thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

Surprise – Google Recently Surpasses Yahoo in Time Visited

Posted on 13. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Silicon Alley Insider’s recent chart showing the amount of time spent on major sites displays a strong push for both Google and Facebook, while the previous (shocking) champ Yahoo is experiencing a steady overall drop.

Yahoo and AOL are in steep decline, while Microsoft is simply staying afloat, most likely bolstered by spending hundreds of millions on marketing their Bing search engine. Apple, which is rumored to be preparing for a more cloud-based approach, isn’t even on this list.

Facebook has really pulled up close with Google, but co-founder Sergey Brin recently said the company is unfazed by Facebook’s growth.

“The indications that we have show that when Internet users become Facebook users they actually do significantly more searches on Google,” Brin told Reuters in Sun Valley, Idaho last week.

But Google isn’t resting on their laurels in regards to competing with Facebook. That would explain this recent release of a huge 216 slide presentation by Google UX researcher Paul Adams on the problems and opportunities of social networking.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 7/12/10

Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

A Chrome OS tablet is still on track to be released sometime this year, according to CEO Eric Schmidt.

It’s possible that Chrome OS really isn’t going to dominate Windows but rather other Linux distributions that are available.

Could cloud computing and other managed services lead to the loss of IT jobs in small businesses?

Positive: Google’s App Inventor will lead to an App Explosion.

Negative: Google App Inventor Further Degrading the Marketplace.

Viacom Loses to YouTube: Good for User Content

Posted on 23. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Viacom sued YouTube for $1 billion dollars back in 2007 over copyrighted content in the form of video clips that were hosted on the video sharing site. Today, it was announced that Viacom has lost their suit against YouTube. A primary reason for this was that the content on YouTube has been declared as protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

This is a big deal, since it allows for people on the web to be able to share things that in the past could have proved to violate possible copyright laws. The problem up until now is that bloggers, user-generated content sites and social media mavens were in a gray area in regards to the legality of sharing certain things with other people on the internet. With this precedent today, we now have something to rely on that cements the web as a place to share thoughts and ideas about anything, as long as it is not outright stealing.

This also helps out in terms of cloud computing, as not only users were at risk previously, but also the datacenters that hold information. These massive structures full of servers are generally operated by large companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple – and I would assume that in the future possible legal disputes about user information stored in the cloud (whatever it may be) would have certain protections as well.

Content sharing and social media, along with cloud computing are starting to come out of the “Wild West” era, so to speak and it is further apparent that there is legitimacy for those who are involved in this space.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/21/10

Posted on 21. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

The first Chromium Extension Sync release was not without problems; a fast response to some bugs has helped developers.

John Paczkowski of the Digital Daily has his own take of Dell’s Chrome OS ambitions, complete with a quote from a company honcho.

Here’s a review from another blog about GoogleSharing – it allows you to hide user information for privacy purposes.

Can the cloud support the needs of scientific computing?

Inside Google’s John Simpson queries Google Chief Counsel Kent Walker on openness from the company’s perspective in a short clip.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/15/10

Posted on 15. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Google Earth 5.2 now includes its own WebKit-based browser instead of relying on the system default browser on installed PCs.

Here are some helpful tips for browsing with Chrome safely by using some popular extensions to protect yourself.

Mashable has a quick and dirty guide to what you need to know about Google TV, all in a very short video clip on the subject.

The Chrome browser has been out for several years now, but are there still some features missing for the mass market?

Although currently known as a hub for IT hardware, Taiwan has great aspirations to become a center for cloud computing.

Chromoting Fits the Chrome OS Thin Client Model

Posted on 10. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

The idea of Chromoting as a way to bridge the gap between the web-enabled environments of the future over to the old model of installed applications on Windows, Mac and Linux seems to fit with the overall theme of Chrome OS. That theme is to get away from natively installed applications, though many of us still will rely on these “legacy” apps to some degree.

In the smartphone realm, the use of remote desktop is possible to go into our computer at home or at work to do things. Chromoting will be no different than that, installed as an extension on a Chrome OS device with another application on whatever other machine you need to remote into.

As cloud computing in ramps up from an operating system standpoint, there is going to be some software that simply will not be available in the cloud. Although it is true when Google says that most major applications are coming out today arrive web-based, there are still some resource-heavy tasks that require a traditional computer. Chromoting thus offers power users the ability to possibly use virtualization on servers to harness both Chrome OS and whatever applications they may need directly through the cloud.

I can see a variety of uses for Chromoting, and not just as a stopgap solution for legacy purposes but also as a path to allow Chrome OS to act as a window to more process-intensive computing capabilities. One would not only be able to use it to access powerful software tools on a thin client Chrome OS device, but the enterprise would benefit as well. I could see IT support analysts, salespeople and health professionals utilizing Chromoting on a tablet or netbook to access resources in a safe and controlled way that perhaps other devices would be unable to.

What other intriguing purposes could Chromoting provide for that I have missed?

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/28/10

Posted on 28. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Will Google be able to make billions from its enterprise Apps services within the next four years?

Google Apps Migration has been announced, allowing a smoother transition from Office over to Gmail and Google Calendar.

