Join us for our 2nd Opera MeetUp in the Baltimore/DC area

We’re having our second Opera MeetUp in the Baltimore-Washington DC-Virginia area this coming Tuesday evening (October 3rd) at 7:00PM.

Tim “Junyor” Altman posted details about the meetup on the official User Group blog. Be sure to join us, if you’re in the area. I’d love to meet you.

Official Opera MeetUp in London
There will also be an official Opera meetup in London this coming October 17th. Read about it on the Opera UK blog.

Opera Community site reaches 500,000 members; More than 1,000 new members join per-day

The “MyOpera” community site today registered its 500,000th member.

The official Opera Community site first launched in August of 2001, and underwent a major site overhaul in 2005. The site offers personal blogs, photo albums, user groups, Opera forums, friend networks and more (all free, of course).

Over the latest months an average of upward of 1,000 new members have joined the community site each day, according to the official announcement by Opera.

The Opera Community forums ranks number 38 of the top English software forums on the web, according to Big-Boards, a site that tracks the most active message boards and forums.

As part of the 500,000-member celebration Opera asked the 6 most active and popular users to share their experience with the Opera Community site, you can read their thoughts here.

Congratulations to the Opera Community members on reaching this moment; the power of the community is what will ultimately help the Opera browser surge ahead in its popularity. The more we blog about Opera, post in Opera-related forum discussions, and mention the Opera browser to our friends, colleagues and family, the more popular the browser will become. It’s in our hands.

Having a strong Opera community with a powerful (and a socially-oriented) community website to back it up is crucial for Opera in winning the browser war.

More: Official Opera announcement | Reaction from the 6 most active users

Opera releases update to browser with version 9.02

Opera today released an update with Opera 9.02.

This update, according to Opera, is a recommended security update. In addition, there are some other updates and fixes such as a fix for high CPU usage while downloading big emails, a fix for Flickr’s Organizr, Slashdot’s new comments system (Discussion2), and a fix for the problem with playing YouTube videos on other sites. (See the changelog here)

In this update Opera also added more fixes for Gmail’s spellcheck, fixed the crashing on live.com, and made Yahoo Mail beta work better.

Download Opera 9.02

Opera's homepage gets a splash makeover

Opera today made an update to its homepage (www.opera.com). The new homepage puts more emphasis on the Opera browser, while omitting the other corporate information that existed on the previous one.

I like the new clean interface, it’s small, not much to read, and gets the point across quickly. The headings clearly point out the other Opera browsers besides for the desktop one. There’s also a link in the center of the page that brings you to the classic (old) Opera homepage.

One thing that could be a bit confusing to non-techie users and to those who haven’t heard much about Opera is that the page doesn’t highlight the Opera browser for the desktop like it does with the browser for mobile and devices. I don’t think the picture of the laptop computer necessarily gives it away.

Opera also added a new landing page for the Opera mobile browsers. It too is clear and easy to read, though I haven’t seen any link to it anywhere on Opera’s site.

The landing page for the ‘Opera for Devices‘ section hasn’t been update as of now, but I hope they don’t forget about that. With the recent announcement of the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii and DS, Opera can get lots of PR mileage out of this hype.

All in all, I think these changes should help somewhat with more downloads of the Opera browser, not just for the desktop, but for the mobile, such as Opera Mini, too.

Nintendo to give away the Wii Opera browser free until June 2007; More details on browser

More details emerged today on the new Nintendo Wii relating to the Opera browser.

The Opera browser will come as an optional download, though no price has been set yet. However, Nintendo will allow the browser to be downloaded free until June of 2007, according to ign.com.

Eventually, you would be able to purchase the browser with the Wii Points (2,000 Wii Points will cost $20).

Chris Kohler from Wired speculates that it’s likely the browser would be free once Nintendo finalizes discussions with Opera.

The browser will also include Flash support, which is an upgrade from the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS. Surfing the web will be done using the Wii Remote (Wiimote).

