That was then, this is now. But it turns out the popularity of Opera Mini is still growing like mad – in fact, last December saw the biggest month-on-month growth for the tiny browser in its history, up 6.3 percent from 195.5 million to 207.8 million users. The Mini servers handled more than 143 billion pages and compressed more than 12 petabytes of data during the month. What gives?

The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. Firstly, the big growth in mobile internet usage these days is in emerging markets, and data can be much more costly – relative to earnings – in such markets than in the ‘developed’ world. This is why other players are also adopting compression techniques, such as Blaast and, somewhat controversially, Nokia.

As Norway’s Opera says in its latest State of the Mobile Web report, issued on Thursday, the earliest adopters of Opera Mini were in Europe and the U.S., with Asia hot on their heels. Adoption in Latin America took off back in 2011, and Africa in particular saw growth at the end of last year. Bear in mind that we’re now talking those areas where internet-capable feature phones and low-end smartphones are becoming people’s first computers.

Interestingly, Opera says 32 percent of its users are now on smartphones – that takes into account the 21.5 million users of Opera Mobile, which is designed specifically for smartphones, but as Opera Mini users outnumber Opera Mobile users roughly 10:1 that percentage spells big-time adoption of the lightweight browser on smartphones, too.

But there is another reason why December was so hot for Opera Mini, and that’s good old seasonality. As Pål Unanue-Zahl, the man behind Opera report, told me: “December is generally a strong month for the sale of mobile phones and a lot of users are discovering the internet on their newly acquired smartphones.”

Either way, Opera Mini is still doing really well, and its popularity should serve as a barometer for anyone designing apps for the emerging markets. Remember, not everyone has the option of being a data hound, and lightweight still rules for many.

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The Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) issued his assessment (PDF) on Friday of Facebook’s compliance with recommendations the regulator made last December. The DPC had been forced into the issue following complaints by a group of Austrian law students calling themselves ‘Europe v Facebook’, and had told Facebook that it had to be more upfront about giving users privacy choices.

The review suggested that Facebook had “fully implemented” most of the DPC’s recommendations, and those that had not been implemented would be taken care of “with a clear timescale” in place.

And one of those moves is apparently to stop recording people’s facial characteristics in order to automatically suggest photo tags.

“I am particularly encouraged in relation to the approach it has decided to adopt on the tag suggest/facial recognition feature by in fact agreeing to go beyond our initial recommendations, in light of developments since then, in order to achieve best practice,” DPC Billy Hawkes said in a statement. “This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU and templates for existing users will be deleted by 15 October, pending agreement with my Office on the most appropriate means of collecting user consent.”

Facebook, which was targeted in Ireland because that’s where all its non-North American business is based, is also crowing about going beyond the call of duty:

“The latest announcement is confirmation that we are not only compliant with European data protection law but we have gone beyond some of their initial recommendations and are fully committed to best practice in data protection compliance.”

But guess what? That’s not the end of the story.

Facebook’s been under fire over precisely the same feature in Germany, where privacy chiefs have accused the social network of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” – remember, this is the home of data protection law we’re talking about here.

When that last bit of bother struck just one month ago, Facebook insisted that:

“We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws.”

So what gives?

Essentially, Facebook has found itself fighting on too many fronts. What began as an obscure concern of people in German-speaking countries has spread: the Norwegian data protection regulator also started probing the feature, and – crucially – so did the Article 29 Working Party (WP29).

The WP29 is a group of privacy regulators from all over the EU, and its recommendations get taken very seriously indeed. In July it said facial recognition features such as photo-tag suggestions should only be allowed when the user gives their explicit consent (and that means the user being tagged, as well as the one doing the tagging).

So yes, Facebook has just gone beyond the Irish DPC’s original recommendation, but only because a higher authority is waving a bigger stick at it, and because the company’s realized it’s not going to win this one.

In any case, even though Facebook is wiping the facial recognition templates it’s already recorded for its EU users, it intends to bring the system back once it’s figured out a “holistic approach” to properly informing those users.

