Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder and CEO, Opera

“Are you looking for an alternative to Netscape and Microsoft Explorer?” That was the question Jon von Tetzchner asked in 1996 in one of his early Usenet messages promoting the Opera browser that he and other entrepreneurial Oslo, Norway, denizens had begun to develop two years earlier.

In the Internet market, where the age of companies is counted in dog years, Opera is ancient. The 10-year-old firm actually burst onto the scene when most people probably were browsing the Internet at a crisp 14.4 kb/s.

“Mosaic was the only browser, and we thought we could make a better one,” von Tetzchner said. “Netscape came and we thought we could compete, and Microsoft just copied Netscape. Microsoft played hardball in the market, but we made money on a small scale, and that's all we needed.”

Opera made money by charging users a subscription fee for its browser, something that's as unheard of in the Internet market as — well, as unheard of as Opera might be to many mainstream Web users. It made the model work by demonstrating the efficiency of its interface and having the fastest download time on the market.

Now Opera is boosting its efforts to become the mobile browser of choice. By using the same source code as its original browser and adapting it for mobile phone screens with its own Small Screen Rendering technology, von Tetzchner believes Opera delivers more information to phone displays more efficiently than other browsers.

But don't make the mistake of thinking Opera is coming a bit late to the mobile party. The company put its first mobile browser on Psion and Nokia devices in 2000, von Tetzchner said. It's now on Sony Ericsson and Kyocera phones, and a new partnership with Motorola may further broaden Opera's appeal.

Opera's latest innovation is mobileIPG, a capability allowing mobile phone browsers to interface with Internet-enabled TV set-top boxes to remotely schedule the recording of programs.

“I don't know if everyone will use this, but it's interesting and useful, an example of what can be done,” von Tetzchner said. “There will be more to come.”