Opera Events

Opera opens the Bar at BarCamp Austin

Sunday, 11. March 2007, 14:13:46

free beer, speeddial, BarCamp Austin, awesomeness

Our first night at SXSW turned into an unexpected success when we briefly stopped by BarCamp Austin and ended up opening the bar for just a little bit. I guess we just like supporting good causes.

In exchange for our beer offering, we got the opportunity to demo speeddial and meet some very cool Opera fans. That's our idea of a perfect night.

So thanks, BarCamp Austin. You guys rock! We'll be back next year...

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Opera MeetUp in Prague

Monday, 26. February 2007, 13:41:31

prague, event, opera, meetup

A dedicated Opera fan recently held an Opera meetup in Prague, Czech Republic. Three cheers and a big pat to Martin Polovinčák for hosting the first Opera meetup in Prague without any Opera employees present. He even baked a nice Opera shaped cake (click here for proof) !

There were 11 attendees and they discussed Opera on Apple hardware, creating Opera buttons and everyone got a chance to try out Opera. They were also celebrating the 4th anniversary of the Czech Opera fan site operacesky.net.

If you are interested in hosting a meetup in your town you can either get the starter kit here, or contact Opera employee Vyoma Kapur at: vyomak [@] opera.com (without square brackets) for more information.

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My trip to Opera HQ by FluffyBunny

Wednesday, 7. February 2007, 16:15:13

Last weekend was one of the best ever by far. Very surreal...

At the beginning of this year, I was offered a chance to visit the Opera offices and spend some time there. It was a thank you for helping out with the London Opera Event back in October. Of course I jumped at this offer! January felt like ages as I was really looking forward to this!

My boyfriend and I flew out there after work last Thursday night. I didn't get a great deal of sleep as I was so excited!

Friday eventually came though and before I knew it, we were having lunch at the Opera canteen. It was really strange to meet people I have been speaking to for so long on the net. They were all as I had expected though if not nicer

.

Friday, I spent meeting people and I was given a tour of the offices. I also spent some time with Espen, the Community Manager. He showed me how the community works and I helped him out with Member of the Week which was great fun! (Congrats organicchunkysalsa btw! Much deserved!

) Seeing how the Community is run was a great experience for me. Having blogged here for 2 and a half years now, it was great to have a behind the scenes peek at how it all comes together. I didn't realise how much work is actually put in to produce our fantastic community!

The day was topped off with Friday beers in the canteen.

It was a great chance for me to meet even more people and learn more about Opera and what people do there. There is so much more to Opera than meets the eye! The guys at Opera do a great job and are always thinking of new ways to improve our all round Opera experience and this was clearly evident. It was a great experience and one I will never forget! Thank you to every one at Opera for making my time there so great!

This community has many loyal members - We really should try harder to spread the Word about Opera and put it up there where it belongs!!! Just remember guys, you can all promote opera but putting a banner (big or small)on your other community pages or websites, by going here ------->Banners and Buttons. Also, don't forget, you can also do your own event - check out the starter kit here ------>Tips for an Opera Meetup.

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Opera in Southeast Asia

Friday, 26. January 2007, 10:19:14

opera, singapore, event

Opera's Vyoma Kapur went personally back to her hometown in Singapore and hosted a Web Standards Conference in the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) last Tuesday, 16th Jan. 2007. This was the first time ever Opera had done something in Southeast Asia. With more than 100 people present, we exceeded the target of 70 attendees .

There were two speakers- Lucian Teo from the Web Standards Group, Singapore and Michael Smith from Opera, Japan. Lucian gave an introduction to Web Standards and its state in Singapore. Michael explained the Web Standards situation with really interesting analogies. He also showed Opera's commitment to Open Standards and a demonstration of the browser.

Check out the Web Standards Group, Singapore here. They recently had their first meetup - kudos to that! Images have also been uploaded .

15 Comments

Leaving Las Vegas

Wednesday, 6. December 2006, 01:45:23

(Cross posted on the November issue of Opera Bits)

By David Storey, Chief Web Opener at Opera Software

Opera recently had a major presence as a main sponsor at PubCon, in Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of attending the event, along with a good handful of other Opera people, that represented a cross section of our company. While it felt like almost the entire city was busy winning (or mostly losing) their fortune, we were bunkered down preparing to get our message across.

