30 minute interview

“We are targeting mid-range feature phones”

Jon S. von Tetzchner CEO Opera Software

The marketshare of mid-range phones is projected to go from 5 to 15 percent. Opera is targeting these feature phones with a colour screen and camera, says Jon S. von Tetzchner

What’s your revenue model?

A third of our revenues are from sales of Opera for desktop PCs. The rest of our money comes from the mobile Net market of which one-third is licence revenue and the rest comes from advertisements and searches. Google serves the ads in Opera, and searches from the browser are a revenue stream for the company. Adobe integrates Opera with its development tools. The next version of GoLive has Opera in it.

We are into strategic co-operation with IBM. It’s a long-term project; a few devices are out in the market. Opera’s loaded on the new ThinkPad X40. The IBM Recovery Disk on ThinkPads has Opera on Linux.

Our revenue growth has been in the 30 to 55 percent range for the last decade. We grew by 46 percent last year. There were four million downloads of Opera 8 in the first month of its release (April 19 to May 19). We have a user base of 1,00,000 to 1,50,000 in India alone.

Smartphones are versatile, but most folks buy feature phones or basic models. How do you cope with that?

We are going into the low-end of the market. Only 5 percent of phones are smartphones. Most of the remaining phones are feature phones with a colour screen and camera. The low-end phones don’t even have a browser. Mid-range phones is the fastest-growing segment, and they’re expected to go from 5 to 15 percent of the market. We’re targeting that slice. The basic Opera browser is as small as 1 to 2 MB. We have sold it to companies such as Symbian, Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, as well as to operators such as KDDI and Optima.

We are the biggest in shipments of ‘actual’ browsers for phones. 8.8 million phones were shipped with Opera in 2004. We have the Opera platform that takes over the phone’s interface. Operators get specific content with the use of RSS or other protocols, and differentiate based on services. We are working with Vodafone and Orange.

PDAs are in a slump. Do you envisage this category doing better in the future?

PDAs, as we know them, will not continue. Phones will gain PDA capabilities. The N770 is a wireless device and not a phone. It runs Opera with a bigger screen and Wi-Fi.

Opera’s been a powerful tool that took a little getting used to in the past. Is that still true of the latest version?

We made Opera 8 simpler. Today we have a browser that grows with the user. The features are hidden until you use them.

Online security is a major concern. Are you working to address this issue?

Yes, we are. With Opera 8, you can see the digital certificate in the URL bar, which means that you have to spoof the address and the digital certificate to fool a user, which should be impossible.

You support voice commands in your browser. How does that work?

We have support for text to speech and voice XML. Your phone can greet you. Interactive pages can be created, and you can talk to them by speaking out your choices. The technology underneath is from IBM. It allows developers to create applications such as a database of 20,000 songs where you speak the name of the song and the system plays it for you. Taking dictation is the weakest part; otherwise, the technology works well. It is finding a home in devices as diverse as set-top boxes, fridges, cars and phones.

Future applications can include delivering a programme guide on a mobile phone, and recording programmes on your set-top box using your phone as a control unit.

Are mobile subscribers accepting browser- based services?

Telenor did a service trial, offering news on its subscribers’ phones. After that, daily use went from 4 to 42 percent. 57 percent of the people started using their phone as a news source. And more than 60 percent missed the service after the trial was finished.

—Prashant L Rao