Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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BARCELONA — Opera has launched new versions of its Mini and Mobile web browsers at the MWC today: Opera Mini Next and Opera Mobile 12.

Opera Mini Next is actually a preview of what’s coming in the next version of Opera Mini, the company’s browser that works on Java-supporting feature phones and smartphones.

It brings Facebook and Twitter integration through something called Smart Page, a starting screen that gives you easy access to social networking functions, news and other goodies.

The Smart Page won’t appear in the smartphone version of Opera Mini Next, though. There, users will get hardware acceleration and a revamped speed dial, which now features an unlimited number of Speed Dial shortcuts.

The company’s native smartphone browser, Opera Mobile, has reached version 12 for Android and Symbian devices. It brings WebGL support, which should make it easier for developers to create and distribute cross-platform games. It also supports Opera’s HTML5 parser Ragnarök, more Speed Dial customization options as well as support for camera use in the browser.

You can get the Android version of Opera Mobile 12 in the Android Market. Opera Mini Next is available at http://m.opera.com/next.

I first met Eric Vishria in 1999 when he interviewed at Loudcloud (later Opsware), the company I co-founded with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz. We were looking for a smart, fired up young dude to be CEO Ben Horowitz’s “mini me.” Eric, then 20 years old, fit the bill and showed from the start that he had a ton of potential. He quickly rose through the ranks in various product and marketing roles, ending up running most of the company’s marketing for us. We got to know each other well since as co-founder and CTO, my job was to be the technical guy explaining to the marketing guy what we were doing and why it mattered, so marketing could explain it to the world.

When Opsware was sold to HP in September 2007, we spent a year there with Eric running a half-billion dollar BU for HP software while I was CTO. Both great jobs, but within a year we found ourselves missing the startup life. We began percolating new ideas independently, and the natural thing was to bounce ideas off each other.

In summer 2008, we were pitching each other our individual ideas and realized we should really work together. We hadn’t nailed down what we wanted to do, but whatever it was, we knew it needed to be together. It had been Eric’s dream since the age of eight to be CEO of his own great company. Being CEO was something I thought I might like to try this time around. One of my better decisions was making a bet on eight-year-old Eric’s ambition rather than my own mid-life curiosity, paving the way for our collaboration.

Throughout the fall of 2008 we were combing the Internet, making observations, and generating ideas. We would meet at each other’s houses or Buck’s in Woodside for breakfast, armed with onepagers to talk through. Most of the ideas were terrible, a fact that usually became obvious before the OJ arrived, but a few made it to the next round.

One idea we were both attracted to was reinventing the desktop in the cloud. It was clear virtually all applications were moving from the desktop into the cloud, leaving the desktop a bit of an empty shell. We quickly realized the browser was the new desktop — why don’t we reinvent that? We took the idea seriously enough to move our meetings from the dining table to a whiteboard, and soon hammered out the vision for what RockMelt would become — a browser reinvented for the way people use the web today, with friends, sharing, and favorite sites built in.

Having worked together for nearly 10 years before founding RockMelt, we felt confident there wouldn’t be any surprises; we knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This worked to our advantage when we began seeking investment since it took away one of the big risks startups face – founders who don’t end up getting along or who begin to develop conflicting company visions.

Our first pitch was to Marc Andreessen, our longtime friend and industry visionary, and Ben Horowitz, one of the greatest company builders either of us had ever known. They immediately loved the idea, but in typical Marc and Ben style, put us through the wringer on the details. Several weeks, our first two engineers, a working prototype, and many pitch revisions later, Marc and Ben were on board along with our coach and mentor Bill Campbell, legendary angel investor Ron Conway, and a few other investors — RockMelt was off to the races!

- Tim Howes

Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon’s HTML5 app that lets you read Kindle books both online and offline from your browser, is now available for Firefox.

Amazon made the Kindle Cloud Reader available to users of Chrome, Safari for desktop and Safari for iPad in August. The launch of the iPad version stirred up some controversy, since it was seen as a way to subvert Apple’s in-app purchase policies. Cloud Reader lets Amazon sell and store books in software that looks and feels just like an app available in Apple’s App Store, but because the program is distributed directly by Amazon, the company isn’t forced to fork over a 30% share of each sale to Apple.

The Firefox version isn’t at all controversial: It simply makes it possible for you to access, organize and add to your existing Kindle library without downloading any software to your desktop. Your library will be automatically synced between the Reader and the rest of your Kindle apps and devices, meaning that if you leave off on page six while reading in your web browser, you can continue reading in the same place on your Internet-connected Android phone, iPad or other Kindle-enabled device.

Max Jeffrey is a serial entrepreneur, podcaster and novelist. He co-founded ThisWeekIn.com, ZeroDegrees, SuperSig and The Palace and is currently writing the sequel to Max Quick: The Pocket and the Pendant (HarperCollins, 2011).

The last few months have seen an explosive resurgence in real-time environments, last popular in the late ’90s. The interesting thing is that this new zeitgeist seems to have taken root in multiple places within the space of a few short weeks.