Day one was mostly spent watching sessions, which included talks by our very own Daniel Goldman, and CEO - Jon Von Tetzchner. One of the hi-lights for me was a keynote by former Apple Software Evangelist - Guy Kawasaki. His speech was delivered with humour throughout, and was based on his book, The Art of the Start. It contained a lot of good advice, that any company would do well to heed.

The rest of the conference was spent on booth duty, and I have to say that ours looked great. It seemed like Jon's message got across, as I lost count of the amount of times people came up asking how to install Opera Mini on their Blackberrys and Treos. I think we've won a fair few converts, when they saw how much it blew the native browsers out of the water. One of the desktop features I enjoyed showing to developers, was how Opera can use Small Screen mode to show what a web page will look like in our Mobile browser. This feature went down very well, with many people making a point to check out their own site and look into ways of improving it. Dev.Opera has articles on how to design for mobile if you are interested in doing the same, along with the beta versions of some of the develop tools that we released at the event. A few people came up to me, to show issues they had with their site in Opera, and it was great to use these tools to show what the problems were and fix them there and then.

The attendees themselves were an interesting mix, from people that knew and tested in Opera, to people that hadn't used it since version 7, and people who didn't even know what Opera did. Being able to sit down with people, and personally show them the advantages Opera gives to them when surfing the web was a invaluable experience. We won a fair few converts, that I'm sure will help us spread the word on the other side of the big pond. We even got a good number of Google people to promise to don Opera t-shirts in the office when they got back. I'd love to see photos of that, if you're reading...

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A long day at the booth for Opera at the Webmaster World PubCon Conference

Thursday, 16. November 2006, 06:50:11

(Cross posted on Opera Watch)

We had lots of people visiting our Opera booth at the Webmaster World PubCon conference today. We showcased the Opera browser on the Nintendo DS, Sony mylo, Nokia 770, Opera Mini and of course the desktop browser.

The Opera booth was probably one of the bigger ones in the exhibit room. It was very close to the main entrance, so we attracted large crowds most of the time. With about 10 Opera employees manning the booth, we barley had time to sit and relax. But it was fun.

Many of the people who came to visit us were inspired by the keynote address of Opera’s CEO from yesterday. For many it was their first time hearing about Opera, and for some it was news to them that Opera is now ad-free. I met one guy, who’s still using Opera version 7, he didn’t want to update and have to pay for another browser version. (How do we let these people know Opera doesn’t have ads anymore?).

People were most impressed with the Opera Mini browser. We had a few phones running the new Opera Mini 3.0 beta version. Mobile browsing in the United States still hasn’t caught on like it has in Europe and other places. When we showed them how easy it is to download and browse the web with Opera Mini, most were amazed. It was great.

Tomorrow we’re giving away free iPods and Nintendo DS’ (with the Opera browser, of course). Every couple hours we will be doing a drawing for those we spot wearing an Opera t-shirt. We gave away lots of t-shirts today; we’ve got another shipment of about 1,600 t-shirts arriving tomorrow. I bet we would see a nice amount of conference attendees wearing Opera t-shirts tomorrow.

We’re also announcing the winners of the Widget World Cup competition tomorrow. I believe around 13 countries qualified for the first round of the competition.

I posted more photos of Opera at the conference on the Opera Event photo album.

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Opera Day 1 at the Webmaster World PubCon conference

Wednesday, 15. November 2006, 09:10:44

(Cross posted on Opera Watch)

Our first day at the Webmaster World PubCon conference in Las Vegas was a successful one. To start of the conference, we attended the keynote address by Guy Kawaski, former Technical Evangelist at Apple and current venture capitalist. Guy spoke about the importance of innovation and ways to achieve it. We at Opera Software found his speech comforting, since most of what he mentioned is what we have been doing for a while already. We’ve been doing real innovation for quite some time.

