News

Opera Enables Emoji-Only Web Addresses Provided By Yat

While longer addresses consisting of four or five emojis sell for as little as $4, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure a memorable single-emoji URL.

Published

4 years ago

February 16, 2022

David Morelo

opera enables emoji-only web addresses provided by yat

Yat

If you have the latest version of the Opera web browser installed on your computer, go ahead and launch it.

Now, copy & paste 🌈🚀👽 into the address bar and press Enter. You should see a landing page belonging to Kesha, the American singer-songwriter.

You can also enter 👽🎵 to be redirected to the official website of Young Money Entertainment, the American record label founded by rapper Lil Wayne.

These emoji-only web addresses are the result of Opera’s partnership with Yat, a startup that sells URLs with emojis using its Y.at domain. Thanks to the partnership, Opera users now don’t have to enter “y.at” when visiting Yat’s emoji-only web addresses.

“The partnership marks a major paradigm shift in the way the internet works” said Jorgen Arnesen, the executive vice president of mobile at Opera. “It’s new, it’s easier, and more fun”.

It can also be pretty damn expensive. While longer addresses consisting of four or five emojis sell for as little as $4, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure a memorable single-emoji URL.

Why would anyone do that when it’s fairly easy to purchase a custom domain name that supports emojis and use it instead of the “y.at” domain? Because Yat’s CEO Naveen Jain has big plans for the startup.

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In the future, Jain would like Yat to become a self-sovereign company using blockchain technology to provide a decentralized alternative to the current domain name system (DNS).

“This is laying the foundation. There are certain elements of the vision that are certainly more of a social contract than actual implementation at this point in time” says Jain. “But this is the vision that we’ve set forth, and we’re working continuously towards that goal”.

In 2021, Yat sold almost $20 million worth of emoji identities, and the partnership with Opera could make 2022 sales figures even more impressive.

News

At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value

Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.

Published

6 days ago

May 20, 2026

Nour Nasir

at io 2026 sundar pichai concedes ai must deliver real value

Google

Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.

Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.

The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.

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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.

What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.