thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/10/10

Posted on 10. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Total sales last quarter for Android phones have topped Apple’s iPhone sales for the first time, according to Business Insider.

Conan O’Brien’s performance at Google HQ has been posted on YouTube.

Aaron West has an article showing you how to debug Flash in Chrome now that it has been integrated into the browser.

With the speculation persisting that Google may buy ITA Software, here are six things that Google could do in the travel space.

Google’s response, plus analysis by our friends at ReadWriteWeb about the recent privacy issues the company has faced, especially with Buzz.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/6/10

Posted on 06. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

More Google services will be integrated with a single sign on, according to the Google Enterprise Blog.

The highly anticipated Google I/O developer conference May 19-20 will have its keynote presentations streamed live on YouTube.

ARM marketing vice president Ian Drew says that the delay in optimizing Flash for mobile devices has stalled the market to some degree.

A new feature to Google Goggles now allows someone to capture text with their phone’s camera and have it translated.

Google is in an interesting battle with Blue Destiny Records over the legality of linking to copyrighted material.

A Look at Google in TV Advertising – Anyone Can Make a Spot

Posted on 06. Apr, 2010 by DC4wr3y. 0 Comments

Here’s a neat little animated sequence that is promoting the Chrome browser’s speed:

Something different, and in fact could even be shown on TV. Google is not usually accustomed to promoting its services on television, but they certainly broke out of their mold with the Super Bowl ad. That spot was actually one that could be seen prior to the Super Bowl broadcast right on YouTube. With that in mind, there are plenty of other ads that Google has put on YouTube that could work on TV, and the fact that they are testing different services for the television market tells me that they are close to moving into that space because it has a lot of profit potential.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at how Slate put a TV advertisement on Fox News using Google’s advertising interface. For just a few thousand bucks they were able to market to a late-night crowd and get some impressions to a website that was set up to count the impact.

Anyone with a digital camera and a computer could therefore create their own advertising campaign. Better yet, why not create a video and post it on YouTube. If it goes viral, edit it and spend some bucks to put it on TV promoting a good or service. Sounds like a plan to me. Anybody interested, I’m in on it. I’ve got ideas. Seriously.

Google TV Ads is a service that is a part of the Adwords program. You can get to the television advertising portion directly by going here.

Hopefully someone will do this. Television advertising needs a kick start, because right now I liken it to visual Ambien.

Trying to Profit from Video, Google Purchases Episodic

Posted on 02. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

It has been announced that Google has acquired the online video platform company Episodic. According to their official website, “Episodic truly spans the video value chain and provides everything publishers and marketers need to manage, measure and monetize online video”.

Monetize online video. That’s been somewhat of a challenge for Google. While video sites that provide television content such as Hulu are now profitable, YouTube is not so easy to monetize. That’s because many video clips on the site lack commercial appeal. How do you find ways to advertise to an audience that likes to watch a cat playing the piano? That’s hard to determine.

Enter Episodic. Read Write Web reports they have been working with companies like Showtime’s Sports division to stream live online video for a fee, which is television content experience that YouTube doesn’t really have. This is like Google getting some of the expertise that Hulu already has, which by the way is a joint venture between NBC Universal, Disney and News Corporation. Hulu monetizes their content through a clever method of advertising prior to showing videos, and sometimes even allows users to choose the ads that they will watch.

With the flurry of news about the iPad release this week, this acquisition along with Google’s recent purchase of video codec developers On2 will end up being a good strategic decision if the intention is to compete with Apple on content in a model that is different – offering video to users for free, but at the same time finding a way to make money from advertising.

Analysis: Who Benefits Most From the Chrome-Flash Collaboration?

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 5 Comments

We all thought it was dead; in one fell swoop its back on the map.

It was rumored yesterday that Google and Adobe would work together to integrate Flash into the Chrome browser, and that rumor indeed came true. Now the development version of Chrome is capable of having Flash baked in, if you so choose. At some point in the near future, this will be implemented to all versions of Chrome. I think many are surprised by the move here, but at the same time this was decision that must have been was months in the making as Google becomes more of an adversary to Apple.

