Facebook May Buy Opera Software, Still Totally Not Planning to Expand Into Mobile
Despite denials from the highest echelons of Facebook, it sure looks like the social media giant is planning (plotting?) to expand its empire beyond newsfeeds, ads, and “likes”, perhaps to a dedicated Facebook phone and/or a mobile operating system to compete against iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
Facebook has been busy, scooping up patents, acquiring companies, opening an app “center”, and most recently building a dedicated camera app. If the competition doesn’t see something big coming, images of Tony Stark building a prototype Iron Man suit in a cave under the noses of his captors comes to mind.
"Don't mind us, nothing to see here!"
The latest Facebook acquisition rumor concerns Opera Software, whose desktop and mobile browsers have plenty of ardent fans but have been hovering around a percent or two of the browser market share for some time. According to Pocket-lint, a trusted source has informed them that Facebook is interested in buying Opera.
By all accounts, the Opera browsers are quality products, and combined with Facebook’s user base of nearly a billion people, it could find a huge and happy audience very quickly. Assuming Facebook acquires Opera’s talent along with its intellectual property, the sky’s the limit in terms of what they could come up with; it wouldn’t be too large a step toward building a mobile OS with a dedicated Web browser and app store.
Facebook has been busy, scooping up patents, acquiring companies, opening an app “center”, and most recently building a dedicated camera app. If the competition doesn’t see something big coming, images of Tony Stark building a prototype Iron Man suit in a cave under the noses of his captors comes to mind.
"Don't mind us, nothing to see here!"
The latest Facebook acquisition rumor concerns Opera Software, whose desktop and mobile browsers have plenty of ardent fans but have been hovering around a percent or two of the browser market share for some time. According to Pocket-lint, a trusted source has informed them that Facebook is interested in buying Opera.
By all accounts, the Opera browsers are quality products, and combined with Facebook’s user base of nearly a billion people, it could find a huge and happy audience very quickly. Assuming Facebook acquires Opera’s talent along with its intellectual property, the sky’s the limit in terms of what they could come up with; it wouldn’t be too large a step toward building a mobile OS with a dedicated Web browser and app store.
