I realized the other day that its been almost a year since I last blogged here. The reason is very simple, I have been really busy. But what a year 2007 was!. Here are some of the things we have done in the Opera consumer team since March 07: - We launched Opera 9.2 with Speed-Dial - We launched an alpha and a beta version of Kestrel - We launched three betas and one final version of Opera Mini 4 - We launched Opera Link - We have published a labs build with <video>, SVG-video and 3d-canvas - We made two major milestones for some secret projects - We launched two versions of the Internet Channel version for Nintendo Wii - David, Navjot and Shwetank in our OTW team opened up lots of important websites from companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft - We were at more than fifteen web developer conferences in 2007, and build lots of good relationships - We arranged our first Rock Opera event in San Francisco and had a university tour into the deep of Russia. - We have published around 40 articles on dev.opera since Chris Mills joined. - and much more.
This year we are planning to do a lot more! So stay tuned!
Yesterday Opera and T-Mobile Europe announced that T-Mobile will launch a new web'n'walk community service build on My Opera. The press release stated that:
By integrating the community into their product offering, T-Mobile allows its customers to take advantage of popular My Opera features such as photo-blogging, photo albums and more, all from the convenience of their web'n'walk powered phones.
I believe it's time to step back and look at our collaboration with T-Mobile. T-Mobile and Opera have been working closely together now for more than two years, and T-Mobile made headlines in June 2005 with the launch of web'n'walk. On its debut, T-Mobile became one of the first operators to offer real Internet browsing on a mobile phone, with unrestricted access to all content. For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that control of the content (the so-called 'walled garden'), was the best method to drive operator revenues from data. T-Mobile and their customers disagreed.
Too expensive, too complicated, too little used — that’s our clients' judgment about our current data services, - Ulli Gritzuhn, T-Mobile.
T-Mobile launched a number of Opera powered handsets like Nokia 6680, 6630 and N70, but they also understood these high-end mobile devices would reach only a niche market, primarily because of price. To address this they chose Opera Mini for the mass market Java enabled mobile phones. The first results came in at the close of the third quarter of 2005. After web'n'walk's launch in June 2005, the indications for an increased data usage as well as data ARPU were very promising. On average, web'n'walk customers visited 330 Internet pages per month. These raw numbers corresponded to a 489% increase in data volume per user, and 119% increase in data ARPU. After introducing several Opera Mini based web'n'walk phones at the end of the second quarter 2006 and Internet usage surged 350% while revenues jumped an additional 70%. This evidence showed that walled gardens did not keep customers and revenue in; they held revenues back. And that is a very interesting observation I will need to get back to later. Meanwhile, I suggest all those who haven't tried photo blogging with Opera Mini to test it out. It supports lots of web services like MySpace and Flickr, or check out recently added photos to the Opera Mini photo stream.
This morning our community team launched a new version of the My Opera Community site. I love it! My best wishes to Fredrik, Espen and the rest of the team who have been working hard on this! When I got to work this morning the first thing I saw was a billboard outside the building with the text (in Norwegian) "Norwegian version of myspace - only better" Though there are plenty of new updates to functionality and design, one of things that really gets me excited is the beautiful use of CSS Media-Types to optimize the pages for the various phones and devices that people surf with. As you see above, the feature and content remains the same regardless of which device you use, such the users are not left out with less functionality just because they are not on a PC.
This has been a week full of exciting events. It started on Monday with the release of Opera 9.1, which included the new real-time Faud Protection. Opera's Fraud Protection utilizes back-ends from both GeoTrust and PhishTank to ensure the best possible protection for the end users.
On Wednesday I had (thanks to Håkon) the very pleasant first encounter with the $100 laptop from the OLPC project. I would like to send a special christmas greetings to the people working on this project - keep on doing good!
Today we are very proud to release the preview of the Opera browser for the beautiful white Wii (I believe our CTO was up 2am this morning). The browser features some very unique innovations like the new Intelligent Zoom. This enables users to simply point the Wii Remote at the area of interest on the screen and Opera will automatically adapt the zoom level to fit the area. The browser will for example provide a different zoom level when reading an article on BBC than it will when logging in to Gmail. The feature is really great and its crucial for the user experience since TVs have much lower resolutions than today's PC monitors. Now I just need to get hold of a Wii - Perhaps I should make a Widget?
Happy x-mas browsing everyone - and long live the web!
Would you like to get personalized and always updated newsfeed directly on the idle-screen of your mobile phone? How about location based traffic information or a map service similar to Google Maps? This is what Opera, Telenor and FAST set out to test in a R&D study named 'Aida' earlier this year. The solution was tested on a large number of end users over many months and was very well received among the testers. Check out the video below from the solution running live on a Windows Mobile phone.
If you have problems understanding the text on the screen, it's most likely because it is in Norwegian
Were heading off for the webmasterworld conference in las vegas next week. A great possibility to test out opera mini 3 beta with the new photo upload support. Really cool so far :-) Nuno is enjoying TGI in LONDON
If you can figure out which web site the screenshots are from, you better be heading over to the competition page right way. Opera is handing out 60 prices including 10 Nintendo DS Lite. Too bad Opera employees aren't allowed to participate
Some days ago, TomSoft wrote an article discussing a few myths of the 'mobile Ajax'. I think many (including myself) share Thomas' view that it's important not to hype technologies, and that its important not to draw conclusions like 'the mobile web 2.0 equals mobile AJAX' (meaning that AJAX is something running in the browser). The Web 2.0 is a much broader term, and limit it to a single set of technologies does not make sense. He is also correct when stating the there are alternatives currently deployed on lots of mobile phones and that mobile AJAX is not a way to bypass the operators. In fact most of the interest in the world for Mobile AJAX solutions derives from Operators who are interested in superior user experiences across devices and medias.
