Opera

Opera Software ASA develops Web browsers for the desktop, device and mobile markets. Opera started out in 1994 as a research project in Norway's largest telecom company, Telenor, and it branched out into an independent development company a year later. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices in Sweden, Japan, China and the US, Opera Software developed the Opera Web browser (download) which includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated searches, an E-mail program, RSS newsfeeds and IRC chat.

Opera Mobile (download) enables users to download MP3s, images and other web content directly to the mobile phone. It is available for Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and a range of other platforms. Opera Mini (download) brings the web to almost all WAP-enabled mobile phone lines.

In a famous publicity stunt upon release of the Opera 8 Browser in April 2005, CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner promised that if download numbers reached 1 million within four days of the launch, he would swim from Norway to the US with only one stopover for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother's house in his home country, Iceland. Downloads exceeded his goal and von Tetzchner dove in for his swim, accompanied by his PR manager on a rubber raft. The trip was aborted when the raft was said to have suffered a puncture and von Tetzchner "rescued his PR manager" who, it turned out could not swim (or read maps, for that matter).

Last updated: May 08, 2006.

Quotes:

"A supreme social challenge." - Cleveland Amory

"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible." - W. H. Auden

"If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni." - W. H. Auden

"Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television." - Luciano Berio

"The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one." - Jean De La Bruyere

"Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process." - Kenneth, Lord Clark

See more famous quotes about Opera