14 October 2008

Opera day makes web sing for Dundee students

The growing importance of mobile browsing of the internet will be laid out by world leaders in the field to computing students at the University of Dundee later this month.

Mobile web browsing, through devices like mobile phones, is a boom area in computing, especially in many developing countries where it is fast becoming the norm.

Opera Software is one of the world's leading companies in providing the technology that supports mobile browsing. Experts from the company will be at the School of Computing to speak to second-year students on October 21st.

They will explain mobile usage trends in your country and how they compare to trends in other regions of the world, and about the history of mobile browsing and the role it plays in developing countries.

The seminar will also cover Web standards, the set of technologies browsers implement to render Web pages and make the Web available to anyone, on any device, anywhere in the world.

'This is fantastic for our students to hear from the people who are at the forefront of the development of the Web,' said Andy Cobley, from the School of Computing.

'Mobile browsing in particular has become a really hot topic. It may not have fully taken off yet in this country but in places like India it has gone through the roof and that is opening up all sorts of new opportunities and challenges.'

The visit from Opera is another opportunity for Dundee students to link directly with some of the biggest business names in the world, following initiatives with the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The Opera seminar takes place on October 21st in the Dalhousie Building, from 3pm to 5pm.

NOTES TO EDITORS

The speakers at the event are Chris Mills and Roberto Mateu.

Chris Mills works for Opera, splitting his time between evangelising Opera's software and web standards, and heading up Opera's developer education activities. This last part includes speaking at conferences, publishing regular web design and development articles on dev.opera.com (check out http://dev.opera.com), and being the creator of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (check out http://www.opera.com/wsc). He is a self-confessed web geek and English language geek, having worked in various geek education roles for the last 8 or 9 years.

Outside of work, Chris is a 'heavy metal warrior', playing really fast drums for many bands, including the mighty Conquest of Steel. He lives in grimy Oldham with his lovely girlfriend Kirsty, son Gabriel, baby daughter Elva, and 3 Macs.

Roberto Mateu is a Product Manager at Opera Software. Prior to joining Opera he earned an MBA and a Master of Science in Information Systems at Boston University. During his time in Boston he also worked at Buzzword.com, a startup later acquired by Adobe Systems. In a previous life he was an assistant brand manager in Procter&Gamble Latin America and had a tech consulting and web development quasi-company in Venezuela. He was diagnosed a geek at birth and has not recovered since.

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