Hasta La Gadget!

Opera has just reported that it lost about 91 of its employees, which amounts to almost 10% of its workforce. Half of the employees were developers for the software company, and the reason for the cut was due to Opera’s decision to switch over to the open-source WebKit browser. The switch left the company with 840 employees last quarter, down from the 931 that it had previously had.

Opera has stated that the restructuring of the company due to the switch actually cost around $7.8 million. Due to Opera switching from it’s old proprietary, rendering engine, Presto, to WebKit, many of the jobs at the company became obsolete. Opera stated that the workers left voluntarily after they had received their severance packages. Opera was kind enough to help many of the workers find new jobs within the industry.

Opera also stated that because of the switch to WebKit, it didn’t need to dedicate a majority of its resources to improving Presto. All it needed to do was contribute to the open-source WebKit community. With that, some of Opera’s key engineers were transferred to more product-specific roles within the company.

Opera believes that with the company switching to WebKit, and with its recent acquisition of Skyfire, the company is about to start its new, exciting chapter. It had recently announced that over 300 million users are using its product on a daily basis, and it’s ready to do something big to one-up itself. It will show off a glimpse of what it’s been working on at the Mobile World Congress next week.

[via The Next Web]

Opera cuts down its workforce by 10% is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung Electronics presents new feature phone REX series that come with several smart features and intuitive user interfaces, targeting consumers in emerging markets. Samsung held a launching event at Oberoi Hotel in Inida on the 14th. The event was attended by about 150 audiences drawing wide interest from local media and partners. REX series phones have touch screen display, pre-loaded SNS apps on 4*4 icon layout, various widgets, and TouchWiz user interface

In a sudden joining of former leaders in the mobile browser arena that have seen their fortunes turn, Opera announced tonight that it has acquired Skyfire for about $155 million in cash and stock. According to the press release, Opera believes one of the things the two can help each other with is its WebPass program that provides short-term mobile data, by further optimizing user’s data requirements. Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck will become an executive vice president at Opera and oversee joint offerings for the two, as well as remain CEO of Skyfire as an independent but wholly-owned subsidiary of Opera.

If you’re still using Skyfire don’t expect it to go away anytime soon, as the two indicate its browser will continue to be developed and supported. The company says three large US mobile operators are already customers for its Rocket Optimizer tech, meant to speed up all manner of data even as mobile connections have gone from dial-up to broadband speeds. Opera claims its advertising chops can help the Skyfire Horizon mobile browser and toolbar applications as well. The deal is expected to close before mid-March, and the two will be taking meetings at MWC 2013 later this month to show mobile operators how much better they are together.

Filed under: Mobile

Comments

Source: Opera, Skyfire Blog

Browser developer Opera has passed the 300m monthly users mark, celebrating the milestone by transitioning to WebKit for its Android and iOS apps, with the first open-source contributions already apparently made. The shift to WebKit, away from Opera’s home-grown browser engine, will begin this year, though the roadmap is described as “gradual”; it’ll get its first public preview, meanwhile, at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.

For Opera, the change in underlying platform is because “it makes more sense” to work in collaboration with existing open source projects, CTO Håkon Wium Lie said today. “Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”

The first stage of the process has already, in fact, been teased. Opera ICE, shown last month, is a minimalist app that pares back browsing to the bare minimum, with advantages in speed and simpler navigation. Described as an R&D project by Opera, ICE will be further detailed “in the future” the company says, though its immediate attention is on more market-ready products, such as the Android app.

As well as WebKit for the mobile portfolio, Opera will adopt Chromium – the open-source engine which powers Google’s Chrome browser – for its desktop software. There’s no word on when, exactly, the first fruits of the software switch-over will be released publicly.

Opera hits 300m users: Celebrates with WebKit/Chromium adoption is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Opera Mediaworks recently published its State of the Mobile Advertising report for Q4 2012. The report offers data for the mobile advertising market from the last quarter of 2012 helping to shed light on popular mobile trends. The source of the data used in the report is Opera’s extensive mobile advertising platform serving 50 billion ad impressions each month.

Those ad impressions are spread across about 12,000 mobile sites and apps according to the company. The report shows that Q4 was a record quarter with over two times increase in the amount of ad impressions and revenue the publishers compared to other quarters of 2012. The increase in advertising is associated with the seasonal impact of holiday shopping using mobile devices.

The report shows that the Android operating system is on the rise thanks in part to the incredible popularity of the Samsung Galaxy S III. Despite Android growing rapidly, iOS is still the top operating system for monetization. However, Android did pass iOS by two percentage points in market share for global ad impression volume.

The top ad impression generating categories of the mobile market were music, video, and media. The report shows that 21.4% of all ad impressions came from those three categories. The report also shows that international mobile traffic is growing significantly with ad impressions from North America declining to 64% from 74% of the global market as international traffic increases. One country that’s growing particularly quickly is the Russian Federation with ad impressions increasing 60%.

[via Opera]

Mobile advertising report shows Android on the rise is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.