Moving The Digital Divide

Opera - the browser company

the Best Internet Experience
on Any Device for Everyone

Charles McCathieNevile - Chief Standards Officer

chaals@opera.com

There is one Web

But many ways to use it

India: 35 million desktop connections

... and 150+ million phones, +5M / month

Nigeria: Nokia's best seller is N70

But half the market is Voice+SMS

Phone and Web

SMS

Short, cheap

On any phone

Easily monetised

No media, output = input

Web

Rich multimedia is easy

Simple infrastructure to set up

Freedom of services

Freedom of devices

People want access to services

Developers want to create value by producing services
- not lose value by having to re-engineer the same thing again

Opera Mobile

Web 1.0

HTML, XHTML, CSS - Pages

New content

SVG (graphics), RSS (news)

Web 2.0

AJAX, Platform

Opera Mini

• A browser in 100kb
• The full web on every other phone
• Compression means cheaper pages
• ...so people can afford to use it
• Photo blogging - connect to the camera
• RSS (and atom and so on) Feed reading

Mini matters

• Delivery platform: aAQUA, CBSE
• On more than 25% of phones in Bangladesh
• Now delivered by network providers, OEMs
• Not just a restricted application.
• New version coming soon...

But...

• There is still a digital divide
• Moving, as Mobile becomes real Web
• W3C developing countries work is important
• To build Convergence in standards...
• ...gives developers a reliable platform
• (and a low-cost, well-known one)