We attended many of the sessions and talks and met with developers. One of the main reasons for us having a presence here is developers. We want to reach out to developers as much as we can. We want to make them aware of not just the Opera desktop browser, but also the browsers on other devices.

I was a panelist on a panel discussing CSS and HTML coding, where my main theme was for developers to pay attention to the new, non-traditional way of browsing the web. We’re seeing a paradigm shift where increasingly people aren’t just browsing the web on the traditional desktop browser, but on mobile phones and other devices too. And it’s important for developers to make sure they follow web standards so that their sites will work across all browsers and platforms regardless of screen size.

Jon von Tetzchner, our CEO and co-founder of Opera, gave the second keynote address of the day. Jon spoke about Opera’s effort to simply build a browser that runs anywhere imaginable. He also touched on Opera’s core belief that web users should have the same browsing content on all devices. There shouldn’t be a need for a slimmed down version of sites just for mobile phones or devices. After the keynote, Jon took questions from the audience. There’s an interesting blog post on the conference’s blog that explains how Jon got the keynote gig.

Being one of the big sponsors of the conference, we got to see the Opera logo and the words “Opera Software” sprinkled all around the conference area. If you’re at the conference, make sure you come visit us at our booth, where you can see how your websites look in the cool devices that contain the Opera browser.

We had a nice dinner at one of the Mexican restaurants in the evening, where Opera’s CEO and his wife joined us (about 10 Opera employees flew in for the conference).

View photos of the event here.

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Opera Backstage: Russia Recap

Thursday, 9. November 2006, 14:41:34

We had a great time in Ivanovo - the Universities really provided great hospitality to us and it was completely cool to be somewhere where Opera has 50% market share (at least in that lecture hall ).

We held 3 events:

The first was an unplanned talk. The University Chancellor brought us into a lecture hall of students at a university where about 100 students turned up to ask many good and surprisingly detailed questions about Opera.

The second was an afternoon presentation with approximately 300 attendees, again mostly students at Ivanovo's universities.

The third and last was an evening panel discussion with almost 100 IT professionals.

What a long, but fun day!

Each session had a lot of time reserved for Q&A. Hopefully everyone got as much out of it as we did. People had really great questions, and I think we got just as much constructive feedback as we gave during our presentations, which is excellent. We brought back a lot of knowledge about what is important to people in Russia who use Opera. We have a strong brand in Russia, although they would like to see us be stronger (so would we, that's what we're working on!). People really like Opera.

After the evening panel discussion, we had some food and drinks - Russian vodka and beer which was quite tasty! Nick Wilsdon (our local contact) at E3 Internet did a great job of getting stuff together, put a lot of effort in and made everyone at his company available.

Thanks to everyone that was able to make it. And a very special thanks to longtime Opera friend Ilya Shpankov from MyOpera.net for coming to hang out with us. Everything was of course captured in photos which are viewable here. See you all again soon - stay tuned.

8 Comments

An overview of Opera London

Wednesday, 18. October 2006, 17:10:28

Well what a great night Opera put up in London's famous West End! By far the best show in town last night. From web developers to bloggers, the event was packed full of people. As the drinks started flowing, the nervous atmosphere soon turned into a relaxed, fun one - all looking forward to the informative speeches given by Opera staff and guest speakers.

On the community side, we were few, but we made our mark. There was me (fluffybunny), coxy, Lokutus Prime, non-troppo and ottouk. Sorry if I missed anyone. I think I can speak on behalf of them all, it was a good night and was so lovely to finally meet people that have known eachother up to, if not longer than 2 years!!! A big thank you for coming!

One of the best things about the event was being able to chat to the Opera staff and the big man himself - Jon S. von Tetzchner. And boy is he tall! I was practically on my tip-toes when speaking to him! lol! One thing that last night re-inforced in my mind, was that the guys at opera are not 'above' anyone. They are happy to talk and listen to suggestions, help people out with any problems they are having and generally do all they can to improve the browser, community etc. So don't be afraid to ask or send any suggestions to the guys (and gals) because without your feedback, they cannot improve our Opera experience.

Anyway - We should have more pics up soon, so keep looking out for new posts!

FB xx

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