According to Opera’s Berit Hanson the Wii browser will support all web standards that are included in the Opera 9 desktop browser, including full support for JavaScript and AJAX.

As with the Opera browser on mobile phones and other devices, the browser on the Wii will automatically reformat the webpages to fit the size of the screen, thus eliminating the horizontal scrollbar.

Keep submitting Opera Widgets for the Widget World Cup

Editor’s note: Benjamin Jacobsen is the Desktop Marketing Manager at Opera Software.

We started the Widget World Cup a few months ago and recently extended the contest deadlines. Widgets are a great way for people to interact with websites, content, and even have fun, small games available to them on their desktop. To win the Widget World Cup, you have to develop a widget, and then find ways to make it the most popular, downloaded widget – first in your country, and then the rest of the world.

The competition is still on, and we need more widgets! The basic idea is to build a compelling widget (think of what content, functionality, localized information might be especially useful or interesting to different types of audiences). After you build the widget, promote it to your friends, colleagues, user groups, etc. The widget with the most downloads from each qualifying country will then win 1000 Euros. Believe it or not, only one country has qualified thus far (http://widgets.opera.com/wwc/stats/)! Pretty crazy given that widgets are simple to build and promote. How about posting a widget on your blog?

Long story short, create a popular widget and promote the heck out of it. Let us know about marketing ideas that you have. We’ve got a lot of ideas up our sleeve that we’re working on, but we’d like to hear your thoughts, ideas, and inspirations about how to spread Opera around your neighborhood, town, city and around the world. Now go build a cool widget and win the Widget World Cup!

Help spread the Opera browser – Got any marketing ideas?
And a final note. We are working hard on coming up with ideas to and expand our current user base with yes, a pretty low budget :). This means we have to be creative and results oriented. It would be great to have your input. Please feel free to send an email to benj at opera dot com when you have cool ideas that you think might work. It is especially fun to see that one of the most important ways of spreading Opera – by having Opera users meet each other and their friends – is happening in the shape of user groups out there. Let us know if you have ideas on what we can do to make it even more fun to invite friends and fellow Opera users to events like these.

First look at the Opera browser for the Nintendo Wii

Nintendo posted on their site (in Japanese) some video demonstrations of the new Nintendo Wii, which includes the Opera browser.

Here you can see a bit of the menu that includes the big red Opera icon. (via Nintendojo).

For a more detailed look at the Opera browser live in action on the Wii, see the videos on page 8 and page 9 of their 14-page presentation. (via Haavard).

Back in May of this year Nintendo announced that it would include the Opera browser built-in to its new gaming console, the Nintendo Wii (pronounced ‘We’). This would allow you to browse the web directly from the Wii console using the Wii-remote — a.k.a Wiimote. (Read: What’s in it for Opera financially with the Nintendo deal?).

Opera also built a version of the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS, which comes as an optional DS card.

The Nintendo Wii is set for release on November 19th in the US and Europe, and December 2nd, 2006 in Japan. (via Saito).

SoonR uses the Opera browser for its AJAX-powered application that brings desktop files to mobile phones

Today at the CTIA Wireless conference in Los Angeles SoonR announced that it is using the Opera browser for its application that provides remote access to PCs (both for Windows and Mac) from mobile phones.

With SoonR you can connect your mobile phone to your desktop computer and access your documents, pictures and some applications (Microsoft Outlook, Skype, etc.).

SoonR is using the Opera browser as the front-end for their application. The menu and application pages are AJAX-powered written with HTML and JavaScript, and uses Opera to render those pages.

One of the most frequent questions I get about Opera is “How do they make money from their browser?”

This is one example where they rake in the money.

Instead of writing a serious application for mobile phones and other devices (like the menu on your TV), you can install the Opera browser on these devices (the core Opera browser is tiny), and create a simple web application using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Since the Opera browser for devices is the same core browser as its desktop counterpart, you could also include AJAX to make the application more interactive.