As for Europe v Facebook, they’re still not happy (no surprise there) but tell me this victory is “totally going in the right direction”.

To give Facebook its due, here are the areas in which the DPC says the company has fully implemented its recommendations:

• The provision of better transparency for the user in how their data is handled,
• The provision of increased user control over settings,
• The implementation of clear retention periods for the deletion of personal data or an enhanced ability for the user to delete items,
• The enhancement of the user’s right to have ready access to their personal data and the capacity of FB-I [Facebook Ireland] to ensure rigorous assessment of compliance with Irish and EU data protection requirements.

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Last month, Netflix said better-than-expected losses from its UK and Ireland launch will entice it to launch elsewhere in Europe this year.

Turns out, the new launches will be in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, Netflix announced on Wednesday.

Lovefilm already operates streaming-only movie subscription in three of those countries (Sweden, Denmark and Norway). Now the only one of Lovefim’s markets uncontested by Netflix is Germany.

Netflix signed more than a million subscribers in its first six months in the UK and Ireland, where it does not offer DVD rental. That likely overtakes Lovefilm’s own streaming-only service Lovefilm Instant, which it introduced to compete with Netflix in January.

But Lovefilm is not Netflix’s only competition in Scandinavia. Voddler, Bonnier’s SF Anytime, Viasat’s Viaplay and SVT Player are amongst existing Swedish VOD operators.

Netflix’s Wednesday announcement says it will carry “a wide array of Hollywood, local and global TV shows and movies”. That suggests it has succeeded in inking some content deals with Scandinavian broadcasters as well as movie studios.

IHS Screen Digest recently had this analysis:

“Competing with an entrenched array of existing incumbent players will generate additional costs for Netflix, particularly if the service provider decides to ink deals for the best movie and international TV rights.”

“Sweden presents an attractive market for Netflix, with high GDP, developed broadband infrastructure and positive consumer attitudes to using legal online video services.

“Viaplay has deals with all major international and local distributers. Importantly, many of the incumbent Swedish online video providers already distribute premium video content directly to different connected living room devices (TVs, Blu ray players, game consoles, etc) – traditionally Netflix’s strength.”

Same day Netflix announces Scandinavia move, HBO trumpets “HBO Nordic, which will serve Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.”

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) August 15, 2012

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On Monday it emerged that Visa Europe had told the Swedish payments service — which, like Square, allows smartphone owners to use their handsets as a terminal for card purchases — that it would no longer be able to process Visa payments in three countries. But while the block affected users in Norway, Denmark and Finland, it did not change the service in Sweden, which continues operating as normal. And, as TechCrunch reported, that scattershot approach raised more questions than it answered.

“They’ve come to an internal policy decision, and to be frank we don’t know much more than that,” de Geer told me over the phone on Tuesday. “They gave us warning, but we’ve been trying every day since we got an initial warning to get them to change their position. In the end we didn’t find a solution.”

So what’s the problem? A Visa Europe spokeswoman told me that:

“Visa Europe supports the development of new types of acceptance devices to be used by small merchants not previously accepting cards. However, Visa Europe has not yet agreed for Visa cards to be accepted on the iZettle platform, as it does not currently meet our standard acceptance device requirements.”

But De Geer is confident that the issue isn’t security compliance. iZettle provides a dongle that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone, allowing users of cards with security chips to make payments by signing their name. The service works in accordance with a range of different payment rules, including EMV, SEPA and PCI. And the fact that Visa hasn’t pulled the Swedish service suggests it’s not because of security problems.

Or does it?

The Visa Europe spokeswoman told me that the Swedish payments — where iZettle partners with the leading telco Telia — are being scrutinized too: “We are aware that some Visa transactions have been accepted on the device in Sweden and we are in discussion with the acquirer.”

That seems to suggest a block could arrive in Sweden soon, if Visa can successfully put pressure on Telia and others.

No surprise, then, that some have started to wonder whether it’s a competitive issue — particularly since Visa Inc is an investor in Square. Although Visa Europe is not actually part of the main company, merely a licensee of its services, eyebrows were raised: the company is due to launch its PayPal competitor V.me in Europe later this year.