What happens here is a lesson of competitive advantage: Google plans on having a big share of the mobile market since they have watched what Apple has been able to accomplish with wireless phones and the hype over the iPad. So creating a strategic partnership with Mozilla and Adobe makes sense. Sure, Flash is not open source but it would not surprise me that there is some sort of agreement between Google and Adobe to start heading that way with Flash, seeing as how Google supports it with Chrome, Android, Chrome OS and other projects.

So Google gets a competitive advantage over Apple. What does Adobe gain? Well, in the future, everyone who uses Chrome will get Flash installed. Since most browsers today have it installed anyways, a logical step is to integrate it. Plus, most people don’t spend time updating Flash unless thye need to for running something in their browser that needs it, and that leaves users vulnerable to attack since older versions are more susceptible than the latest and greatest.

An auto-update allows users to be worry-free when it comes to Flash. Because most people don’t really care about Flash itself, they just want the interactive web to work as it should, right?

It’s been said that Adobe has struggled to keep Flash from being exploited, most likely due to the fact that before now Flash wasn’t a target of hackers. That’s no longer the case and it makes one wonder how this will affect Adobe’s other popular free software, Reader, which uses rather large PDF file formats that could contain malicious code.

So who gains the most? While Google getting a standard format integrated into Chrome is certainly a plus, it does make one wonder whatever happened to the huge push to HTML5, where video codecs are browser embedded and can play clips using a tag. Perhaps this is a reaction to the metrics recorded from the YouTube HTML5 beta, with Google realizing that Flash is so ubiquitous it is better off increasing support of the format that powers the biggest and potentially most profitable video site in the world.

Adobe gets exposure for their formats as a result of this, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone now that a seemingly resurrected Flash will allow them to continue to provide all sorts of web content to end users. They get the backing of Google which will challenge Steve Jobs’ assertion that Flash is full of bugs, and allow for a more secure experience because security sandboxing will be implemented. Not to mention the fact that auto-update will limit the amount of widespread attack that could possible. This could potentially motivate hackers to take on different, and perhaps more exploitable, targets that exist.

So for now Google wins, until we see Flash integrated in all the major browsers – which could be the next move since Mozilla also has an interest in this new collaboration.

Partnership Between Chrome and Adobe’s Flash May Be in the Works

Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

Larry Dignan of ZDNet is publishing a rumor that we may hear an announcement in the coming days of a supposed partnership between Google and Adobe for its Flash technology to be bundled within future versions of Chrome browser. When I first read this report, I was a bit surprised. After all, Google has slowly decided to kill Gears and has set up a HTML5 beta on YouTube, probably the most Flash intensive site on the planet since all videos on the site require the plugin in order to play.

But what does Google have to lose? It feels like this is being said a lot lately, but there is still a lot of the web that uses Flash and if Apple is not going to support it on their mobile platforms now they aren’t going to in the future, either. That creates competitive advantage for Google in its own push to have a platform for users with Android and Chrome OS. Apple has its own benefits, and while many have been calling out that the death of Flash is here that will surely not be true if Google partners up with Adobe.

Perhaps there will be some sort of agreement to help make Flash run faster and secure. After all, those are the two biggest pitfalls of Flash. Many experts would agree that having Flash installed on a browser creates vulnerabilities, and the fact that Adobe has a miniscule security team to try to thwart potential attacks would make Google and its expertise seem like a good match.

But we’ll see. While we’re waiting, take a look at this comparison of Flash vs. HTML5 performance.

Google Apps Marketplace Now Has YouTube Channel

Posted on 26. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

The Google Apps Marketplace was announced a few weeks ago, with fifty partners offering applications that further extend the base Google Apps functionality beyond key features such as Gmail and Docs. While this was a major announcement, the YouTube channel that has been announced today is a tool for which many of these companies that are working with Apps can get their message across.

That means communicating to users that the Google software suite can go above and beyond what Microsoft or IBM can offer in a business suite. For example, check out MindMeister, which looks to challenge the expensive Microsoft Visio:

All of the applications in the partner YouTube Channel can be thought of as “extensions” to what Google Apps already offers. Many companies have found that they can save money in software licensing and IT administration by switching over to Google. That’s because a per user license for Apps is $50 per year. The partner applications in the Apps Marketplace vary in terms of cost structure.