Computerworld has a interesting article titled, “The Smart Paranoid’s Guide to Using Google”.

As the cloud grows, what will Google do to keep it interconnected worldwide? “We want 100Gbit/s”.

Visual travel guide Ruba, which mixes blogging, photos and maps into a unique social mash-up has been acquired by Google.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/23/10

Posted on 23. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

In response to the Chrome Web App Store, Mozilla has announced on its blog an initiative for an Open Web App Store.

Here is the FTC’s official statement on their decision to let the Google-AdMob deal go ahead.

GNU founder and open source maven Richard Stallman talks to Mashable about how open Google really is these days.

PCWorld looks at how Google’s search engine results have helped hackers get their software on unsuspecting users’ computers.

Amazon has been quietly successful in the cloud computing market, but should they now be concerned about Google?

Eric Schmidt: Chrome OS is About Breaking Down Walls

Posted on 17. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

We’ve heard a lot lately about Apple and its “walled garden” approach to its computer platforms. When you think about this approach, however, this is the same thing that Microsoft has been doing for years. While they do not have hardware specifications set in stone like Apple, the ability to run applications is based on some set rules in a closed source platform. While Linux and its many open source variations have been around for years attempting to change this ideal, they have not been successful in terms of wide spread adoption.

Enter Google. During a talk at  Google Atmosphere , the idea of the “walled garden” approach comes into play because before search became so ubiquitous, we didn’t worry so much about whether something was closed- or open-sourced. Now that we use the internet for a wider variety of things that are integral to our lives, taking a different approach to this is clearly Google’s strategy:

By the way, Google Atmosphere was a cloud computing event held earlier this week.

So with that in mind, there is still this fact that Google wants to open up all these data sources to make infrastructure easier for us, they are going to need to effectively control hardware in order to get the right amount of performance. Schmidt details the fact that they don’t want to build Chrome OS or Android machines themselves, they simply want to have the correct software platform the can enable better collaboration.

Instead of it just being Google creating these collaboration tools, they will open up the market to create them as well. Two examples of that right now are the Android Market and Google Apps Store for enterprise. Interestingly, with thin clients that are connected to the cloud it’s possible that the distinction between these two could begin to blur since you could theoretically have different profiles for separate purposes.

If you’ve got a spare forty minutes, check out the clip above. Schmidt talks about trying to create a new platform, about creating a new industry model. It’s been pretty exciting to monitor all of this because we just don’t know what’s going to happen quite yet. Information keeps coming out bit by bit and the overall potential of where we are going is simply immense.

What’s the Solution to Printing in the Cloud?

Posted on 16. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

Of the many perils associated with cloud computing, one that could potentially be very problematic is the issue of printing. Sure, we don’t print as much as we once did as documents go the way of “paperless” solutions. But the reality is that printing is not going to go away any time soon. A recent Chromium Blog post addresses this issue, announcing that Google will be working on a project called Google Cloud Print, which gives developers a peak at how this might work.

The service is going to run on Google servers, sending the printing information from a webapp to them and then to printing devices which as we all know requires drivers and sometimes other special software in order to work depending on the type of printer. There may be some concern about having to send documents directly to Google and then routing that information back to a printer, but I’m not sure how else printing is going to be accomplished.

In fact, this solution has already been proposed by another company called Cortado that has an application you can use to print things from an iPhone. Clearly you are unable to install print drivers on an iPhone, so this app is pretty cool. The concept is still the same, however, in that another machine somewhere with the correct software installed is doing the work of being the interface to the printer:

This still begs the question: are you concerned that the cloud will affect privacy? Or does it not matter anymore in an ever-transparent world that we live in?

A Look at How Printing Will Be Done in Chrome OS

Posted on 16. Dec, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

One of the central themes of Chrome OS is that the array of software and drivers that clog up a traditional operating system will be done away with in order to increase speed and usability. But users are still going to want the traditional features of a computer – and that includes printing. In the PC world of today, a driver almost always needs to be installed for a printer, which could possibly mean several print drivers if a user has a reason to use more than one, and  there are so many makes and models out there that this could be challenging to accomplish in Chrome OS.

It hasn’t been discussed how this is going to be addressed before a Chrome OS release date in mid to late 2010. Is Google going to be able to come up with a standard one size fits all solution for the myriad of printing devices? It’s hard to believe that if Microsoft has not yet been able to do it after they had printer issues with Vista, although that did lead some companies like HP to release universal Vista drivers.

One novel approach is being taken by a virtualization company called ThinPrint, which has announced that they will work with Google to take the printer driver system that PCs currently use and place it in a cloud computing environment using their specially developed technology. In this situation, a device would probably need spooling capability but little else, acting as a communication tool between itself, the cloud and the printer. Below is a video demonstration on how the system works using an iPhone app  as an example:

“Naturally, we don’t have all the details on the Google Chrome OS yet, but we are certain that we will provide the best Google Chrome OS print solution based on our patented technology,” said Carsten Mickeleit, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ThinPrint.

Pretty cool technology, and it makes me wonder what else the cloud can replace for us that we haven’t even thought of. I take that back – someone probably already has.