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Live From Google Chrome Press Event,
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Yesterday it leaked that Google was working on a browser called Chrome. Today Google is holding a press conference at its headquarters in Mountain View to demo the new browser and discuss the reasons behind its development.
If you’re interested in reading the comic released yesterday that introduces Chrome, you can find it here.
Below are our notes from the conference, which started at 11:00 am PT.
Google has launched its website for Chrome here - you can download it now (it’s just under half a megabyte).
Tabs are going to be the primary elements of Chrome. They are like title bars for webpages and applications. They can be dragged around to reorganize (as in Safari) and can even be dragged out of a window to create a new one.
Google Chrome has no search box - instead it has an “omnibox” where you both enter website addresses and conduct searches. It sounds very similar to what can be found in Firefox 3.
The omnibox also has smart search engine detection. If you visit Amazon, Google will detect that site’s search engine. Next time you visit Amazon from the browser, you can hit tab to search using Amazon’s search without having to fill in the field on the page itself.
Google is turning away from the typical homepage (which makes us wonder - what about iGoogle?). Your default homepage is a list of your most visited sites, each accompanied by a screenshot.
Chrome comes with an “incognito window” (i.e. porn mode). It has a little spy icon to remind you when you’re in that mode. When using the window, it won’t record any of your activity. One cool thing about incognito mode - you can have one window open using incognito and another in normal mode at the same time.
A download bar will create a bucket at the bottom of your browser window where all downloads go. You can drag each file from the bucket to where you want on your desktop. It’s meant to prevent the loss of files that you’ve downloaded because you don’t know where they went.
Some applications, like Gmail, want to break free from the browser window. Gmail could use shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu, for example, so it can be launched like a real app. A special app view window in Chrome doesn’t have typical browser controls, just the web app itself.
Google Chrome has reportedly been in development for two years and will release in more than 40 languages today in beta.
The rendering engine has been limited to that all a webpage can do is talk to the browser. Pages are basically placed in sandboxes and the only way a hacker could cause harm would be to find a bug in the rendering engine and escape those sandboxes.
A task manager for the browser itself will let you see how much CPU is being used for Flash and other plugins on the sites you visit. When a browser tab hangs, you can use the manager to kill that single tab. This preserves the page and the position of the browser when you reopen it.
Google has chosen Webkit because it’s fast, open source, and they don’t want to force developers to learn another rendering engine. A rendering test of static content resulted in 220.64 ms in IE and 77.28 in Webkit.
Chrome’s new JavaScript engine (V8) efficiently handles hundreds of kilobytes of code, as found in applications like Gmail. Google has found a way to introduce so-called “hidden classes” through a virtual machine. The classes are used within the native code that it compiles. They are supported by inline caching and dynamic parsing, so the access of data and execution of functions are really fast.
Even though Webkit already had a JavaScript rendering engine, Google wanted to set a new bar for virtual machine performance within the browser. The team behind V8 is Danish. In speed tests, IE performed at 15.5 round trips per hour (RPH) and Chrome performed at 584 RPH.
Other browsers can take V8 and include it in their systems, because it is being provided as open source.
Chrome has no tie-ins to other major Google services. If you had Live Search as your default search engine in Internet Explorer, Chrome will use that automatically.
Larry Page is here saying he’s been using Chrome for awhile now. He says Google wants a world where platforms are advancing and the open source model allows for this. Mozilla can choose to take some of the advancements Google has made and incorporate them into its own Firefox browser.
When asked how Chrome fits into Google’s mobile strategy, especially with Android, the company said Android has a separate browser (which is also Webkit based) but that both browsers share underlying technology. The two basically only differ in their user interfaces.
Sergey Brin: “I would not call Chrome the operating system of the web application - it’s basically a very fast engine for them”
As for plugins, Chrome will support plugins like Flash and PDF but it doesn’t have extensions like those found in Firefox. Google does, however, plan to provide an extension API in the future.
Chrome is very small, about 7 megabytes in size.
When asked about gaining marketshare, Google representatives say they don’t have a target number for what they hope to achieve. They say they want “a diverse ecosystem” of users.
