Yes.Expect something big soon.Opera’s community news section has been updated to announce that Team Opera has planned a big event to mark the New Year.Daniel Goldman has revealed that the major event will be held in New York City.However other community members would not also be left out. More details should be available on this Monday ( December 12th ).As of now one lucky member can win an Opera T-shirt everyday for answering a simple question.You can participate here
A part from that expect a lot of new features in the future releases of Opera.I had mentioned in one of my earlier articles that there are reports that final release of Opera v9 would support widgets.Today Opera employee Olafur Arnason aka Olli has revealed that some more new features has been added to Merlin ( codename for Opera v9 ).Also it would include a much easier way to add search engines to the search bar.So now you wont need to download the search.ini editor or tinker with the search.ini file manually.It would now be possible to have site specifit settings.Check out his blog for more info.
Update: Opera has revealed what the big surprise is.For details see http://my.opera.com/newyears