Opera considering entering the IP telephony market
6 CommentsPublished January 18th, 2006 12:49 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
Opera is considering a potential entry into the Voice Over IP (VoIP) market. Rolf Assev, Opera’s vice president for marketing and sales, told the Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, that they are looking into options for implementing some kind of a VoIP telephony into the browser.
The article seems to make the suggestion that Opera will be challenging Skype, the largest free peer-to-peer VoIP network. However, an Opera official told me that Opera has no plans to compete directly against Skype, but wouldn’t elaborate further.
Opera already has an Instant Messaging capability in the browser, through the Private Messages (PM) in its IRC client, so adding voice would be a sensible extension. Implementing an Opera phone would be a logical step for Opera, since it likes to refer to the Opera browser as an “Internet Suite”, which already includes a mail client, a full RSS reader, Newsgroup reader, IRC client, BitTorrent support (soon), and of course the browser itself.
I’m working on trying to obtain more details from Opera; I will post updates as soon as I get them.
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Thanks to Dan1el for the heads up and translation.
Perhaps they implement Jabber with Jingle like Google did with GTalk. Perhaps even in cooperation with Google…
At least I remember using an ICQ-Client within Opera a loooong time ago
Yeah, it would be great perhaps…
Just gimme my Operatalk!!
As Opera considered itself as an internet suite. Five important components must be included.
1) calendar … a must
2) Download manager (modified from transfer manager, improved ui such as adding an auto disconnect thing)
3) ftp client … quite important
4) Html editor… no need to be too powerful, something like mozilla composer or nvu will do.
5)Connection manager
Yes it will bloat the existing software. Opera had better develop both the “professional version” and “personal version” of the software.
The personal version (with calendar,improved download manage) should remain free, and the professional version (actually the bloated version packed with ftp client,html editor and connection manager) can be charged us 29
Just dreaming…
Skype works for me. I probably wouldn’t switch, especially if Opera didn’t have full interoperability with Skype network.
Google have just opened their GTalk protocol to other Jabber and SIP services like Gizmo. If Opera could play nice with Google’s IM services, it’d have to be good for the internet.