When asked why consumers should use Chrome, they say it’s attractive if you want a “faster, more robust, safer web experience” (yawn)
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SubPLY: Making YouTube Captioning a Reality,
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A few days ago YouTube announced the addition of Closed Captioning support to its videos. One small problem though… YouTube included neither the tools nor the services to help video owners create the actual captioning source files– SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT)—needed to activate this feature. This is where SubPLY, the new video captioning service by PLYmedia might be helpful. With the launch of the service the company is providing an exclusive offer for TechCrunch readers: Free professionally produced English and Spanish closed captioning for YouTube videos!
SubPLY will provide English & Spanish captioning to 5000 YouTube videos submitted by TechCrunch readers. The video source language must be English and video duration cannot exceed 5 minutes. The captioning will be available within 24-hours of video submission. Offer details and how-to, here.
Is captioning videos really worth the hassle? YouTube clearly believes as much and PLYmedia’s internal research supports this claim as well. SubPLY was piloted with a video publisher that tested ten different videos for a period of six weeks, in three different languages (English, Spanish and French). Here are the results for videos watched with captioning:
- Foreign language usage and viewership increased over 700% in a 5 week period.
- 19% more viewers watched videos to completion than those without subtitles.
- The share function (sending the video to others) was used by viewers watching subtitles 171% more often (the viral effect was boosted).
- A 37% increase in both users who watched the video in full screen mode and users who replayed video.
A short backgrounder on PLYmedia: The Israeli company, which recently raised $6 million, provides video publishers the ability to add layers—”PLYs” as the company calls them—on top of their video players. These layers allow a variety of interactive applications to be offered along with the video with fairly minimal hassle for the publishers. The applications can range from BubblePLY (that lets users add text, images and graphics to videos) to information enrichment via infoPLY to ad overlays via adPLY.
SubPLY, the newest addition to PLYmedia’s range of “PLYd” applications is a dead-simple service that adds captioning to videos. All one has to do is provide a URL of a previously uploaded video and in return receive a new embed code from SubPLY that loads the original player along with the additional code necessary to overlay the captions. See the bottom of the post for an example.
SubPLY is being launched with captioning translation for 42 languages. The company will provide commercial customers a turnaround as quick as two hours from submitting the video to having the captioning active on it. Important to note is that the SubPLY embed code can be embedded immediately and the captioning functionality will appear once it’s available. Adding additional languages down the road will not require a code change, they will simply appear as soon as they are ready to go. Another aspect worthy of note is that the subtitles are encapsulated in an XML file that is made available with the SubPLY code. This means that videos are not only enriched with captioning, they are also enriched with additional SEO juice (XML files are parsed by search engines).
Pricing depends on the type of content, turnaround time, and scope of work per customer. There is also pricing “seasonality”. Current pricing is available here.
SubPly will open-up its translation tools in the coming months, allowing any user to create closed captions and subtitles. The tools were specifically created for online video, optimized for Flash and require no upload or transcoding.
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Nokia’s Comes With Music Launches in UK Next Month,
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Nokia’s Comes With Music will launch in the UK next month, before spreading to the Continent and to Asia next year.
Comes With Music, you may remember, is Nokia’s scheme to include music from the top record companies (less EMI, for now) with its cellphones, slowly getting the company into the Apple-dominated music business.
Nokia has not given any specific price points for Comes With Music Cellphones, but said that pay-as-you-go consumers had indicated to it in surveys that they’d be willing to pay somewhere between £100-£300 ($178-$535; wow, the dollar has improved since the last time I checked) for such a cellphone. Yeah, not me. A POS MP3 player, loaded with sweet, sweet V0s, can be had for like ~$0 these days. Yes, zero dollars. Get a knock-off one, it’s not like the iPod sounds that good or anything.
The first cellphone that will work Come(s) With Music is the Nokia 5310.
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IFA 2008: The Coffee Shop of the Future,
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In the Home Appliances section of IFA 2008 in Berlin there are dozens of brands of coffee makers, most doling out freshly-brewed joe to bleary-eyed conventioneers. Interestingly enough, some of the companies are using cool interactive displays, much like Microsoft Surface, in an effort to catch our attention.
A video on CrunchGear demonstrates one of the larger of such displays. A small pad on the bottom of the coffee cup contains an icon which a camera under the table identifies and tracks as it slides around the surface. When it comes to a full stop for a few seconds, information panels fly out and are then activated by touching the tabletop. As you can see in the video, we first pressed one then another widget to get information about the coffee on the screen. The future of cyber-cafes, anyone?
