<div>If Google Chrome chants that ‘the web is what you make of it’, Opera Software seems to have taken upon the task of giving you exactly (and only) what you want from it. With the aim of customising mobile internet services on a qualitative and quantitative basis, the company has created the Opera Web Pass; a product that follows a pay per use model of subscribing to the internet that offers time- or site-specific data to their users. </div> <div> </div> <div>Sunil Kamath, Vice President for South Asia at Opera Software reveals that the ideology behind the Web Pass is to introduce customisation in mobile internet browsing while making it more accessible. “If you look at the market in India and around us, which share a similar ecosystem, the number of feature phone users as well as smartphone users is increasing. There is a huge surge in the mobile internet vertical business and people are accessing the web more frequently than ever before. However, there is a large segment of population in the market today who are not able to afford an internet service on the phone, because the way internet is sold is very mechanical and technical,” he says. The primary intent of the Web Pass is to lower the anti barrier for consumers on the one side and make the experience user friendly on the other.</div> <div> </div> <div>It is no surprise that the Web Pass has been launched on their flagship product, the Opera Mini, mobile browser. Of the 237 million users of Opera mobile browsers, 215 million use Opera Mini, worldwide, with India being the largest market (in terms of volume and growth). In India, Opera has partnerships with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Tata Docomo. Opera Mini works seamlessly across all platforms from Java to Android and iOS. “. We are available across app stores, devices and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s are preloading opera mini as the default browser on their feature phones — Samsung Star 3, Samsung Star 3 Duos and Champ Deluxe Duos — before shipping them out. Kamath explains that currently on the Opera Mini homepage, which has graphic tiles or tabs such as speed dial, one of the properties will be replaced by a tile that reads Web Pass. “The moment you click on the page it will have all passes listed with a short description of what it is for the end user. The user can click on the pass he wants and from that moment on the pass is activated. It becomes part of the user’s browsing behaviour,” he says.</div> <div> </div> <div><strong>Personalised Browsing</strong></div> <div> The fact is that most users wouldn’t know how many megabytes of data they are consuming, in a day for instance; their awareness is limited to the broad figures (from which once can derive an approximate estimation)provided by the telecom service provider with regard to how much data can still be purchased within the plan period. On the contrary, if they were asked about which websites they browse, one could gauge their browsing behaviour, which is the essential focus in developing the Web Pass; creating content packages in a manner that the consumer understands what he wants to buy. “From an end user’s perspective, instead of buying unlimited data or 2GB data for a fixed amount, (s)he can choose to buy Facebook for one hour and pay Rs 5 or 10 (depending on how the telecom operator’s pricing strategy),” Kamath informs. </div> <div> </div> <div>Alternatively, one could also decide to purchase a sports pack around the IPL, for example: a package such as this would include to six major cricket sites, and a subscription based tariff plan could be generated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. “In the backend we make sure that those sites are not charged per kilobytes but are free for the end user for a fixed period of time. The moment the user’s pass expires, he will be greeted with a renewal option on the homepage of his/her Opera Mini browser. Similarly there could be data packages around news or entertainment websites, so on and so forth depending on the creativity and pricing strategy of the telecom provider, Kamath feels. One can imagine them drawing inspiration from DTH providers who have considerable expertise in successfully rolling out different content packages for different target demographics. </div> <div> </div> <div>Last week, Bharti Airtel became the first telecom operator to launch the Opera Web Pass in the Indian market. The advantage with this product is that it offers an easy enough solution for people have subscriptions to (2G/3G) data packet connections from Airtel, for instance, as well as those who don’t. The Opera Web Pass was previously launched in Malaysia in November last year. “(The Web Pass) is in the interest of the operators to grow their ARPU (average revenue per user), and that is the value proposition. There could be an incremental revenue upside from the operator’s perspective plus it puts him in a position to develop a better price and product proposition for his customer,” Kamath reasons. The Web Pass is the result of an integration of the advertising engine within Opera and the Opera Mini platform, which effectively means that Opera is able to target consumers within the Browser framework, keeping a track of what previous web passes a user has purchased, and thereby making purchase related suggestions.</div> <div> </div> <div><strong>Screening Possibilities</strong></div> <div>While technology continues to form the DNA of the 18 year old Norwegian software company, Opera, Kamath claims, is expanding its horizons and owing to some of the significant acquisitions made in the last 12-18 month period, the company have a distinct advantage over other players in the market. “We acquired an app store called Handster, in the US, recently and now the Opera mobile store is the 5th largest in the world. We also acquired two agencies in the US and the UK which get advertisers on board, we create campaigns and coupled with Ad marvel (an ad servicing platform acquired in 2010), we have the complete eco system in our control; we have the advertisers on one side, we have the serving platform (through Ad Marvel) and we have Opera Mini and other third party publishers as the publishing network,” Kamath elaborates.</div> <div> </div> <div>With all of that in place, Opera is concentrating on consolidating its position as a consumer organisation where they the company has significantly large verticals of business on desktop, an devices (Kamath defines the category as any UI which is not a mobile, tablet or desktop) such as set top boxes, gaming consoles, DTH, car browsers in developed markets such as US and EU. With regard to the television domain, Kamath says that “If you go to a local electronic shop today and ask for a Sony Bravia (launched in September 2012) which comes with an opera TV store, Opera branded TV store browser. Opera is in n the process of signing local app developers who would be interested in interacting with TV consumers at present. The company has been present in the TV space for about 8 years. “We have an Opera web based software development kit (SDK), which is supplied to OEMs across the world, who take our SDK and build their applications or EPG (electronic programme guide)on top of it to make it a full browser experience for the users,” states Kamath. When it comes to the desktop market in India, Kamath says that while Opera can’t compete with “deep pocket players” dominating the market in India, the company is seeking an alternative distribution channels to increase desktop penetration.</div> <div> </div> <div>Despite the extent of their B2B business, mobile is the biggest growth driver and continues to be on top of the company’s priority list. The Opera mobile app store showcases 10,000 developers and 80,000 apps at the moment. “We get a significant amount of traffic on our app store since we are a cross operator, cross device, crossover store. We are not limited to a particular device, or operating system. Since we are a global organisation with presence in many countries, we have a good mix of apps coming from all over the world” says Kamath while claiming that Opera Mini users browse the web 10 x times more than those who use other browsers. There are more than 13 million unique users in India every month consuming from the opera mobile store and half a million downloads, which Kamath considers favourable statistics..</div> <div> </div> <div>In terms of market size, after India the largest markets for Opera Mini are Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria and Mexico. Yet, “we are not shying away from the developed markets,” maintains Kamath. “With developed markets the focus is not on cost saving, compression of data but to do with the browser experience, high end devices, not feature or smart feature phone market. While price sensitive, emerging markets are good for advertising as a business as well,” he says, emphasising on the importance of both.</div> <div> </div>
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