But when you compare Microsoft Visio to MindMeister for example, Visio costs over $500 for a license. MindMiester? It’s only $9/month per user. Meaning that if a certain user doesn’t like it or stops working with the software you can cancel that license if you want.

Compared to some of the costs in the enterprise market for software, some of these Apps Marketplace partners are offering companies a pretty good deal.

Google Testing Search for Television

Posted on 09. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is working with DISH Network in testing a variation of their search algorithm that is customized specifically for TV. Since the WSJ site is for subscribers only, we have analyzed AppScout’s article for this post.

I’m currently a DISH customer, and I must say that the ability to find programs that you want to watch is ridiculously hard. Sure, it’s easy if you know the name of the show you are looking for, but finding one in terms of content or detailed subject matter is just not very easy. This seems to be a common theme for cable/satellite operators, as I’ve been told by someone who is a customer of AT&T’s more advanced UVerse system there is no drilled-down search capabilities in their system either.

The problem with traditional satellite and cable TV search functionality is that there really is no way to do any type of contextual search. Sure, one can look for a show title or a genre, but there isn’t really a way to drill down to actors, studios and specific content of a program. For those of us who are used to using internet search engines to find things easily, this presents a problem to the more traditional environment of television.

That’s why I think Google testing this could potentially be a win for TV. Many people are switching their video tastes to YouTube or Hulu, so these operators need to do something drastic to continue to attract younger customers. Plus, DISH Network is not one of the top tier providers. So, much like T-Mobile starting out early providing Android devices which resulted in them getting the first crack at the Nexus One smartphone, this could benefit DISH as a content provider.

What DISH Network should really do is drop their proprietary set-top box operating system and use a customized version of Chrome OS. Why not? It would probably be a faster experience, and the architecture would provide better user interaction and interoperability with the web. The problem has been that cable and satellite companies have wanted to keep these two realms apart, but expect to see them converge more often then not in the future.

HTML5 Will Replace Google Gears – But Not Without On2

Posted on 22. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

It certainly was a big deal a few years ago when Google first announced their Gears platform for web browsing. But the truth is that it was only a stopgap for what is to be the future: HTML5. Well, finally the time has come for HTML5 to shine, as recent developments have pushed it into the forefront for a more interactive web experience.

Basically Gears is a bridge between the browser and the native computing system. With HTML5, this type of flexibility is coded right in with web development. That benefits users because it provides for simplicity along with more flexibility in terms of development. Some things that you may use Gears for today, such as offline storage to all for a faster experience or just to have files when you’re not connected, can be done even easier with HTML5. Plus, the majority of browsers now support HTML5 unlike when Gears was announced back in 2007.

The official Gears blog had an update last week, explaining why there has been a lack of posts lately. No more updates to Gears, however until everything is completely moved over to HTML5 (which could be a while) support will continue. It’s also no coincidence that on the same day of that post it was announced that Google was finalizing its purchase of On2 Media for $124.6 million.

That’s because the video technology that On2 has developed fits well within what Google is trying to do with YouTube. Although some people like to complain about the lack of innovation sine Google purchased YouTube, they just recently have started a HTML5 beta on the site, and I’m sure that you can expect to see more interesting developments now that On2 is in the fold. That is unless Google bought On2 just to kill it, which seems doubtful.

One of the big things to watch for: video compression standards. On2 has a variety of these proprietary formats, and so it is not a stretch to expect HTML5 paired with one of them, namely called V8  VP8, to become the standard for Chrome and especially on YouTube, which currently uses a licensed technology called H.264 that works with Adobe’s Flash Player. There has been a call for On2 to make VP8 open source by some developers, and we’ll see what happens with that.

So what is the underlying problem with H.264 and Flash? Well, both of them have been around for a while with little relative progress in their technology. That’s not going to work too well in the near future with devices becoming ever smaller and portable running ARM processors.

