Opera is now free!

Opera have removed the ad banner and licensing fee and have made their browser completely free. This move was inevitable since FireFox has been commoditizing the Non-OS bundled browser market. Here's what Opera says about going free:

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today's milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

Opera will still make money by licensing their browser engine to others. For instance, Adobe uses the Opera rendering engine in GoLive to preview content for the desktop and mobile. The Opera for mobile browser is also currently still a paid product and even comes bundled with some mobile devices. Opera has most of the features a typical user might like including tabbed browsing, simple clean interface, download manager, mouse gestures, sessions, url shortcuts and skins. It has some additional features as well like an RSS reader, mail client, a very nice sidebar and an IM client.

Being cross-platform, fast, feature packed and now free, Opera should give FireFox decent competition and shake up the browser market share numbers for sure!

Links

• Opera.com
• Opera 8.50 download

Mobile credit cards: Now in India!

Bharti Tele-Ventures, ICICI Bank & Visa have joined hands to launch mChq - a credit card on the mobile phone. In the first phase, the service will be available to Airtel and ICICI Bank customers in Delhi and Mumbai across 100 retail outlets. The service is RBI approved and VISA claims its safer than the normal swipe card.

Your SIM card stores your credit card information. Not just one, but potentially the information of all your credit cards. If you lose your phone, then deactivating the SIM card will also deactive the credit cards present on the SIM.

While Airtel customers subscribing to the service will be issued a new SIM card free of cost, ICICI Bank card holders will be issued an add-on card on the basis of their existing ICICI Bank-Visa credit card.

So now suppose you’re at a restaurant and need to pay the bill. Here’s how you can use your phone:

• You write your cell phone number of the bill and send it back to the cashier. The cashier then sends the number to a secure server which then sends you a bill on that phone number.
• The bill is picked up by an application on the phone, which asks you if you want to pay the bill. If you agree, then the application displays a list of credit cards whose information is on your SIM card.
• Now you choose one of your credit cards, enter a PIN number and authorize the payment.
• The application now sends encrypted data back to the payment server, which then follows a procedure similar to todays credit card swipe. The restaurant cashier gets a notification of payment received and you may get a printed receipt from the cashier and keep a electronic receipt on your phone.

Links

• Now, your mobile is also a credit card (Business Standard)
• Now, pay through your mobile (Times of India)