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In what seems like a bit of round about pressure on Apple to let Opera Mini into the App Store for the iPhone, Opera is announcing today that "Opera Mini is money". The company said in its blog this morning that its mobile browser, Opera Mini , has generated more than $1.2 billion per year for mobile operators. Sponsor The report, which the company pulls from its monthly " State of the Mobile Web Report ", seems clearly aimed at letting AT&T know that its browser brings in the big bucks and perhaps the company should give Apple a little nudge. Currently, Apple only allows Safari to operate as a browser on the iPhone and all other browser apps are simply overlays on top of Apple's native browser. Opera says in its post that its Opera Mini users generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for mobile operators, using $1 per megabyte as a standard. The quote from Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's co-founder, says it all. "We like to think of Opera Mini as a win-win solution," said Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder, Opera. "Consumers who would otherwise not pay for the mobile Web can do so without fear of 'sticker shock' when they see their bill. People paying for a flat-rate data plan can enjoy quick and hassle-free browsing over EDGE or 3G connections. Operators attract new customers for their data packages, and their strained networks can catch their breath while our servers do the heavy lifting." "Who could pass up such an opportunity?" Opera seems to be saying. And for iPhone users, who are required to buy an unlimited data plan, the winner here would be AT&T, because Opera uses a compression system that the company claims can compress data by up to 90%. For some iPhone apps, like Skype and Sling , overuse of the 3G network was a claimed concern. With compression, AT&T could serve up the same or better experience while using less bandwidth. In case you were wondering, it's been just over six days and three hours since Opera submitted its mini browser to the App Store. Discuss

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Opera Says "Mini Is Money" (Hint, Hint AT&T)

Fliptop , a new content subscription service, is one of several companies presenting at this week's DEMO conference in Palm Springs. Among a large group of startups, this was one of the first to catch my eye, making me think "wow, I need that!" In short, what Fliptop offers is a simple way to subscribe to a website's content. But unlike traditional RSS feeds, which just offer a direct feed which must be added to an RSS reader like Google Reader or FeedDemon , Fliptop's service provides more features, like the option to filter content by keyword, follow only select topics or categories and the ability to receive email digests of the just content you're interested in. Sponsor For Web Publishers The Fliptop service is available in two formats - one designed for website publishers and another designed for web surfers . The first provides an embeddable button that publishers can add to their site. When clicked, this button prompts the user as to which topics they want to follow. A sports site could set it up so fans could just check boxes next to their favorite team names, for instance. Another option below the checkboxes lets you further refine the content you choose by keyword filters. So, here on ReadWriteWeb.com , for example, you could follow news about "mobile, real-time web, apple" etc. (Keywords are separated by commas). After picking your options, you click "Next" and then choose how you want to be alerted - either via a traditional RSS feed or by email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS text. If choosing the email option, you can even configure how often you want to be alerted - once per day, once a week or immediately. For Consumers However, you don't have to rely on publishers to begin using Fliptop before you can try it. A browser bookmarklet is available which lets you drag-and-drop a Fliptop button to your web browser's bookmarks. Click the new "Subscribe" button it creates when you're on any page that has an RSS feed (look for the orange icon in the address bar of your browser). When clicked, you can configure how you want to follow that site. At the moment, your only options here are email or RSS. The service is simple, incredibly easy to use and useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their news feeds. (Gadget blog readers, rejoice! This product is perfect for you!). The only downside to the service as it stands right now is that it requires you to fill out CAPTCHAs when signing up. These spam blocking tools force you to type in the blurry words you see into a text box before confirming your subscription. And if requesting an email subscription, you then have to click yet another confirmation sent to you via email to assure Fliptop that you really did want to subscribe. We appreciate that the company is looking out for us, but two confirmations is at least one too many for what should be a speedier service, in our opinion. Will Fliptop Make Website Subscriptions More Mainstream? The real question now is whether something like Fliptop will encourage more people to follow a website's content via an automated mechanism, be it a customized, filtered RSS feed or an email digest. The idea of subscribing to a website directly via an RSS feed is one that, for whatever reason, never quite caught on with the general public. However, those same folks probably use RSS without even knowing it - like when they follow their favorite blog on Facebook, for example. The updates they track there are, in most cases, automated via RSS technology. Fliptop could potentially reach these same sort of non-technical users too, thanks to its simple terminology (publisher buttons say "follow" not "subscribe"), a clean layout and easily understandable filtering options. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see if any web publishers pick this up and place it on their site. Discuss

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Fliptop Makes RSS Easy, More Configurable

At the time of this writing, it's been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store. How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple's notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone. Sponsor Opera first announced that it was planning to bring its mobile browser to the iPhone at the beginning of February. As we noted then, Apple's response is uncertain, as it has yet to allow any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone. While other apps work on top of Safari, there are no other independent browsers. Opera Mini is already available for Symbian and Android and Mozilla has been working on apps for Android and Windows Mobile. A primary difference between Opera and Safari is the browser's server-side rendering, which downloads a web page to a server and compresses it before sending it to the client, in this case your phone, for viewing. This method can reduce page load-times dramatically and could be even more important for mobile browsing than it is for web viewing at home. The following sneak-peek video shows a full-featured, tabbed browser that certainly looks a lot faster than Apple's native Safari. Even if we end up trying Opera Mini and decide to stick with Safari, in the end we feel it's always better to have options when it comes to software and platforms. But then again, that's not exactly what Apple is known for, is it? Hopefully, Opera Mini will pass muster and it will be the beginning of the browser revolution for the iPhone - or, at very least, we'll have two browsers to choose from. Discuss

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Opera for the iPhone? We Sure Hope So.

Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts , a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API. Sponsor Thanks to this, you can now import all your Gmail contacts to the local database and use this contact info to autocomplete forms anywhere on the web. You can also import data about your Twitter friends and if you are on a Mac, you can import your local address book as well. Contacts will also import avatars from Gravatar whenever they are available. Lots of Ambition Beyond Autocompletion This email autocompletion feature is really just a first step for Mozilla, though. The real mission of this tool is to give users more control over their own data - a mission that is also very much in sync with what Mozilla considers its own mission to be these days. When you import your contacts database on most websites today to check if your friends are already online or to invite them to the service, you have to trust this service that it will keep this data private. Once more sites implement Contacts directly into their services, however, you will be able to control exactly what data a third-party site can access and retain control over this data. The current version of Contacts consists of four pieces: a browser-based database that syncs with your address books. Contacts uses the Portable Contacts format to represent this data in the database. a generic importer system that allows developers to create importers for desktop and web-based address books an email autocompletion feature a Javascript API that third-party sites can use to access all of your data (with explicit permission and the ability to filter the data) Give it a Try After installing the addon, you can test both the autocomplete and the tool's export features here . Discuss

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New Mozilla Labs Project Wants to Give You Total Control Over Your Address Book

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome , the company's increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome. Sponsor Read 52 Languages Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don't need it for. One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google's servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post. Better Privacy Controls In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new "Content Settings" option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls. What About the Mac and Linux? With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn't easy. While these new features aren't available for Mac and Linux users yet, it's likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome . Discuss

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Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation and New Privacy Features