A Chinese consortium called Golden Brick has made a $1.2 billion offer to purchase the Norwegian browser company Opera. Golden Brick includes Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360. Julian Clover at Broadband TV News notes that Opera, in addition to its browser technology, has a presence in the smart TV market. He quotes Opera CEO Lars Boilesen as saying, “There is strong strategic and industrial logic to the acquisition of Opera by the consortium. We believe that the Consortium, with its breadth of expertise and strong market position in emerging markets, will be a strong owner of Opera.”

Mistakes companies make with big data is the topic of an interview by Rebecca Blumenstein of The Wall Street Journal with Hilary Mason, chief executive and founder of Fast Forward Labs and former chief scientist at Bitly, and Andreas Weigend, director of the Social Data Lab and former chief scientist at Amazon.com. Key points: data about an individual is not useful—data about populations is. And data should be transparent internally.

SEMI yesterday announced the launch of the European Semiconductor integrated Packaging and Test (ESiPAT) Special Interest Group. The SIG represents SEMI members who have semiconductor packaging, assembly, test, manufacturing, or design activities in Europe. The newly formed executive committee of the SIG includes representatives from AEMTec, First Sensor, NANIUM, RoodMicrotec, Sencio, STMicroelectronics, and Swissbit. More than 20 additional companies from the European back-end supply chain have expressed interest in joining.