Opera News

For techie types, this is the week of the year when everyone talks about the shiny things making their first appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A veritable Valhalla of gadgets, this is the place to play with all sorts of remote-controlled doodads and goggle at TVs the size of small movie screens.

Speaking of television, Opera sent a crack team to CES to show off the "app-"propriately cutting edge Opera TV Store, which aims to bring the best of the Web to the big screen in your living room. (Even if it's not quite as sizeable as the ones down in your local multiplex.) We'll bring you more of a big CES wrap up next week, so just stay tuned!

Meanwhile, as swag junkies were trawling the halls of CES, hopefully holding out plastic carrier bags in the general direction of free stuff, a different sort of frenzy was shaping up online. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, aka the folks who assign domain name addresses, announced it would begin accepting applications for new top-level domains, such as .shop, .computer, or just about anything else you could think of. The only catch - it's not cheap, so you may not want to put all your eggs in that domain-riches basket, or at least have a backup plan. Speaking of online names, if you want to know why Opera is called Opera (and not, for example, "Arepo") Espen breaks it down for you in this fine post.

In a vaguely related piece of good news, mobile operator O2 announced plans to create Europe's largest free wi-fi zone in London. It's intended to fuel the anticipated social media buzz around the 2012 Olympics, even though we all know that what people really want mobile internet for is to share pictures of cats - and other animals.

Now, lest all these forward-looking developments make you feel like the future is coming a little too soon, you can take a stroll down memory lane with the The Restart Page, and relive the good old days of computer hardware that was heavier than the furniture it sat on.

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Have a great weekend, everyone!