You can check out a video comparison between H264 and VP8 from On2′s website right here if you’re interested.

Is Your Bandwidth Good or Hot Garbage? Find Out With YouTube Dashboard

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

There have always been an array of speed tests available for those who are interested in seeing how fast their internet connection is. But it’s always been dubious to trust that these types of sites are really all that accurate. Indeed, some (but not all) of them simply exist to try to sell you some sort of “speed up my PC” bloatware from their advertisers. Well, with YouTube’s new Dashboard application, you can really see whether your ISP is really giving you the bandwidth that you are paying for.

Also, at the bottom of the page, you can also run a test video that shows how your bandwidth streams in real time. This can be helpful in determining whether your provider is giving you a stable connection, or begins to throttle your video after a certain period of time if you are viewing something that is very long and/or continuously streaming, which is why the test video here is over an hour:

I find this feature interesting for YouTube as it is hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that they are going to use some of their cash in the bank to roll out fiber networks in select communities throughout the United States. It seems as no coincidence that Google’s plan is to better connect people with an open network infrastructure so that they can roll out cloud applications that can work flawlessly on their hardware platforms that are going to be coming out soon.

With the comparison graphs that come on Dashboard, there is little doubt that Google wants to begin benchmarking what other ISPs are doing – because most other providers don’t only deal with providing internet access. They are also trying to sell their customers ancillary services such as cable TV and phone service. If your internet bandwidth is good enough for quality voice and video over the web, what is the advantage for these other ISPs?

Check out your video speed with YouTube Dashboard here. How do you stack up where you live?

Video: Using HTML5 with YouTube

Posted on 11. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

As many already know, YouTube is attempting to get away from using the proprietary Adobe Flash standard for video playback. In mobile devices such as the iPhone and soon the iPad, you cannot use Flash, supposedly because Apple CEO Steve Jobs deems it “buggy” – causing applications that use it to crash. There is another valid argument for not using Flash, and it is because now that it is installed in so many devices it could be a security threat according to McAfee.

As previously reported here, there is a beta for using HTML5 while on YouTube. This allows anyone using a HTML5-compliant browser to use it. But that means using a compliant browser such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox or IE when coupled with Chrome Frame to use it. The current version does have its quirks, but eventually it will result in a a faster and overall better user expeience when looking at any type of media over the web.

You can take a look at how to use HTML5 and its early performance on the YouTube site right here:

It’s pretty clear from the clip that the video loads pretty fast. Instead of using Flash as the go-between, HTML5 allows web developers to directly  embed compressed video files such as MPEG right into the code itself so that it can be called from a server. Not to mention that Flash can take up a lot of resources on your machine if you’re trying to load up a couple of videos. The only intermediary is the application that you use, further evidencing the fact that personal computing is becoming more centralized around the internet browser and the standard application that we use to view it.

HTML 5 Beta Goes Live for Youtube

Posted on 23. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

It’s been a day or so since YouTube publicly released the HTML 5 beta program. This is largely in response to users who had overloaded the Google Product Ideas submission site with requests for this feature on YouTube just a few weeks ago. In order to view videos in this newer web format as opposed to using traditional Flash, you must have a compatible browser and head over to this page in order to turn it on while you are looking at Youtube videos. So what is a compatible browser? It must be Chrome browser, Apple Safari (verion 4 and up) or Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed. Full screen mode currently does not work, and ad supported videos  don’t either.

The benefits of using HTML 5? Faster video loads as well as smoother playback.

When looking at videos on the Youtube site with the beta, you’ll see a HTML 5 logo when your clip begins to load. Other than that, and along with the inability to go full-screen there really is not much I noticed different at first glance. But that may change as I watch more videos. Interestingly, another video site that I’d never heard of called Vimeo also is testing HTML 5, where there is a link to switch over on the lower right hand side below individual videos.

Anyways, go ahead and sign up for the beta at YouTube if you’re interested. There are some issues right now with Flash for Chromium OS, and it is for Google’s own benefit in the project to get HTML 5 up and working successfully on YouTube.

Check out Google’s own presentation on HTML 5 from September 2009 right here: