Interview: Cameron Moll

This month we feature an interview with Cameron Moll, one of the more influencial and reveered new media designers of our time. From writing a new book on Mobile Web design to designing acclaimed Web sites, there doesn't seem to be anything this creative design guru can't do. Like most of you - we wanted to know what makes the man tick....

Leaving Las Vegas

by Opera's David Storey

Opera recently had a major presence as a main sponsor at PubCon, in Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of attending the event, along with a good handful of other Opera people, that represented a cross section of our company. While it felt like almost the entire city was busy winning (or mostly losing) their fortune, we were bunkered down preparing to get our message across.

Day one was mostly spent watching sessions, which included talks by our very own Daniel Goldman, and CEO - Jon Von Tetzchner. One of the hi-lights for me was a keynote by former Apple Software Evangelist - Guy Kawasaki. His speech was delivered with humour throughout, and was based on his book, The Art of the Start. It contained a lot of good advice, that any company would do well to heed.

The rest of the conference was spent on booth duty, and I have to say that ours looked great. It seemed like Jon's message got across, as I lost count of the amount of times people came up asking how to install Opera Mini on their Blackberrys and Treos. I think we've won a fair few converts, when they saw how much it blew the native browsers out of the water. One of the desktop features I enjoyed showing to developers, was how Opera can use Small Screen mode to show what a web page will look like in our Mobile browser. This feature went down very well, with many people making a point to check out their own site and look into ways of improving it. Dev.Opera has articles on how to design for mobile if you are interested in doing the same, along with the beta versions of some of the develop tools that we released at the event. A few people came up to me, to show issues they had with their site in Opera, and it was great to use these tools to show what the problems were and fix them there and then.

The attendees themselves were an interesting mix, from people that knew and tested in Opera, to people that hadn't used it since version 7, and people who didn't even know what Opera did. Being able to sit down with people, and personally show them the advantages Opera gives to them when surfing the web was a invaluable experience. We won a fair few converts, that I'm sure will help us spread the word on the other side of the big pond. We even got a good number of Google people to promise to don Opera t-shirts in the office when they got back. I'd love to see photos of that, if you're reading...