Daily Debrief: Opera browser hitting the high notes

[ Music ] ^M00:00:04 >> Rafe: Hi, it's Rafe Needleman here from News.com's WebWare with Jon S von Tetzchner of Opera, CEO and Founder of Opera. >> Jon: Yes, Co-Founder. >> Rafe: Co-Founder of Opera. >> Jon: Two of us. >> Rafe: Okay, thanks for coming by today to talk about Opera. Now, I wanted to ask you, it's interesting that you're here today in an environment where we've got Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Flock, all these other browsers and Chrome now coming along and you were saying some interesting things about how Chrome is affecting Opera's performance. Tell me what -- the Google affect on Opera. >> Jon: The effect so far has been since the launch of Chrome we've had 20% more downloads everyday at Opera, so that's been the effect so far of the Chrome launch. >> Rafe: Now, Opera runs on multiple platforms so are you saying all platforms or just desktop? >> Jon: Just desktop. >> Rafe: Okay, and to what do you attribute that? >> Jon: Well, I think in a way the biggest hurdle out there is all those people that are using IE, they don't understand that there's a browser out there, that there's a choice. Now, those people are now reading about the fact that there is a choice and a lot of the articles talking about Chrome are also mentioning the competition, that includes us. People then go and they out our products and actually a lot of them are then finding out that Opera is a great browser and they end up using us instead. >> Rafe: So, well, give us some numbers, I mean, most people out there, at least in the U.S. are familiar with IE or Mozilla or are becoming familiar with Chrome, maybe Safari. Give us some numbers to show how Opera fits in here and abroad. >> Jon: Well, overall we have on the PC side we have about 25 to 30,000,000 active users. Now markets here varies a lot from country to country, it varies from, I mean, in some cases less than 1% to other places more than 20%, significant variations from country to country. >> Rafe: Again that's desktop? >> Jon: Yes >> Rafe: What about mobile? >> Jon: Well the mobile side -- >> Rafe: You use multiple products in mobile, correct? >> Jon: Yeah, we have the Opera Mini, which is the downloadable free browser, we have Opera Mobile, and we [inaudible] on the mobile [inaudible] as well, so overall, I mean, we have the most used browser for access of Internet on mobile phone, I think that's clearly Mini. Mini is, in very active users, in September we had 19,000,000 active users on Mini, grown 350% during the last year, they browsed 4,500,000,000 sites. So, very active users of that browser, in addition to that there's a mobile browser and device browsers in general, I think we clearly have the most used browser for access to Internet on television through Opera on the Wii. We have Opera on all the television systems like the Sony and Phillips and the like, we have media players from Arcos and all those, so if you want to browse with anything else in the PC quite likely what you'd like to do is to browse with Opera, if you're on a PC obviously you should be browsing with Opera as well. Rafe: I've got 3 browsers on my desktop already, I've got one on my phone, why should I look at another browser? >> Jon: I think in a way, I mean, the browser is the -- you spend more time in front of your browser than any other application. The browser as such is an extremely important tool, and we as a company we focus on providing you with a better user experience. A lot of this is about being effective; this is about making the most of your computer. As an example, I mean, when you start Opera you start with multiple windows, the other browsers have a tendency to, by default, start at only one. By having one allows you to more easily [inaudible] while our focus is to provide you with a more desktop experience. Rafe: Alright, so I've got multiple windows opening, what else does it do that I won't find in one of the other products? >> Jon: We believe that if you have a lot of memory on your computer we use it, and that allows you to have very effective browsing, that's one thing. We then have -- so we have the sessions, we have the [inaudible] mechanism, we have the mouse gestures, being able to execute comments by moving your mouse around, if you have a small screen, a lot of people are having these small laptops, if you have a small screen and the page doesn't fit you can hit a button and it fits the screen more elegantly. There's a long list of features with a likeness, fast forward and rewind, if you go to a page and there's a natural next page, Opera will quite often find that next page and you press that or do the mouse gesture instead of having to find the next link, Google Research is an example, result is an example of that. So there's a lot of things that differentiate Opera, the zooming function, you go into a page and there's some small print and you want to have a closer look you zoom it up, I mean, all of this is adapting to the user. >> Rafe: Alright now, and on the Mobile? >> Jon: Well, the Mobile site it is -- with Opera Mini in particular what we're doing there is [inaudible] to the networks. Today's networks aren't really all that fast and so people are saying you need to have WiFi, you need very high-speed networks but it's going to take time until everyone has that. So what we've done with Opera Mini we're giving you a WiFi like experience on a normal network, so through the compression mechanism we have with Opera Mini, 85% on average, the speed of displaying pages is so great that, again, it's comparable to running on a WiFi network. >> Rafe: And the session information that I have on my desktop Opera will go into the session information on my Mini phone. >> Jon: You can synchronize them if you like. If you're using an Opera link feature you can synchronize your Bookmarks, your History, and anything else, your notes between your mobile and your different desktop browsers. >> Rafe: Great, well, thank you and good luck, thanks very much. This is Rage Needleman for News.com, thanks. ^E00:05:46