Archive for August, 2007
About Opera Marketing
Not so long time ago there was a plenty of discussions regarding Opera’s marketing strategy, some said it’s good while most of the people disagreed with that.
Daniel Goldman wrote a very interesting article about Opera’s marketing which you should read.
Here’s a list of “to do/done” things regarding Opera marketing.
We are reviving our developer outreach efforts. It’s very important for us to have web developers be aware of and test their sites in Opera. We recently hired a developer/writer to run our developer site, dev.opera.com, where you’ll see lots of good stuff in the coming months.
With the Desktop Team blog, we have made the development process of the desktop browser more open to our fans and followers. This is by far the most popular blog we host on the My Opera Community site. This blog is one of the important places where we converse with you, our users.
For the launch of Opera Mini 4 beta we produced an ‘Opera Mini vs. iPhone’ video — it was extremely popular in the blogosphere and on video sharing sites.
We are producing more fun and informative videos to be released with the Opera 9.5 and Opera Mini 4 (final) launches.
We send many of our developers, executives and others to speak at and attend industry-related conferences and events (worldwide). The audiences attending these events usually include developers, business contacts, and everyday internet users.
We organize large Opera-user get-togethers, which we call ‘Opera Backstage’ events. These Opera Backstages have already taken place in numerous countries, with more of these events planned. In addition to the marketing team, these events are attended by our executives and developers. These events are typically attended by anywhere from 100-500 people.
As I mentioned above, news stories about Opera in the press don’t usually happen by themselves. We have an entire PR department working on getting as much publicity for Opera in the press as possible, in multiple languages.
We’re currently working on a new affiliate program, where our users get credit (and tangible rewards) for encouraging others to download Opera.
Opera’s homepages, both www.opera.com and www.operamini.com are redesigned with each major release of a new browser version. This keeps those sites from becoming stale.
Our marketing and IS departments are currently working on a major redesign of our website.
The website’s design, usability and content are crucial in our efforts to increase Opera’s market share. After people read or hear about Opera, the site is what often convinces them to download and use Opera.
We run ads on various tech websites and blogs to promote the desktop browser, Opera Mini and the Wii browser.
We have (and continue to pursue) major distribution deals with ISPs and web portals to distribute the desktop browser and Opera Mini. Examples include T-Online, Clix and Onet.
Opera sponsors many events and conferences, which gets our name and brand out to conference-goers.We also have booths at many events and conferences, where we demo and talk to people about our browsers.
We run the My Opera community site, which has close to 1 million registered members. When potential Opera users consider downloading Opera, and notice our strong community of users, I’m sure this helps a bit in their decision to download and use Opera.
We recognize that our users are very talented, and many of them want to help spread and promote Opera. To help those users, we have set up the Choose Opera group where Opera users can plan, execute, and show off group and individual projects that build awareness of their favorite browser*. (*Opera).
We want everyone, not just English-speaking users, to have the opportunity to find information about and download Opera. To support that, we’ve developed localized versions of our website. For example, see ru.opera.com, cn.opera.com, pl.opera.com, and jp.opera.com
Our developers, engineers and QA people often join in on conversations with Opera users in the official Opera Forums, Opera’s IRC channel and on blogs around the Web. This helps make the culture of Opera more open and accessible.To encourage people to learn more about Opera, we solicit questions from our users to be used in interviews that we publish with Opera executives, developers and others.
We give out promo merchandise to our users and supporters that include: Opera t-shirts, pens, pins, phone straps, stickers, etc.We do outreach on many social networking sites. We are active on sites such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr.
Why Firefox Is Blocked?
It’s all about ads blocker…
You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser.
And here’s why:
Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software.
This is interesting but it won’t change anything.
P.S. Not only Firefox can block ads. Will it block those too?
Adobe Flash Player (Moviestar) Beta
Adobe Flash Player is one of the most popular software among web browsers users.
Adobe Moviestart (Beta goes later today) will support H.264 (better video quality) , HE-AAC (better audio quality) and hardware accelerator for web video.
You will be able to download it from labs.adobe.com. I am waiting for it as well as you do.
Browser Of The Month – What Should It Have?
Sooner or later we will have new web browser release. Probably Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Opera 9.5, those and Internet Explorer 7 will be reviewed so we could pick our “Browser of the Month”.