I’ve seen this all before: I was one of the founders of an avatar chat company called The Palace, Inc. back in 1995. Although quite popular (10 million users at its peak in 1998), The Palace never found a revenue stream that worked. As Jake Winebaum once told me, Palace was a phenomenon, not a business. He was right. But that was then, and this is now.

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The New Real-Time Landscape

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Let’s examine a few examples. Avatar-based chat room Shaker took the gold two weeks ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Created as a Facebook app, Shaker lets users enter an isometric environment that resembles a bar. You can see and interact with other fully articulated avatars that look like mannequins. Users can chat, dance, give other users virtual drinks, see which of your Facebook friends are nearby and invite them to join the party. There is no “point” to Shaker interaction; it’s simply fun and engaging.

Then, there’s the twin phenomenon of Turntable.fm and Chill.com. Turntable lets you enter a virtual room (again with an avatar) and either DJ yourself or listen to other users select music. Chill is much the same idea, only it showcases YouTube videos or real-time streamed events. The idea behind both is shared media consumption while chatting with friends as you watch or listen together. If you recall the ’90s show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, you’ll know what I mean.

Worlize.com is perhaps the most Palace-like of the real-time spaces. Allowing for custom avatar uploads and creation of user-owned spaces, Worlize has the expressiveness, color and “aliveness” that made the Palace tick. You can invite your friends to join from Facebook or via a tweeted link. Worlize also allows for a few tricks: embedded YouTube windows and a live feed from your webcam as an avatar option.

Google Hangouts mostly centered on video party-lines wherein users could watch YouTube videos together. And with the most recent upgrade to Google+, shared whiteboards and shared desktops were added. Clearly, Google felt that the real-time environment is where the action is.

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Real-Time Tech Has Come of Age

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So what’s going on here? Why now, and not back then?

One of the largest challenges we faced back in the ‘90s with these environments was getting people to show up at the same time. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a Palace avatar materialize, look around at the empty room and dematerialize — only to have someone else materialize minutes later. There was no way to synchronize people’s participation.

But now, Turntable.fm sends me email whenever one of the DJ’s I follow starts spinning virtual vinyl. And with the Facebook and Twitter integration of all these environments, rallying up an online party is not all that difficult anymore — they’re virtual flashmobs.

We also faced significant technical challenges back then. The Palace and its competitors required hefty standalone clients or huge Netscape plugins crowbarred into the browser. The frequent changing of avatars, room art and real-time games meant a central server needed to coordinate a large flow of information. The “lag,” as it came to be known, destroyed the illusion of being in a space with other people. Now bandwidth is cheap, content delivery networks deliver art assets quickly, and Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds have pointed the way to solutions once unimaginable.

Lastly, real-time business models have changed significantly over the years. We had three choices with the Palace: charge for the software (nobody wanted to pay because “everything’s free on the Internet!”), charge for registration codes and “extras” (same objection) or charge for advertising. In the ‘90s, however, successful advertising on webpages was akin to sorcery, let alone advertising inside this weird little universe of speech balloons and downloadable clients. We couldn’t convince anyone to advertise at volume.

But again: that was then, and this is now. Zynga and others have shown that the purchase of in-world virtual products to “pimp” your farm, castle, mafia hideout or avatar is a highly lucrative business. Chill is already experimenting with “appointment viewing” of real-time net shows. Recently, the company experimented with This Week In Venture Capital. Finally, I profess that I’ve increased my iTunes purchases thanks to all the new music I’ve discovered within Turntable.fm rooms.

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Why Now?

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Back to the original question: Why is now the right time for real-time? Why has it grabbed the collective imagination at this exact moment? Simply, it is the last great frontier in social media. It is the logical extension of an already powerful trend.

We’ve been heading this way for some time. First we had Geocities — basically static shrines to this or that topic. Then we had static profiles in Ryze and Friendster and MySpace. Better, but still stale over time. Then Facebook and Twitter materialized, making near-synchronous feeds ubiquitous. It wasn’t quite real-time, but edging in that direction.

Now we’ve finally arrived — real-time is the latest social space. The technology is there and, at last, the right psychology is in place that will make these services explode. And I, for one, welcome our new avatar overlords.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pinterest

Quick Pitch: Pinterest is a digital pinboard for things you love.

Genius Idea: A bookmark that makes it easy to save photos from any webpage.

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When Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann was looking for an engagement ring for his girlfriend, he turned to his own product for inspiration. He found the right one on the list of a jewelry enthusiast, and pinned it to his digital board.

He also used Pinterest to help plan the wedding, keep track of potential future vacation destinations, list his family’s favorite recipes and just remember images that fit the title “little things I love.”

This flexibility is part of Pinterest’s draw. Expressing passion for a hobby is just as easy as browsing for your next purchase. But what’s even more addictive about the site — a collection of collections — is that it’s just as much about the users as it is what they’ve posted.

“The things you collect say a lot about you, and we wanted to bring that experience online,” says Silbermann.

