SPOTLIGHT: Opera Software adds 2M users

Opera Software says its new mobile Web browser, Opera Mini, has attracted about 2 million users globally to the WAP alternative since it launched the service earlier this year. The daily number of Web pages accessed with Opera Mini averages about 4 million, said the company. For T-Mobile in Europe, which started offering Opera Mobile to deliver the full Internet on smartphones in 2005, the Opera Mini has proven to increase revenues. After launching its web'n'walk service in June, users of the service visited about 33 Web pages per month, resulting in a 489 percent increase in data volume per user and 119 percent of data ARPU per user. Given that data ARPU (excluding SMS) ranges in the single-dollar range, 489 percent doesn't represent as high of a jump as it seems, but it shows that making data access easier certainly has an impact on usage. Article