De Geer suggests it’s not about Square, but could be about a broader sense that payments services like iZettle are competitive to the banks and payment companies who constitute Visa Europe’s members. With $31 million in the bank iZettle is in a pretty strong position to expand, but theoretically it will expand card use — good news, surely, for card providers?

“That’s why it’s so confusing. We can address a market they can’t reach themselves — we’re broadening the market for them; there are around 20 million businesses in Europe that can’t accept card payments right now,” he says. “But whenever you innovate, there’s always fear, confusion or someone thinking we’ll take away their market. This is really the first time in our young history that we have had a blip like this.”

Trying to downplay the impact, he pointed out that a problem with Visa is not necessarily a big roadblock to iZettle’s business as it stands. The countries that have had Visa support removed have only been trialling the product for the past couple of months, with around 15,000 merchants in those countries on board. But it’s clear that this is something that needs addressing, particularly as the company tries to expand to Android and to other markets.

De Geer says it’s a story we’ve seen before.

“You can either work with innovators, or you can sit back like the music industry decided to do and then watch as your industry gets cannibalized. And mobile payment is happening.”

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Now, however, it looks like the time for slow expansion could be over, as the business prepares to step up its game massively thanks to a new €24 million ($31 million) round of funding.

The investment round is being led by Greylock, out of its London office, and Scandinavian venture firm Northzone, best known for its stakes in companies like Spotify and Lastminute. Other investors joining in include private equity firm SEB, as well as existing backers Creandum and Index Ventures. But perhaps most interestingly, Mastercard has gone from being a partner to a strategic investor — especially intriguing given that Visa made a similar pact with Square last year.

This doesn’t mean that iZettle is actually going to go head-to-head with its rival in San Francisco — not least because there is a huge technical difference between the two. Although they look pretty similar, Square works on the American system of magnetic stripe cards, while iZettle is focused on the payment cards with embedded chips that are popular in the rest of the world.

But CEO Jacob de Geer told me that it was time for his company to take what it had learned in the Scandinavian region and go big, with launches in France, Germany and other major European markets on the cards. There is even, he hinted, the potential for rollout even further afield.

“The world is changing fast,” he said on the phone from New York. “I wouldn’t say this is us going into battle — it’s us going to market. All the other guys are doing great products for their users… it’s all about expansion.”

“The major markets are what we’re going for,” he added. “Fifty percent of cards in the world are chip-equipped — so we are looking into that. But right now we’re focusing on Europe, because it’s the region we understand.”

And while Square has shown little interest in expanding internationally, iZettle won’t be out there on its own for long. Its chief competitors are more likely to be companies like PayPal, which wants to move fast with its PayPal Here service, and NFC payment services, which are being pushed hard by a lot of the banks and card companies.

Oh, and then there is always the threat of Germany’s Samwer brothers, who are said to be working on a similar system called Zenpay.

But iZettle may be hoping it can use the money it’s just raised to get a jump on the rest, at least in Europe. It’s already said it wants to go beyond iOS, and de Geer confirmed that the next version will, unsurprisingly, be for Android. But there’s still a lot of testing, re-education and explanation that the business has to do before it can become mainstream. And for parallels, he looks to another Scandinavian startup you may have heard of.

“When I talk to merchants or cardholders, they get it, there’s not too much pushback… but the industry and banks don’t really know what we do. We’re facing the same kind of problem as Spotify did when it had to negotiate with the record labels.”

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Soundrop launched as part of Spotify’s first slate of apps late last year, offering users to join genre- and band-based listening rooms that can be collaboratively programmed. Think Turntable.fm, but without the gimmicky animations and with the power of Spotify’s catalog. Soundrop has been doing well on Spotify’s app platform, with users playing 60 million songs in its more than 7,000 rooms in May alone.

Soundrop co-founder and CEO Inge Sandvik attributed much of this success to one of the key problems a service like Spotify has: It’s great when you know what you want to listen to – but doesn’t expose new music very well. That leads to many people resorting to old favorites instead of discovering new music. “They are listening to the same thing that they have listened to all along,” he said, adding that this wouldn’t warrant paying $10 a month for most people.