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Win a copy of Ilium Software’s eWallet,
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The kind folks at Ilium Software are offering ten free copies of eWallet to ten lucky readers.
eWallet lets you secure your personal information in a single file which can be accessed on your mobile device. Whether its PIN numbers, bank account information, passwords, or credit card numbers, the vast majority of us have an ever-expanding amount of confidential information that we need to keep secure and conveniently accessible on our fingertips. eWallet 6.0 allows you to password-protect your personal information letting mobile device users store information in a safe and secure electronic wallet.
eWallet runs on Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and now iPhone/Touch.
How do you win? Read on…
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Ads For Twits On Twitter (TwittAd Launches),
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Do you have 53 followers on Twitter? Shouldn’t you be making money off of them somehow, selling their attention to the highest bidder? Well, now you can with TwittAd. You list how many followers you have and for how much you are willing to sell an ad on your Twitter page, and TwittAd will match you with advertisers. Then the ad sits on the empty left-hand column of your Twitter page. The ads appear on any individual message page for standalone Tweets as well.
Something like this was bound to happen. If you’ve got an audience, no matter how small, advertisers will figure out a way to reach them. The ads themselves are actually not so bad, and relatively unobtrusive. At least TwittAd is not plastering the entire background with blaring ads—although, that would get my attention. Sort of a Nascar look. Robert Scoble could make a killing, except that his Twitter page is already plastered with ads of himself.
Selling space on your Twitter page obviously will bring more money the more followers you have. (TwittAd lets you set your own price, but market forces set a price per follower soon enough). We’ve already seen semi-famous Twitterers try to auction off their entire accounts. Keeping the account and selling the ad space makes more sense, because those followers are not going to stick around once they start getting Tweets from Pepsi.
The problem with placing ads on your Twitter page, though, is that ultimately you may just be advertising to yourself. I rarely go to the Twitter pages of people I follow. Their Tweets appear on my Twitter page (and my FriendFeed page, and my Thwirl client, and my Twinkle app on my iPhone). That’s why I follow people, so I can get their Tweets pushed to me. The only way ads are going to work on Twitter is if they are blended into the message stream and sent out as Tweets. But that would be annoying.
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Angelsoft 3.0 Launches With 400 Angel Investment Groups In Tow,
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Angelsoft on Tuesday announced that it has officially launched version 3.0 of its angel funding platform, which will connect entrepreneurs to over 400 angel investment groups and 11,000 investors across the world.
According to the company, the new Angelsoft 3.0 offers three new features that make it easier for startups to find the right venture funding. First, the company built a search engine that exposes the 400 angel investment groups to entrepreneurs. But because Angelsoft gets 2,000 startup applications each month, the company was concerned that investors would stop looking at all the applications due to sheer volume. To funnel the applications more efficiently, Angelsoft will let entrepreneurs “push” their idea to three investment groups at a time so more startups can be matched with the right investors.
More importantly, Angelsoft 3.0 also added a Digg-like feature, which lets investors rate their existing portfolio companies based on the success of each startup. Based on the rating, the most viable startups should rise to the top, letting other investors know that it’s worthwhile investing in the firm when entrepreneurs look to increase funding. Unfortunately, startups cannot rate investors so the rating is really just a one-way street.
Angelsoft’s home page also offers a Google Maps mashup, which provides real-time information on what’s going on in the community.
For all the tools on the site, it doesn’t seem like money is changing hands too often. According to the company’s statistics, just 1.32 percent of startups have been funded and just 24.72 percent have been screened.
Regardless, Angelsoft 3.0 looks like a fine offering for both investors and startups alike. And with the help of some of its new features, the 11,000 investors and thousands of entrepreneurs should find each other much easier.
Angelsoft 3.0 Introduction Video from Angelsoft on Vimeo.
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Picasa Refresh Brings Facial Recognition,
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In the anticipated release of Google’s new and improved Picasa, the company will offer facial recognition technology to help you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.
Launching at noon PDT today, Picasa’s facial recognition technology will ask you to identify people in your pictures that you haven’t tagged yet. Once you do and start uploading more pictures, Picasa starts suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them.
The facial recognition technology comes to Picasa thanks to an acquisition Google made in 2006 of Neven Vision, a company that specialized in matching facial detail with images already found in a centralized database. Picasa’a facial recognition technology works in much the same way.
There’s no telling if the facial recognition technology will be able to accurately identify each person in a picture, but it does suffer from a setback that may annoy users: it works best when a person is facing the camera and will have trouble identifying them if they’re not.
“Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera,” Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager told CNET. “There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows.”
Either way, it’s nice to see Google pull Picasa out of the doldrums and breathe some life into it. To play around with the facial recognition technology, head to Google’s Picasa page later this afternoon.
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Hulu Launches Fall Lineup, Premieres Before TV Broadcast,
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Hulu on Tuesday announced that it has launched its Fall Premiere Lineup, which over the next seven weeks, will be the place to find season premieres of Prison Break, Bones, House, Heroes, The Office and 30 Rock.
To build up the hype around new shows or those in their second season, Hulu will also debut the first episode of Knight Rider, Lipstick Jungle, Chuck and Life, one week before they air on broadcast television.
The decision to debut shows on Hulu first is an interesting one. For years, TV studios were loath to even put television shows on the Web and most wanted to maintain the same business model they had clung to for years. But now that they’ve realized there is money to be made online, the studios are embracing the Web like never before.
For a full lineup of Hulu coverage over the next seven weeks, head over to its Fall Premiere Lineup page.
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Psismic Matches People Over Things They Like,
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Psismic has a novel approach to internet dating. Rather than simply stating who you are, or taking a personality profile, Psismic lets users upload interesting pictures and videos, text posts and links. Then others indicate if they like what you’ve posted and the site serves up matches based on who likes the same items.
The sign up process is straightforward and presents only a single page of questions. It has three open entry boxes for you to describe who you are, who you’re looking for, and what are your interests. Someone at Psismic must like Twitter because each box is limited to only 500 characters. That’s not an awful lot, but then the site is more about defining oneself with pictures, videos and posts rather than mini autobiographies.
The site is minimal in nature, well laid out and easy to navigate. There’s really not a lot to it. The main page shows the all-important “Post Stream” which shows all the posts from other users. One user left the caption “Gentle Giant, best band ever. Really.” with a video of a band playing the most horrendous melody I’ve ever heard. Someone out there might like “kaden’s” favorite band. Perhaps they’d also like kaden, but they probably don’t like me for the somewhat cynical comment I left on the post.
Psismic is StumbleUpon-esque in that users can browse random items that other people think are cool, and sometimes they really are cool. Sometimes they’re really not, but that’s ok because it’s still amusing. At least they provide a window into other users’ psyches and somehow indicate whether you’d get on with them well.
There’s no user search functionality on Psismic. Instead, you browse the post stream and click on posters’ images to learn more about them and see the other items they’ve posted. If you like what you see, you can “request a match.”
Most people just aren’t that good at self-analysis and many people lie on dating sites anyway. So Psismic offers an entertaining alternative approach that gives internet daters a chance to be a little more honest above themselves, if a bit indirectly.
Psismic charges $19/mo or less for 6 and 12 month commitments.
This post was written by guest contributor Mark Brooks, an analyst/consultant whose blog Online Personals Watch summarizes the daily internet dating industry news.
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Happy Tenth Birthday Google! When Are We Celebrating?,
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One day this month will mark Google’s official tenth birthday. They’ll most likely celebrate with a blog post and a special logo (this one was tweaked based on an earlier one). And we’ll see a slew of articles about how much they’ve accomplished in those ten years. A few publications couldn’t wait and got out there with their Google tributes last month.
So all we need to know is when to celebrate! Almost certainly on September 27. But the real answer is way more complicated than that.
Google is actually nearly 13 years old if you go by their own corporate history page: “By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website.”
But if you go by when the Google.com domain name was registered, they’ll turn 11 on September 15.
However, the date Google celebrates as their birth month is September 1998. They celebrated on September 7, their date of incorporation, until 2005. Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.
So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? According to Danny Sullivan, who wrote about this mess last year, they pushed the birthday date forward in 2005 to all for the announcement of a index size milestone.
At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”
So Happy 10th, 11th and/or almost 13th Birthday Google! First three people who sing happy birthday to Google in a video comment below (all the way through, full volume, GO for it) get a TechCrunch t-shirt.
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TechCrunch50: We Need Student Volunteers, Last DemoPit Tables Have Opened Up,
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TechCrunch50 starts next Monday in San Francisco. We’re on track to sell out the 1,500 available tickets sometime in the next 48 hours. We’ll have a bunch of updates for attendees here and on the TC50 blog over the next few days.
Here are two updates now: We need more student volunteers, and we’re opening up the last five demopit spots to non-TC50 applicants.
