@Sairam: What did you want out of the interview?

Also, we got to speak with EVP of Devices, Scott Hedrick regarding the Wii announcement. Look for that this week as well!!!

- Drew
Best Damn Tech Show, Period.

The started with History starting 1992 how opera started as a research project at Telenor(??!!) and then they signed a contract and moved out, with 7k as starting capital.

Then they did an advertisement sort of intro for non-geeks and CEO added his own info to it, adding they are user oriented.

QA round
Q:Does Apple want to dominate the term widget?
A:NO

Q:Fav widgets?
A:Slashdot, umm ahh umm ahhh, clock, weather, search one that won the competition

Q:The community has been working on opera?
A:Hacker fest 6k people attended and we had a competition at this gathering

Q:opera’s strength a core community
A:yea agree, people remain loyal and spread the word…

Q:how many employees?
A:approaching 300

Q:How many downloads?
A:Difficult to exactly.. more than 100Million (since??)

Q:Big strength Multi platform?
A:Yea, …Microsoft based, symbion, set-top boxes, gaming consoles and aeroplanes

Q:Buoyed by stats that handhelds are catching up to desktop
A:Number of mobile phones is greater than pc, we dont care what people we want to provide solutions .. on any kind of device

Q:Opera has been boasted as lightening quick browser, with widgets, trash can, voice, screen reader .. all these features= is there a trade-off..
A:Speed is a priority, and size too.. since beginning, our first ??? required us to run Opera on a 386 machine, our goal is to run on 10 years old pc we have to have it working efficiently, going back and forward in history about using kb shortcuts and mouse gestures, we add features but we do not use available libraries even though in school u ar taught to not re-invent and use what is available

Q:There are some website that will not work with a browser, is it something you are pushing to catch up with.. compatibility or do you think it should be the other way round.
A:It works both ways, we work hard to make websites work with opera and… if other follow standards … web-desginers need to realize not every one will be using IE6 on 1024×768, and that is the only real solution to the problem but obviously lot of us will have to work towards it.

Q:Integrated bittorrent really got us pumped up, what made you think it was time to bring it to the forefront?
A:We spent a lot of time thinking about it. we spent time improving the… we believe the technology is great and it allows people to share… its about being able to publish… someone who can not afford to provide huge amount of bandwidth… what we have been seeing is that more and more legal content is being made available and this is a good technology let us take it further… it has been kind of done with mp3

Q:screen reader and voice browsing how has user response been to those?
A:quite positive , part of our thinking we should tailor to our user, it is a cool feature too,

Q:when will 9 be final
A:ASAP, not too far off… in a few months

You’ve got three people here who are very impressed and etc etc