Sandvik told me that his company launched all the way back in 2008 with the idea to build Spotify playlists for local bars and coffee shops, something he compared to the idea of the diner jukebox catapulted into the 21st century. Soundrop originally hacked this together based on Spotify’s API, but then launched a much more ambitious take on social music discovery on top of Spotify’s app platform in November.

After concentrating on genre-based rooms first, Soundrop gradually added personalized and private rooms as well as band rooms. Just a few days ago, it officially launched a DJ mode, making it possible for bands and DJs to program their own rooms. One of the first artists to take advantage of this was a duo of Swedish house DJs, who attracted some 80,000 listeners.

But Soundrop’s plans don’t stop with the addition of new listening rooms. The company is also thinking about supercharging other apps on Spotify, many of which could use some help, according to Sandvik. “They are still playlists with a skin on it,” he explained. A forthcoming Soundrop API could help other to make their music apps social and collaborative as well.

Soundrop also plans to extend its reach to the web, allowing users to join rooms outside of the Spotify client. “Our rooms should be able to be embedded everywhere,” Sandvik explained. Of course, that makes even more sense if users can also play music without having access to Spotify, which is why the company is exploring to plug into other services as well. Some of that may even bring videos to Soundrop. “YouTube is a fantastic music service,” said Sandvik.

Soundrop has been bootstrapped until its Series A funding. Its team currently consists of eight people, and Sandvik said that he wants to moderately grow staff to 10 to 12 people.

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Norwegian Aspiro operates WiMP, a subscription unlimited music service with 350,000 paying customers in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Portugal. Three quarters of the outfit was bought by Scandinavian newspaper publisher Schibsted  in January.

“Aspiro is planning alternative business models in music, which will imply a funding requirement in 2012,” the company said on Thursday, without elaborating.

“Aspiro will launch new music services in Germany, the Netherlands, at least two more European countries and at least one country outside Europe in 2012.”

The company saw Q1 music sales grow 177 percent from last year to 49.3 million SEK ($7.1 million), and is targeting 2012 growth of 80 percent. But Q1 2012 losses almost doubled from last year to 10.7 million SEK ($1.5 million).

Its plans come as larger rivals like Spotify, Deezer and Rdio rapidly launch in to new global markets, and as other competitors like Mog and mSpot become acquisition targets for consumer electronics firms like HP and Samsung.

WiMP is already having the Portugal rug pulled from under it. Portugal Telecom, the telco which provides the service, is ending its relationship, meaning the loss of 40,000 customers.

“We want to focus even more strongly on our own brand WiMP and become less dependent on partners,” a spokesperson tells paidContent.

Some 200,000 of Norway’s 700,000 Canal Digital TV subscribers have activated a bundled subscription to WiMP.

Spotify leads the on-demand music subscription market with three million paying customers from over 10 million active users.

Release.

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Dagbladet, a liberal tabloid, is the country’s third largest newspaper. It’s been pretty successful online, with a brash and high-impact site that breaks a lot of the accepted rules on online news, but yet delivers around 1.7 2.8 million readers each week.

Now the service has launched a new online video player that does some interesting — and slightly unconventional — things.

The Dagbladet Nyhetsstudio (“News Studio”) collects seven different video feeds and allows website visitors to easily flip between coverage from inside the courtroom, the courthouse, background interviews and commentary on the street or from pundits in the newspaper’s own studio.

There’s also a roaming live team who are running around Oslo with their entire broadcast kit running from a backpack, a low-cost alternative to driving around in a van stuffed with equipment.

It’s effectively a producers’ gallery for the public, allowing them to take the firehose of coverage (most of it live) and make the decision on what to watch as it happens — rather than have it fed to them by directors.

And it doesn’t stop there: the page also includes a constantly-updating stream of live updates from reporters in various locations, and moderated comments from the community as well. And to top it all off, the service works on the web and tablets, with a slightly different way of accessing video streams for mobile.