Here’s how Pinterest works: Users create lists about anything and fill them with photos from around the web. They can follow other lists and users, and “repin” specific items. An Instapaper-like bookmark makes adding to a list from anywhere much easier than writing a blog post or uploading an image to a photo-sharing service. And the browser experience is ideal for the small attention spans of web readers — almost no text, almost all pictures.

Pinterest revealed Friday that it had raised a $27 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

The site is still not open to the public, and users need to request an invitation to use it. Silbermann says that there are no monetization plans in the works. It’s unusual for a startup in private beta to get this much attention from a top investment firm — especially a startup with no clear path to making money.

What Pinterest has is people’s attention. Judging by the 4.5-star iTune rating of its iPhone app, that attention is positive. Though the company declined to reveal information about their userbase, almost 30,000 users have taken time to rate the app in the app store.

That’s about as many ratings as Tumblr’s iPhone app — which had a four-year head start.

Image courtesy of istockphoto, chieferu

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Mozilla’s rapid release schedule for Firefox continues with the arrival of Firefox 7 for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Firefox 7 comes less than six weeks after the release of Firefox 6. Mozilla moved to a more rapid release cycle with a more streamlined, frequent and incremental upgrade cycle a la Google’s Chrome browser, after Firefox 4 launched back in March.

As a result, most of the changes have taken place under the hood. Mozilla boasts that Firefox 7 uses less memory and performs faster.

Firefox 7 also improved its support for cutting-edge web technologies, including hardware-accelerated Canvas for HTML5 animations. That means that web apps and browser-based games should get better performance.

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Memory Improvements: Your Mileage May Vary

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The Firefox 7 team says that the latest version of the browser uses less memory, a reduction of anywhere between 20% and 50%. In a blog post at Mozilla Hacks, Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote details the memory improvements. He says the benefits will be most noticeable for users that:

• Keep Firefox open for a long time
• Have many tabs open at once
• Use Firefox for Windows
• View pages with lots of text
• Use Firefox while also using other memory-intensive programs

In our tests, using a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM running OS X Lion, we were unable to ascertain just how much better Firefox 7 used memory as compared to Firefox 6. However, we did pit it against the most stable release of Google Chrome.

I opened up the same browser pages in Firefox 7 and in Chrome. They included Mashable, Variety.com, Google+, Facebook, Mashable‘s backend website and Hulu.com. On Hulu, I played a video in high definition.

To take Flash out of the equation, I then removed the Hulu tab from both browsers. These are the results.

As you can see, the main Firefox app uses the same amount of memory in both tests. The “plugin-container” process is actually what Firefox uses to sandbox some plugins, like Flash, so that even if that process crashes, the rest of the app stays in place.

Mozilla’s tests indicate that peak memory usage for Firefox 7 is lower than its predecessors and that sustained usage is more consistent. We haven’t had enough time to test whether memory usage continues to increase the more time a tab or window is left open, but we’ll assume this is true.

For Mac users, Firefox 7 is still no match for Google Chrome, at least when it comes to memory usage. To be fair, Apple’s own browser, Safari, has memory performance issues with OS X Lion, and Firefox 7 could perform better in Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier. Firefox has historically had better Windows performance, especially when it comes to memory usage, and we expect those are the users that will really see the benefits.

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Is the Rapid Update Cycle Working?

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I’m conflicted about Mozilla’s rapid-release approach to Firefox. As nice as it is not to have to go months or years between major updates — especially when it comes to support for newer HTML5 and JavaScript technologies — I have to wonder if this process isn’t too rapid.

Because Firefox has historically been such a version-number driven product, users are conditioned to expect major feature improvements every time a release is introduced. On the flip-side, Google doesn’t make a big deal about the version numbers of its Chrome browser. Users just know it as Chrome.

Part of the reason that a rapid update cycle works for Google Chrome is that the updates take place completely in the background. Because of how Chrome plugins are designed, most will continue to work with new versions. Firefox has a much larger and more complex add-on environment and as a result, there will always be add-ons that are incompatible with the latest release.

While I firmly believe that the move to more rapid, consistent improvements is good for the browser ecosystem as a whole, I’m not convinced that the Firefox team has figured out the best way to alert users about updates or that that the messaging behind how these updates work is on target.

What do you think of Firefox 7? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook announced Tuesday that it would be rolling out new site features and designs. Namely, top stories and a ticker, to name a couple.

Tuesday night Facebook users began encountering a host of new features, the most noticeable of which was “Top Stories,” a feed addition that “clues you into the most interesting stories,” according to the company. The company’s blog says, “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff.”

In case you don’t find Top Stories relevant, however, Facebook allows you to hide or add posts based on your interest level. Just click the top right drop-down menu on the post, much like in the former design.

Another major new tool is Ticker, which Facebook touts as a way to “join friends in real-time.” The company’s blog adds, “News Feed often has a time lag … Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to see and chat with your friends about photos, articles, and other things they’re posting in real-time.” It’s a clear nod to Twitter’s feed, but Facebook allows you to hover over ticker updates and respond instantly.

Apart from Top Stories and Ticker, Facebook has made aesthetic improvements here and there. Take a look through the gallery below for a tour of the new features. Are you on board with the redesign?