In the wake of the speculation about Microsoft acquiring Opera, Google has done a one-year deal that will make it the default search engine for Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The wireless space appears to be where Opera has a good chance of thriving as opposed to the desktop where it, at best, has 1% market share. To be honest, it's a bit of a mystery why Opera hasn't done better on the desktop. It has many of the same features as Firefox but hasn't captured anywhere near the buzz as Firefox. This may be a long shot but I'm thinking Google will acquire Opera in 2006 to create the much-anticipated GBrowser. A Google browser makes complete sense. If you're going to offer a huge menu of Web-based services, why wouldn't you want to own the way people access them? A Google browser could incorporate search, GMail, Blogger, Picasa, Google Analytics and Google Local, Google Base and Google Maps - making it a Flock-like, multi-purpose browser. Google buying Opera somehow makes a lot more sense than Microsoft acquiring Opera - for whatever reason.
Update: John Battelle (I think) believes mobile search will be big in 2006 based on a cryptic post he made today.

 

Only Nortel would come out with a double-shot of news during the week between Christmas and New Year. Earlier this week, it acquired Tasman Networks for $99.5-million in cash to establish a presence in the corporate router market. Today, it discloses the sale of a 24% stake in Volt Delta for $56.4-million. Nortel picked up the equity position in August, 2004 after "contributing" some assets and liabilities of its directory and operator service business to Volta Delta. Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski has been at the helm for only six weeks but he certainly has wasted little time putting his mark on the company. It's been out with the old (Brian McFadden, Susan Spradley, Clent Richardson, Volt Delta) and in with the new (David Drinkwater, Joel Hackney, Tasman Networks). I wonder what we can expect from Nortel in 2006. The Tasman deal suggests it has no intention of getting out of the corporate market so perhaps the optical business is the most vulnerable. The next hurdle for Nortel is $1.275 billion of debt that comes due in February. Nortel CFO Peter Currie suggested the company could tap the junk bond market to re-finance it.

 

The  Financial Times has named Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin as Men of the Year (apparently beating out Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko). I guess it's difficult to argue with the choice(s) given Google's growing presence and popularity but did Google really have more of an impact this year than 2004? Sure, Google's stock soared, its financial results continued to blow away Wall St., it rolled out several new cool services, and it capped off the year by spending $1-billion for 5% of AOL. It sounds like it was busy but was it a Men of the Year year? I would boldly suggest the Man of the Year - at least in the online world - was Rupert Murdoch, who took News Corp. from zero to sixty on the Web with a series of bold strategic acquisitions. After sitting on the online sidelines, Murdoch decided News Corp. needed to get into the game so his M&A people went out and bought IGN Entertainment, which owns AskMen.com, TeamXbox, Rotten Tomatoes and GameSpy, for $650-million. They also purchased Intermix, which owns the wildy-popular MySpace.com, for $580-million, and Scout.com for $60-million. These deals made News Corp. a major online player in a matter of months - putting the company firmly in the middle of the Web's advertising tsunami. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks but you can sure try if he has enough money...and Rupert Murdoch seems intent on making sure he doesn't miss out on the the Web's next growth spurt.