February - 2012 issue > CIO Insights

By si Team

In a candid chat with siliconindia, Håkon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software talks about the company's future dockets and their operations in India.

Opera started out in 1994 as a research project within Telenor, Norway’s leading telecom. In less than a year, Opera Software ASA was launched as an independent development company. Today, Opera is headquartered in Norway, with over 700 employees in offices around the world and over 100 million opera users. Opera’s founders and employees believe that access to the Web is a universal right. This has guided the company to adapt various platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products which include Mac, PC and Linux computers, tablets, mobile phones and PDAs and various game consoles and other devices.

There are about 150 million people who use Opera Software worldwide and India ranks second just one step behind Russia which bags the first place. Opera offers a browsing experience to people who may not have access to a Desktop or a laptop, in a mobile phone as it is extensively used worldwide. By using Opera mini they could get a similar experience of the Web in a mobile phone at a very low price. So the plan now and always will be to provide this platform to the next millions of people with the software that can give them the best internet experience.

Mobile landscape today

The mobile market looks very promising. Roughly speaking, rate at which the mobile phones are sold outnumber the computers being sold at a big ratio. Hence, our hopes of increasing the number of users remain strong in India and rest of the world. We at Opera make sure that we are technologically updated by creating and writing the perfect web application that customers feel comfortable with. The three standards we use are HTML, CSF and Java Script. These specifications form the platform for our web application. By using these specifications, we can actually write applications that give users the same experience as they have in more proprietary applications that have been built recently. For example, in the web apps, we can give the location of the person viewing. In some capabilities of the mobile web continue to increase; we can trade very compelling applications.

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