It’s a fascinating exercise in how to try and do something a little different. Unlike the way that so many newspaper websites approach video, Nyhetsstudio doesn’t simply ape television — and with the nation gripped by the Breivik trial, it’s a critical and novel way of trying to cover a huge story in a competitive way.

And while it’s fair to say that this may be possible partly because Norway is a not a heavily-populated country (a citizenry of fewer than 5 million people means that it’s got the population of the entire Detroit metro area spread across a land mass the size of Montana) that is both a benefit and a drawback: not least because it also means that Dagbladet is working on small budgets.

The newspaper has less than 100,000 people each day; its online audience is around 1.7 million each week. These are not vast numbers, yet that doesn’t prevent the team from producing something that can feel vibrant and vital. Plenty to learn for other organizations?

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A Scandinavian pitch contest jury has named iZettle, a Square-like mobile payment gadget, the region’s Digital Champion and given Klarna, a pay-after-delivery facilitator, a Billion Dollar Company award.

The contest was held by tech M&A advisory house GP Bullhound, which judged along with VCs and entrepeneurs, at Stockholm’s Riskkapital 2012 VC event on Thursday.

The call was put out to pitchers earlier this year. The programme named the following as the 25 most interesting companies in the Nordics’ digital economy…

1. Artificial Solutions (natural language interaction)
2. Avito
3. Bambuser (live mobile video capture)
4. Betsson (online gaming)
5. Blocket (classified ads)
6. Brandos (shoe retail)
7. Burt
8. Cint
9. Digital Route (data management)
10. EPiServer (website builder)
11. Garagekoll (parking space rental)
12. Guldbrev (scrap gold buyer)
13. iZettle (mobile payment gadget)
14. Klarna (buy now, pay later facilitator)
15. Livebookings (restaurant booking)
16. Mathem.se (groceries)
17. Neonode (multi-sense interface recognition)
18. Nordnet (savings bank)
19. Orthocone Innovation Technologies (LCD technology)
20. Qliktech (data exploration)
21. Seamless (mobile payments)
22. Soundcloud (audio sharing)
23. Spotify (music access)
24. TocaBoca (mobile learning games)
25. Wrapp (Facebook gift cards)

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As of tomorrow, customers in Denmark, Finland and Norway will officially be able to get their hands on the company’s iPhone and iPad card-reader, which enables them to take card payments using an iOS device instead of using a cash register.

CEO Jacob de Geer told me that iZettle planned on distributing between 15,000 and 20,000 free dongles over the next two weeks, mainly to those merchants — large and small — that have already expressed interest in using the system. That will roughly double the size of the rollout since the service came out of beta last November.

“We’ve been pretty happy with how the system works and now we’re ready to expand,” he said. “We’ve been piloting in these markets for some time, and we’ve had fantastic virality. Since the Nordic markets are nearby to us, the word’s really spread.”

Like Square’s basic service — which de Geer admits was the direct inspiration for iZettle’s own technology — iZettle has garnered buzz for letting anyone who signs up plug a card into their device and take payments. Like Square too, it takes a 2.75 percent cut of all transactions in exchange for providing its service. Unlike Square, however, iZettle has to cope with the more demanding technology of chip-based credit cards and the complicated regulatory system across Europe’s patchwork of countries.

But now that the company has gone beyond its own borders for the first time, it looks set to keep growing: in addition to the Nordic expansion, the company has also just hired a managing director for the U.K. ahead of a planned launch there later this year.

Stewart Roberts, currently director of global innovation at Barclaycard Group, will start in May with a remit to build out provisions and partnerships. That could prove a significant hire for the Stockholm-based business, which received $15 million in funding from Index Ventures and Creandum last year with an eye to becoming a significant European business.

De Geer told me that he expected to find that merchants in each country would adopt iZettle in different ways, especially since it could be seen as a lower-cost alternative to traditional Chip-and-PIN readers used by many small businesses.

“We’ll see totally different usage patterns,” he said. “The cost of a reader without the PIN pad is much lower, which makes it appealing for smaller merchants like chiropractors, carpenters, or anyone still bound to cash, checks or invoices.”

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