Student Volunteers: Here’s the deal - work a day for us and enjoy the other two days free. Alternatively you can register for all three days for just $150 and skip the work. Frankly, volunteering for a day is actually fun, and you get to see the inner workings of a conference (ever hear about making sausage?). Either way, it’s great to have a lot of students at the event to round out the audience. Plus, everyone is trying to hire you. If you want to volunteer, email Tanya at TechCrunch dot com.
DemoPit: The TechCrunch DemoPit is a way for the 1000+ startups that applied to TechCrunch50 but didn’t make the final cut to participate. You get tickets for half the normal price and you also get to exhibit your company for one of the three days. Just like last year, you collect poker chips from attendees and whoever gets the most gets the last spot on stage at the end of the conference. We’ve sold most of these spots, but five are left and available to startups who want to pitch something new. Email Dan at TechCrunch dot com if you want to be considered, no later than Tuesday afternoon. After that we go to the printers for signage, and we need some time to review the requests.
More news soon. See you next Monday.
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Hurricane In Louisiana? This Time, FEMA Is Prepared. This Time, FEMA Has MySpace Widgets.,
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FEMA isn’t screwing around this time. There’s a hurricane hitting the gulf coast, and they are not going to take the blame if things go wrong.
They’ve evacuated 2 million people, for example.
And now, they’ve got widgets, which have been created by the Department of Homeland Security. Earlier this evening, MySpace says, Homeland Security phoned MySpace’s Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam who then called President (and hacker extraordinaire) Tom Anderson to quickly fast-track the project. Within a couple of hours Tom had posted a message to all MySpace users with links to information contained in the widget.
I’ve installed the FEMA widget on my MySpace page (sidebar, on the left, please excuse the music but it’s how I roll). It helps people locate victimes by directing them to FEMA’s National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System, allows people to make donations, and tracks the approach of Hurricane Hanna. It will be available in both English and Spanish.
If you want to install the widget on your own MySpace page, here are the details. These are actually simple IFRAME widgets so they can be installed on most sites.
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Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer,
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Make no mistake. The cute comic book and the touchy-feely talk about user experience is little more than a coat of paint on top of a monumental hatred of Microsoft.
Chrome, the Webkit-based Google browser that launches tomorrow at Google.com/chrome, will give them a real foothold on the desktop and way more control over how web applications perform. While it seems that Chrome is aimed at IE and Firefox, the target is really Windows.
They’ve built their own Javascript engine despite the fact that Webkit already has one. This should make Ajax applications like Gmail and Google Docs absolutely roar. When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access (see what MySpace did with Gears to understand how powerful it is), Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.
Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs. That was going to happen anyway, but Chrome + Gears just made the decision a whole lot easier for hardware manufacturers to make.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is stuck with a bloated closed source browser that they don’t even tether to their search engine for fear of more antitrust woes. Google can push their search engine and other web services all day long on Chrome, with no government interference. So not only will Chrome drive lots of incremental revenue to Google, it also paves the way for a Microsoft-free computing experience.
I love Chrome already and I haven’t even tried it yet (nor will I be using it much soon, since it will only work on Windows for now). But Google’s days of unchecked growth may soon come to an end. They are quickly becoming the new Microsoft.
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Google Launches Video For Businesses,
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This certainly won’t be the most interesting product launch of the day for Google, but it’s worth noting anyway. This morning Google is launching Google Video for business, a customized video platform aimed at businesses for internal use. Think training vides, HR videos, etc. (anything that isn’t outside facing). The product is included in Google Apps Premier Edition for free, with 3 GB of storage per user account.
This is a “Zero billion dollar market today” Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. The reason there’s no market, though, is that it’s a huge pain to build a video infrastructure for internal use. Google Video for business aims to make that trivially easy.
Videos basically have the same features and limitations as YouTube, including upload size and file type limits. Videos have access control, even if they are embedded outside of the intranet or Google Apps, and can be tagged and commented on just like YouTube.
An overview video of the product is below:
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First Images of Google Chrome,
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Update: Google giveth and Google taketh away - the Chrome site is now down.
Google appears to have soft-launched this site for Google Chrome, its open source browser, which is slated for release on Windows tomorrow.
The site provides the screenshot above, plus a set of demonstration videos that can’t actually be played because they have either been removed or set to private. We’ve uploaded the splash screens to these videos so you can at least get a fuzzy sense of what Chrome’s features look like.
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