-ten publishers by sales for April, as revealed at the BREW 2008 show last week.