It's strange, it seems like there are 'hot' areas in technology from time to time for no apparant reason. For example, video on the web is big "right now", podcasting was big before, blogging before that, and lets not forget mashups somewhere in there too and a heap of others. I'm not sure if this is simply media bias, or maybe a race to VC funding? What ever the case there is something less glamorous but more lucrative stirring on the horizon: mobile data.
I'm not talking about shitty WAP where you are charged per minute to access a fraction of the web that's ported to WML. I'm not even talking about DoCoMo's highly popular in Japan, more reasonable i-mode with their subset of XHTML called CHTML. The future is pure XHTML, CSS, and Javascript thanks to Opera.
*Opera Desktop:* Opera's legacy play. Browse the standard compliant web on your desktop. Nothing new here.
*Opera Mini:* Opera's mobile legacy play. Browse the web from your old (1.5+ year old) mobile. Seemlessly run through Opera's proxy and let it clean up the code, reformat, and remove code you don't need.
*Opera Mobile:* Opera's browser on a phone play. Surf the web just like you're on a desktop but with a smaller screen. Benefit from Opera's "small screen rendering" technology.
*Opera Widgets:* Opera's Internet platform play. The web is a transparent pool of services in this model. Take your existing web site 'view' code. Whack it on the phone, render as a widget on your desktop or an application on your phone. Access remote sites via AJAX. Don't know what a Beagle is? Open up your wikipedia widget on your mobile/desktop, type in 'beagle' and there's a bunch of info on Beagles.
So back to my original point. What's bigger, video on the web or a platform that could create a ubiquitous Internet?