What I question is the following:
Looks good, but unfortunately, I have no Ajax enabled browser out of the thousands of handsets we have here at MobileScope….
How you manage to have thousands of phones without an AJAX capable browser? Opera Mobile is estimated to ship on approximately 46 different handset model in 2006 and Nokia ships their new web browser on a significant model. This means that there are already millions of AJAX enabled mobile phone in the market.
Seems that the Write Once Run Anywhere myth is back!! It was actually already not achievable through technology designed for this, so I did not see how Ajax app (which is basically designed for one or two platform) will be able to address suddenly thousands of different platforms…..
I haven't heard anyone claim this anywhere. But we are in Opera reusing lots and lots of AJAX solutions on other devices than it was originally designed for. Whether SoonR in their demo reused any code from their PC version is not sufficient to argue otherwise.
So finally... OPERA mobile AJAX platform got themselves a partner... SOONR.com to develop a mobile ajax app running on their OPERA platform
This has nothing to do with Opera Platform. It's a standard AJAX application, that just happens to be running on a mobile phone rather than a PC. Opera Platform on the other hand is a full AJAX framework for creating user interfaces and applications with.
Summing up. The discussion points Thomas brings forward are very valid, but there is a clear difference between advocating for which technologies will succeed in the future and which ones are available today.
Test your web site to see if it’s ready for mobile customers.
They continue on their site saying
If you're not happy with what you see, - if you see anything at all – it's time to join the dotMobi Community by getting your .mobi domain name and optimizing your site for the mobile Internet.
The problem is that what their showing is not even close to what a user actual would see when visiting a web site with their phone. Especially is this the case when the site use media types to adapt the layout to the different screen resolutions. The screenshot on the right show this community site rendered in the emulator, while the one to the left show what it looks like in Opera 8.5 which is the web browser shipping on the Nokia N70.
dotmobi is the first top level domain to enforce a technology ever. The technology is XHTML Mobile Profile, which is a part of the OMA WAP 2.0 specification.
A lot of the new domain names just compound the problem of trademark infringement and fraud.
- Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon.
...A senior lawyer at Verizon Communications, the second-largest US telecommunications group, said there was no 'particular business need' for 'dotmobi' and the company had only registered verizon.mobi to prevent others taking it... web developers said there was no technical benefit to using 'dotmobi', as websites could be designed to adapt to mobile phone screens...
Looks like the lawyers are awake. Wonder when the technologist will join in.
or, let's get rid of prefixes and suffixes that are not technology agnostic.
The .mobi top-level domain initiative which was initiated by Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft, reports that more than 5000 domain names was registered within the first 2 days after launch. This is no surprise. Being late with registering a new domain name can turn very expensive.
But do we really need this new top-level domain name?
People like Russel Beattie has argued that we do need it. Today people refer to their "mobile friendly" version as for example wap.ebay.com, google.com/xhtml or even mobile.opera.com. These solutions are *really* bad because their not consistent. I believe that .mobi might help these companies clean this up.
My criticism however to .mobi is that it is not technology agnostic (like .com or .org or .dk). If we decide to add top level domains like this for every type of media, we might end up with many silly solutions like:
opera.mobi opera.tv opera.pda opera.mp3 (music player, could easily be confused with a music format) opera.ife (in-flight entertainment)
This is not a good solution to the problem. End users should not have to be aware of what type of device (or media) their on in order to find the right kind of content. People who for example wants to read news on CNN should simply go to CNN.com and find content for their device.
Luckily there are alternative solutions to domain names.
My personal favorite is to build web sites using CSS Media Types. This enables easy adaption of the content for different devices without expensive infrastructure.
To test out how this works in practise, simply click "View" - "Small Screen" on this page (using Opera off course). This will simply change the active CSS document, and make the page into a mobile friendly version.
Voila. Problem solved. And did I mention its free to use and supports plenty of other media like TV and projection (similar to Power Point)
Opera today announced that the next version of Opera for devices (which is used for TVs, set-top boxes, portable media players or even game consoles) will have support for Web Widgets. Opera already added support for Widgets in the Beta version of Opera 9 for PCs, and enabling support for this on embedded devices means that you might very soon be able to use your favorite widgets on your next TV or media player.
This is very cool!
Widgets are small web pages that resides outside the user interface of the web browser and are typically front-ends to online web sites. Some of my current favorite Widgets includes a football world-cup widget and off course the Slashdot news reader.
I never expected to develop an application for a TV, but this might just change that
Opera is working on making version 9 ready for mobile phones. One of the developers in the Symbian team in Opera recently posted a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the very advanced ACID2 test from WebStandards.org. The test was first passed by Safari from Apple before Opera passed it on desktop in March 2006. Opera for mobile is based on exactly the same rendering engine as the desktop browser and such all the good stuff will become available on millions of phones and other devices soon.
This is great news for web standards and for web developers!
Everyone seem to be writing or talking about Web 2.0 at the moment. The concept of letting other developers reuse your service (perhaps i combination with services even from you competitors) and such stimulate innovation, is novel and potentially disrupting for many industries. Web browsers are key for Web 2.0 since they empower virtually all the new services, but not that many have started looking into the consiquences for mobile and embedded devices. Ajit Jaoka has however published one of the [URL= http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/03/mobile_web_20_a_2.html]very first articles about this.
I'm looking forward to see how the discussion evolves.
