BROADBAND ‘We have bigger browser engineering than Google or Apple’

Having achieved 50 mn active user-base in India, Opera Software is confident of reaping more from the India market. In an interview with Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software, talks about its journey, innovations and strategies to compete with the likes of G

Voice&Data:

Congratulations on achieving over 50 mn user-base in India. How has the journey been so far?

We started coming here very early (in the year 2006) and it’s a very big market. It was all about establishing brands, identities. We tried to make people access full internet on their mobile phones but that was impossible because India market primarily had feature phones.

So, we developed a product called Opera Mini and it was very unique as it can compress data and run on any type of mobile handset. We do it with the help of our servers. We compress 90% of data without losing content; we take extraneous page elements like image pixels that users don’t miss. Our technology can also read what kind of phone you have and customize content accordingly.

The magic was seen particularly in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 and now, we have 50mn users of Opera Mini in India.

Lars Boilesen:

Voice&Data:

very low…

But the market share is still

Lars Boilesen:

It’s not low at all; we are the third largest mobile app in India, just behind Facebook and WhatsApp. People are using Opera in smartphones and most of them are android phones. Half of our users are now on android and add to that other platfoms like iOS and Tizen. So, we keep on innovating our products as per changing consumer landscape. Recently,

CEO, Opera Software