But before reviewing, let me ask: What should that “Browser of the Month” have?
I want to use as many factors as possible in the upcoming review. If you have any, please post them in comments. Till now I will post just some obvious ones.
Performance, security, low resources usage, not overloaded user interface, ease of use, inline spell check (I think that’s important) and easy updating.
FavBrowser.com Make Over
No big changes. Just thought that logo should tell something more. So instead of pure glassy blue text effect also “integrated” web browsers logos.
F – Firefox
O – Opera
S – Safari
E – Internet Explorer
Press F5 if you don’t see new logo.
Hope you like it.
An Interview With Opera’s CEO, Jon von Tetzchner
The Register recently published an interview with Jon von Tetzchner and there are some very interesting questions and answers as well.
Andrew Brown, a big fan of Opera, wrote that he chose to move to FireFox because it was more compatible with new websites, partly citing Flickr compatibility. Do you feel you’re falling behind?
…
It’s a chicken and egg situation, which means we need to get more users.
…
I don’t want to agree with that. It’s not all about users. Of course, big market share helps a lot but let’s see the following situation:
Let’s say 1000 potential users decides to download Opera and surf their favorite sites, some of them found them incompatible with Opera. What they do? They are switching back. So you get more users for a week or so but then lose some of them due incompatibility with their favorite sites. Of course, market share still grows, but very slowly. As posted in 2007 July Browsers Market Share Results, Opera lost 0.02% of their market share that time. I tend to believe that decrease was not due the fact that users didn’t like Opera’s interface or features, but due incompatibility.
Opera can’t grow so fast due incompatibility with some sites.
Incompatible sites are incompatible due low Opera’s market share.
Paradox?
If Opera would get 20% of the market share in one night, this would help for sure. But that won’t happen.
So it’s up to Opera Software.
Another interesting answer was:
We just try to focus on our side. We’ve always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We’ve had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn’t make sense. We’ve introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like – and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience.
It’s fantastic that Opera is being copied, that means they are doing very good job in providing users best web experience, but how long can it happen? How long can you brainstorm and add new features without seeing rapid Opera’s market share growth while competitors with those new features becoming stronger (more popular). Why It’s Not Enough To Have All The Greatest Features?
Web Browsers Flame War. Wanna Join?
Just kidding, don’t do that.
There’s an interesting thread (Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser) posted.
I haven’t read it all, just 1 out of 50 comments or so and found that it’s just another flame war (or will be the one soon).
There’s even a comment from Daniel Goldman (Opera Software).
I’m sure we (I work for Opera Software) could work some revenue sharing plan with Dell. Part of our revenue from the desktop browser comes from Google.
Any other companies wanna join too and try to get their stake from Dell? Everyone is just talking about how good or bad their favorite browser is.
One more interesting comment by sazar
There are other options besides Firefox, why promote one over the others? This will simply create a browser monopoly of sorts with Firefox. IE comes bundled with the OS and allows people to get online for the first time, this shouldn’t be a handicap. If the user is savvy enough, they will be able to download the browser by themselves.
I agree.
Happy Birthday To Me :-)
Sorry, no news today, if Opera 9.5 goes public today, will post about it tomorrow (hope so).
Why? Because it’s my birthday ;-)
Have a Nice Day Everyone.
Netscape Navigator 9 Beta 3 Released
Netscape Navigator 9 Beta 3 was just released, this version includes nice amount of changes and fixes. Here’s the changelog:
- New preferences in Tabs panel of Preferences dialog
- Added “Link Pad” to the “Clear Private Data” dialog
- Fixed issue with Link Pad icon blinking indefinitely
- Added News preferences to Netscape.com pane of Preferences dialog
- Fixed bug with feed processor that was causing both a memory leak and excessive CPU usage
- Added tab preference for opening bookmarks
- Added tab preference for links opened by Netscape.com integrated components
- Changed URL correction confirmation to be enabled by default
- Fixed bug in URL correction that was interrupting the auto-addition of “www” and “.com”
- Fixed bug that caused the “Confirm correcitons” item in the Location bar’s context menu to be hidden
- Added button in preferences to easily disable Netscape.com integration
- Various performance fixes
