LiMo Foundation Blog

I have to start this blog with a small technical note for those people that do not know Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is a browser for mobile phones based on a client-server technology: a light client (J2ME) that provides user interface and local handling of web pages, together with a powerful server to which is offloaded the heavy-duty task of downloading and rendering web pages. The result is a thin client, installable on virtually any mobile phone, which allows access to full internet with a reduction of bandwidth usage up to 80%.

Now that it's (hopefully) clear what Opera Mini is, I can start this month's blog post on a happy noteJ .  For the first time, people using Opera Mini viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month, 8% growth over the previous month.  At the time of writing, the number of active users for the month of August is over 29 million; it's very likely that Opera Mini will be able to celebrate the ambitious target of 30 million monthly active users.

These numbers may be significant for Opera Mini, but they are far more important for the mobile Web itself. These numbers prove that experiencing the mobile Web is not confined to the relatively small club of expensive smartphone users but can be available to any mobile phone user.  In effect, feature phones are the larger contributors of Opera Mini transcoded pages.

For companies planning their mobile Web strategy, it is not enough to cater for one phone or one type of phone; rather it is important to code for the Web itself and let the browser on the phone handle the rest.

Developing for open standards, implemented on open platforms is key to unlocking a huge and so far, untapped business potential hidden in the hands of billions of mobile phone users around the world.

Network operators and device vendors are beginning to embrace open networks and open development initiatives to connect a new range of devices and create new business models.   This is now starting to result  in revenue growth for those companies that embraced full internet on mobile phones.

This fast growing movement is also allowing millions of people in developing countries to finally access internet services, resulting in unprecedented access to unbiased information and market opportunities.