Mobile Marketing that Makes Sense!

Opera Browser Turns 15

Unless you were really paying attention last week you may have missed this news, the Opera browser turned 15 years old. Most people don’t realize it, but the Norwegian company, Opera has been in the browser game for much longer than Safari, Chrome, FireFox or even Internet Exploere (just barely on that last one though). Opera now has three browsers available: Opera, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, and the PC browser actually just launched their 10.0a edition. In truth, Opera is pretty good for browsing on your traditional computer, it is most known for its mobile browsing capability.

Opera for the Traditional Computer:
Opera has yet to gain mass acceptance on the traditional computer; Only about 40 million PC have Opera installed, out of the one billion PC’s available, and even then, Opera is generally not the default browser. But even those numbers, reported by Opera may be a tad high. According to Wikipedia, as it stands in 2009, the Opera browser only takes up 0.7% of the market share, while Internet Explorer comes in at 67%, FireFox at 22%, Safari at 8% and Chrome at 1%.

The low market share is perplexing, because Opera has all the bells and whistles that FireFox, Chrome and Internet Explorer have and then some! Opera actually pioneered some features that have now become common-place in the browsing world; Things like tabbed browsing and continued sessions between browsing instances opening were actually first offered by Opera. Some of the things that make Opera stand out from the crowd include small screen rendering (SSR), geo-location, mouse gestures and voice commands.

Small Screen Rendering: The PC based version of Opera allows you to view any webpage as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone, with a simple click of the mouse. This gives webmasters the opportunity to quickly anticipate how their website will look when it is viewed on a mobile phone without additional software or excessive testing. Chasing down all the emulators and simulators that you might need to preview your site in a mobile environment can be time consuming: Most of what you need to know will be apparent when you view your site on Opera SSR.

Geo-Location: IP based geo-location is notoriously inaccurate, and can cost advertisers who are sending geo-targeted messages thousands of dollars, so Opera has found a better solution. In its most recent release, Opera offers a Geo-Location API that developers can work with to more accurately determine the location of the user based on whatever information is available including GPS location, triangulation of WiFi signals, or web services.

Opera has worked with the W3C to create a JavaScript protocol to retrieve the latitude and longitude of a browser when it retrieves a webpage. This API can be integrated with services across the web to improve the user experience and the relevance of the information that is being presented to them. Some users may balk at the potential privacy implications of this type of advancement, but believe the benefits will outweigh the risks, and web surfers and their mobile counter parts will learn to appreciate this type of browsing quickly.

Mouse Gestures: Opera helps simplify browsing by allowing you to control the experience without even having to click buttons in the browser tool bar. All you have to do is simply hold the right-click button down and make small movements and the browser will respond. If you move the mouse to the left, Opera will take you back a page, if you move the mouse to the right, Opera will take you forward a page. With mouse gestures, you can also minimize, restore and maximize windows, reload the page or open pages in new tabs.

Voice Commands: In Opera, you can talk to the browser, or it can talk to you. You can highlight text and press a button and the browser will read it to you without any additional downloads or plug ins, which is cool, but not ground breaking. The cool thing is being able to tell your browser to do things like re-load a page, go back, go forward, log-in, go to your home page or toggle between tabs.

The one real downside, which is understandable but still annoying, is that you have to press a button for Opera to begin listening, so it is not totally hands free. This voice capability is exciting, but I am really waiting for the day when I can yell at my computer from across the room, and have it do something!
Opera was actually written from the ground-up to handle poorly coded websites; With that it min, it offers developers a lot of tools to test live a websites’ elegant degradation/progressive enhancement capabilities. Without additional plugins, the browser lets you disable or enable frames, animations, JavaScript, images and cookies, and has for quite some time (like, since 1994 in some cases!)

Mobile-Only Offerings:
In the mobile world, Opera can be found on 120 million handsets worldwide and boasts faster download speed and better security than the other mobile browsers. When the iPhone launched, Opera quickly fell from the number three mobile browser to number four. Mobile Safari is now the top mobile browser in the United States, and second most common mobile browser in the world after Nokia’s browsers.

Much like Mobile Safari, Opera mini displays web pages on mobile phones, just as they would appear on a traditional computer, and it even allows you to zoom in and out of the page (without the silly pinching motions!) All of the major handset manufactures an most carriers have phones that ship with Opera Mobile or Opera Mini pre-installed. If you are shopping for phones, you might see an Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Pro or the Samsung Omnia and if you are out shopping for other things, you might notice that Opera is embedded in popular gaming devices, such as the Nientendo DSi and the Nientendo Wii.
Many of the cool offerings that Opera provides on their traditional browser transfer to their mobile offerings too, though frequently not as seamlessly as you might hope. While there are definitely bugs to work out, I often believe that Opera has not been given enough credit for its innovation and creativity. Despite what some of the detractors would have you believe, I think that Opera is poised for tremendous success in the mobile browser game in the coming years, and potentially some of that may even transfer back to the traditional browser acceptance. Either way, I say with all sincerity, happy birthday Opera!

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WebPro News Interview: Attribution & Mobile Marketing

I got to catch up with Mike McDonald at WebPro News while I was at SES New York. We had a great little chat about two sessions that I spoke on. Here is the video:

More WebProNews Videos

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Comms Day Interview: Search to usher in the mobile marketing revolution?

Before SMX Sydney, I had the opportunity to talk to Laraine Davis from CommsDay, which is an Australian publication that focuses on the telecom industry. Petroc Wilton did a great write up on the conversation. I can’t find a version of it live on the web, so I included it below. Enjoy!

Search to usher in the mobile marketing revolution?

The unique properties of mobile search could be a key piece of the mobile marketing puzzle – but it risks being stymied in Australia by high mobile data charges, according to Rank-Mobile founder Cindy Krum. Ahead of her presentation at the Search Marketing Expo next week in Sydney, Krum spoke to CommsDay about the marketing potential of mobile search and future directions the technology might take.

Because the mobile platform can offer carrier-specific ‘on-deck’ content search and specialised search applications in addition to transposing conventional web search engines, argued Krum, advertisers must open their eyes to a gamut of new ways to channel users to their sites. But they also have new opportunities to tailor their content. “Mobile is one of the most personal marketing platforms,” she told CommsDay. “It knows who you’re calling, it knows your calendar… and it knows what you’re searching for online. That makes it really great for marketers because we can really take that information and tailor our marketing message with it.”

In addition, Krum continued, mobile search is frequently employed outdoors, opening up opportunities for industries that see little benefit from conventional search activity on home PCs. “People like restaurant [owners] are really missing out on the mobile opportunities…people use mobile search when they have an immediate need to fill,” she said. “Companies that haven’t done a particularly good job with internet marketing really have a huge opportunity with mobile… there’s a lot of market share to be moved.”

However, Krum warned that high data charges in Australia are likely to be a real stumbling block, with users wary of big bills for browsing. “That’s going to really slow down the adoption of mobile marketing, because there’s such a disincentive to search,” she said. “In the US, we’ve just got all of the carriers offering flat-rate data pricing… that’s kind of the tipping point.”

Looking to the future, Krum forecast a more device-agnostic search paradigm. “I see mobile search going to a lot of different devices, because I see more and more devices becoming webenabled,” she said. “I see the search engine starting to take those devices into account more. Even within that, different devices have different demographics… the search engines can detect what device you’re on, so they could start to include that in the algorithm as a means of personalisation.”

Petroc Wilton, March 2009

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