Pay Per Click Advertising and SEOOpera - Pay Per Click Advertising and SEO

Opera acquires FastMail to aid cross-platform messaging

Matt Thomas — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:00:50 +0000

Opera have announced their purchase of web-mail provider FastMail in order to boost their cross-platform messaging capabilities.

This acquisition of Australian based FastMail will now assist Opera in their aim to deliver messages for TV’s, mobile phones, computers and games consoles.

Opera stated that the move was primarily targeted at emerging markets as well as operator tie-ins in all markets.

FastMail released a statement over the weekend announcing that their service will continue as long as users agreed to have their personal details and account information handed over to and controlled by Opera.

Everything will continue as normal for existing account holders including the billing cycle, security, pricing and mail features.

Opera have always provided an e-mail client in their browser, the company now actually has more users of its mini web browser than of its computer browser, 55 million as opposed to 50 million desktop users, FastMail will allow Opera to offer a more stable and consistent e-mail experience across all versions of its products.

Operas strategy chief Rolf Assev has this to say about the acquisition:

“Many Opera users, especially on Opera Mini, are starting to use the internet for the first time through their mobile phone. It’s their first opportunity to establish an email address. We want to offer those users their first data on the mobile phone and their first email address.”

With recent news that Internet Explorer is slowly losing its stranglehold on the web browser market we can expect to see their rivals doing all they can to make their service more appealing than Microsoft’s.

Opera browser app proves success on iPhone

James Oliver — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:50:16 +0000

After having been restricted to using Apple’s own Safari browser on the iPhone since its release the technology giants have finally allowed another company to release their own browser in the app store much to the delight of many iPhone users.

Rival company Opera have released their browser “Opera Mini” in the Apple App store and it has done very well indeed.

Although other browsers have been released on the iPhone they have all had to be built around the Safari engine making them not to dissimilar from Apple’s browser. Opera bucks that trend as it is the first browser app to run completely on its own engine.

Reports have suggested that the Opera Mini browser has already exceeded 1 million downloads worldwide and it is topping the app store download charts in over 20 different countries.

Apple may be regretting their decision to allow little European start up company Opera to run on the iPhone as Safari has been unchallenged on the platform since the phone’s release 3 years ago.

Many of the reviews of the new browser have been extremely positive as most users claim that it seems to offer faster loading times than the Safari engine. Such features as keyword search on a page and the ability to have different tabs have helped its growing popularity.

Opera has been highly successful in the European market but this runaway success in the app store could be key to breaking the US market for them which could then lead to users choosing the Opera browser over Safari on their computers, Apple must be questioning their decision now.

Opera submit their iPhone browser to App store

James Oliver — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:42:07 +0000

Opera Software, the company behind the lesser known Opera web browser have confirmed that their iPhone browser “Opera mini” is now complete and has been sent to the sceptics at Apple for approval.

Opera, who make an entire range of mobile and computer web browsers, claim that their iPhone incarnation was “the first big step toward giving users a new way to browse on an iPhone.” Until now iPhone users have only ever been given the option to browse using Apple’s own Safari browser, so a fresh injection of software might be a welcome change.

The first glance of the Opera mini iPhone browser came at the mobile world conference in Barcelona where the browser was received really well, being praised for its interface and speed.

Although it does sound like a promising new feature for iPhone users it is still yet to be confirmed by Apple who may decide to completely reject it as they are not often very welcoming to applications that will compete directly with their own Apple default applications, in this case Safari.

It would be nice to give it a try though, especially if Opera’s claim that it loads pages 6 times faster than Safari is true.

The browser uses server-side rendering which compresses the data of a web page by up to 90% before it is transmitted to the phone. This in turn speeds up page load times and therefore places less of a drain on user data allowances.

Opera’s mini 5 browser is currently running on Google’s Android mobile operating system but it is doubtful that this will influence Apple’s decision to approve it or not in anyway, whether they decide to go with it or not we are likely to be waiting a while to find out.

Browser ballot box benefits Opera browser

James Oliver — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:25:01 +0000

As we reported on the Top Click Media blog in recent weeks, the implementation of the browser ballot box by Microsoft has gone live, and it would seem that the chief protagonists of the new system, Opera, have benefited the most.

Since the browser ballot box has begun appearing on new versions of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, downloads of the Opera browser have reportedly ‘more than doubled’. The idea behind the ballot screen was to level the playing field somewhat; the European commission (along with companies such as Opera) felt that Microsoft’s practise of pre-installing their Internet Explorer browser onto all computers with a Window’s operating system was a tad cheeky.

It inevitably gave Microsoft an unfair advantage whereas the ballot screen offers a choice of 12 different browsers, a move that would appear to have been extremely beneficial, especially for a relatively small company like Opera.

According to Opera Software, downloads of their browser have increased by 15.3% across Europe since the ballot screen was implemented.

“This confirms that when users are given a real choice on how they choose the most important piece of software on their computer, the browser, they will try out alternatives,” said Hakon Wium Lee, chief technical officer at Opera software. “A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse.”

The ballot screen comes pre-installed on any new computer that is running the Windows 7 operating system and much to the annoyance of Microsoft it will be in place for the next five years, Internet Explorer 9 is going to have to be quite special if they are to keep their users or the chasing pack might just overtake them.