Roger Strukhoff

Oslo-based Opera Software has been focusing on mobile browsing for many years. Now it has launhced something called the "Oupeng" mobile browser in China, in a joint venture with Telling Telecom,, China's leading mobile-phone distributor.

Oupeng was developed through the joint venture, which is called nHorizon Innovation (Beijing) Software Ltd.

Opera claims to be the world's leading mobile browser provider, with more than 130 million users. Certainly that will be challenged as the iPhone and Android phones proliferate.

But it has maintained a steady overall browser marketshare of about 3% worldwide for many years, despite the competitive heft behind IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Opera has also found great success in Eastern Europe, with market shares as high as 47% (in Georgia), 36% in Russia, and a steady 8-11% in the key developing nations Poland and the Czech Republic.

And now, Opera has focused on what is potentially the world's largest market.

It claims its rendering engine and data compression increases page-loading speeds with Oupeng by a factor of 10. Oupeng also embeds the social networking platform Weibo, which Opera describes as the "leading microblog service in China." Weibo is designed for picture sharing, quick comments, and pushing updates on selected topics to its users. 

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