Now that Opera supports Widgets, you could simply create a Widget for your mobile phone or device, and have it act like a regular application.

Although the Opera browser for the desktop is free, it does charge a licensing fee when the browser is incorporated in mobile phones or other devices. I’m not sure how this agreement with SoonR is structured, but Opera will likely get some royalty fees depending on the number of SoonR downloads or perhaps a flat fee for using the browser.

SoonR is a pretty neat application for your phone, not only can you access your files and pictures remotely, you could also use Skype directly from your mobile phone through your desktop PC. Best of all, it’s free.

Another Opera team joins the blogging world

There’s a new Opera blog in town, a blog by the Opera team that runs the Opera Community site and Opera’s other websites.

Only within the last year or so did Opera start with official blogging by various teams in the company. Blogging is, IMHO, an important and crucial method of reaching out to current and prospective Opera users.

I wish there was more blogging by Opera, not just personal blogs by Opera employees. Google’s many official blogs proved immensely popular.

Recently I talked with someone on the Opera Mini team about starting their own team blog, where they would share the latest technological advances, news, and new release info on the blog.

It’s much easier to follow and subscribe to a blog than scouring the forums for news. Plus, it creates an open conversation with users. We’re in 2006!

List of official Opera blogs
Opera doesn’t have a page on its site that lists all of their official blogs, so here’s an unofficial list:

• Desktop Team Blog – This blog is almost exclusively about Opera’s weekly builds of the desktop browser.
• Opera Widgets Blog – Covers mostly competitions for Opera Widgets geared towards Widget developers.
• Opera Labs Blog – There are still only a few posts on this blog so I don’t know what to make of it yet. It’s supposed to be an eye into new products and technologies that are being developed in Opera.
• Opera Platform Blog – Discusses the Opera Platform for mobile applications.
• Opera Web Applications Blog – Talks about technical aspects of Widgets, how Opera can be used to create applications using the Opera Platform, AJAX and Web 2.0 stuff. I’m not sure if this is a replacement blog of the Opera Platform blog.
• Opera Competitions – You’ll find all kinds of competitions and contests in this blog, which are quite often.
• My Opera News – This blog gives you a behind the scenes look of the Opera Community site and the other Opera sites, mostly technical stuff.
• Opera Community Blog – This is a blog relating to news about the Opera community, member of the week, Opera news, etc.

Opera takes the lead with AJAX support among browsers: More efficient streaming

On the official Opera Web Applications blog, Arve Bersvendsen wrote about a cool new AJAX feature that was added to Opera 9.

AJAX, which is a programming model for creating interactive web applications, has been made popular recently with Google for Gmail and Google Suggest. Lately it has been the big buzzword on the web for countless other sites too.

Here is just a brief explanation of this new AJAX feature, without getting too technical.

From the blog post: With the traditional AJAX implementation, the browser continually polls the server, sending requests to the server, asking to get data back, making new HTTP requests for every single poll, putting more strain on the server than needed.

In Opera 9 you can instead open a persistent connection to the server, sending data to the client when new information is available, eliminating the need for continuous polling.

“This method for doing remoting offers a tremendous advantage, since the server no longer has to handle the overhead associated with clients asking for new data. Instead, the server simply sends back data [to]  every connected client when appropriate, thus reducing the load on the server, with the added advantage of offering instant feedback to the user.”

The new feature is called Server-Sent Events (SSE); it follows the WHATWG Web Applications 1.0 specification.

See it live in action
Opera setup an example web chat application on the web where you can see and test it for yourself. Check out the Opera RealTime Web Chat. (Screenshot here)

Advantages
They seem endless, the advantages for using this new technology. This will decrease the load for servers with heavy use of AJAX. Imagine what Gmail and Google Maps can do with this.

Learn more
You can read more about this in the blog post on the Opera Web Application blog, as well as Arve Bersvendsen’s post in his personal blog.