Google has scheduled a press event for 10am PST this morning where the company plans to announce more details about its Linux-based Google Chrome OS . According to the information we received from Google, the company plans to launch Chrome OS next year. We don't expect Google to release an early build of Chrome OS today, but we would be more than happy to be wrong. We do, however, expect to hear more details about the OS and to see a demo of Chrome OS's functionality. Read on for our live updates from the event, which will start at 10am PST. Sponsor 9:55am: Ahead of the event, Google has already made the Chrome OS source code available . 10:00am : Still waiting for the event to begin. "Some of our attendees are unavoidably delayed in traffic." 10:05am: Event gets started. No beta, no devices today. But they will give a demo and focus on technical demo. 10:06am: Google Chrome has been open-sourced. 10:07am: Why did we do Chrome? We wanted to push the web forward. Over 40 million users. Focus on speed. Mostly on the JavaScript engine, but also on other parts of the browser. Updated Chrome over 20 times in the last year, but users don't notice this because it happens in the background. User experience should be seamless. Coming soon for Chrome: Chrome for Mac will be ready this year. Chrome for Linux is coming along "very well." Extensions are coming soon as well (with automatic updates). 10:10am: HTML5: we want web application to get more access to the hardware. Example: graphics; multiple threads; real-time communication 10:12am: 3 trends in the industry: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web application today), phones getting computing capabilities Phones are becoming more like laptops and laptops are becoming more like phones. Chrome OS 10:15am: Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security. Every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Simplicity: Chrome OS is just a browser - all your data is in the cloud. Users should be able to log into any Chrome OS machine and be up and running with their apps and data in seconds. Security: users don't install binaries on the OS. Keeps the system safe. Everything runs in the browser. 10:18am: Demo time. Booting up on laptop takes seconds. "Everybody knows how to use a browser and we want Chrome OS to feel that way. UI will still change until release. Application Tabs : just like tabs in Chrome, you will be able to set persistent tabs for apps (Gmail etc.). App menu on the top left to access apps as well (see first screenshot above). These apps will be little widgets that appear in a panel just like Google Chat in Gmail. 10:23am: As netbooks get better, we expect them to become entertainment devices. Shows chess game. Shows Google Books in full-screen mode. Chrome OS will feature multiple windows. You can drag and drop tabs from one window to another. Even the file browser is a Chrome tab. Shows what happens when you click on an excel file. Actually launches Windows Live Office apps to show them. "Every app you write for the web is a Google Chrome OS app." 10:29am: Every file opens up in the browser: PDF, Micorsoft Office, etc. Under the Hood 10:30am: Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS on stage now. "We want Chrome OS to feel more like a Television." Instant on - all flash memeory. How to make the boot-up faster? Right now, operating systems still spend a lot of time on unnecessary boot steps (looking for floppy drives etc.) 10:34am: Verified Boot: makes sure all the components are working and haven't been modified by malware. System automatically fixes itself and reimages the computer with the last working version - saves all system settings and cache data. Security : all apps are web apps. The OS does not trust any app. Other security steps: files system is licked down, every tab runs in a secure sandbox. There is only a small list of known programs (verified and signed). User data on a Chrome OS machine is ALWAYS encrytped. All the data is synced to the cloud (on the Google Drive?) - user partition on the machine is basically just a local cache. 10:41am: Back to Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management. Going to market: Chrome OS - but also working with hardware manufacturers. Will only support flash drives - not traditional hard drives! Google will specify reference hardware (specific wifi cards etc.). Google wants netbooks with a full-size keyboard, larger resolution, better trackpad. Launch: wants devices to be out by next holiday season. Chrome OS Open Sourced Google wants to work with open source community. Will give all of its contributions back to the community. 10:45am: Showing marketing video. Q&A Question : What is the target group for a Chrome OS device? Will there be Chrome server solutions? Chrome as a server? Answer: First we want to get netbooks out - no servers - but this is a paradigm shift in computer. Other questions: time will tell. Question : Cost of Chrome OS netbooks?> Answer: We will see larger netbooks - no price point - no price target.Demo ran on Asus EEE PC. Question : How can manufacturers join the program? Answer: Documentation on website. Reaching out aggressively to hardware partners. For software developers: there will be a page that shows which devices are compatible already. Question : Will there be an app store? Will Google certify drivers from OEMs? What about applications to edit photos? Answer: App store: the web is our app store and we will work hard on making those discoverable. Drivers: working with hardware partners. Want devices to be build on reference devices and with open source drivers. Editing: some apps are not available on the web. Most people who will buy this machine will have another machine in their home. This is not meant to be a primary OS - just a "delightful experience to be on the Web." This is a companion device Question : What about video codecs? Answer: working on that. Trying to use hardware acceleration where possible. Everything that's available in Chrome will be available in Chrome OS - including the http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ technology. Sidenote : a lot of what you will see in Chrome OS will also flow back into the Chrome browser. Question : Silverlight support? Answer: No comment. Question : Plugins? Other browsers? Answer: code is available, but we won't support other browsers to run on Chrome OS. Question : Do you expect to see this just running on netbooks or other devices as well? Answer: more info about devices will come next year. Google is currently focused on delivering compelling devices: netbook-like form factors. Question : How big is the OS? Answer: nothing specific. Question : Offline access? Google Gears support? Answer: you can play media - but device mainly meant to run online but will make use of HTML5 local storage. Question : can you run it in a virtual machine? Answer: yes. Question : are you working with partners? Can Android apps run on Chrome OS? Answer: we focus on making web apps better - mission of Chrome is to push web apps forward. About Android apps: no. Question : will there be third-party apps? Answer: no - on phones you need native apps, but not on laptops. Question : Native Client needs Intel - will you still support ARM? Answer: we will support X86 and ARM - working on Native Client for ARM. Question : What's the business model? Advertising in the browser? Answer: Right now, we are focused on getting the OS and devices out. Chrome OS is free and open source. As people use the web more, it benefits Google. No specific real-estate in Chrome OS will be devoted to ads. Question : What does Chrome do that I couldn't do in Firefox with plugins? Answer: most of what we do is available in other browser. But not the application tabs etc. We are offering a fundamentally different model of computing (fast, simple, secure). In Chrome OS, Google can offer things others can't: fast boot, security. Question : How do you get people to trust the cloud? How do you assure people that their data is secure? Answer: most of what you are doing is already in the cloud - so problem is not specific to Chrome OS. Google thinks the cloud is just as secure as local storage. Users have a choice - always in control. Question : data syncing - will this be open or data just controlled by Google? Answer: none Sergey Brin drops in and joins the Q&A. Question : Support for Java? Answer: nothing to announce right now - hopefully we can do something interesting with this in the future. Question : What about instant-on OSes on Dell etc.? Does Google want to do this? Answer: No - we want to just be able to start super fast. A lean and mean netbook. Question : Will a Chrome OS machine be able to run printers? Other devices? Answer: we will support storage devices. Printers: we are taking an innovative approach and share more about that next year. Question : Open Source. Answer: we want to upstream what we do and help the community. Want to collaborate with Question: Real-time notifications. Answer (Sergey Brin): We need better real-time notifications in the browser. Chrome will use the W3C Notifications API. Question (for Sergey): How does Chrome OS fit into Google's strategy. Answer: we want users to be able to use netbooks easily. Make it easy to manage software on these devices. The web is the right platform for this. Trying to fulfull this need. Discuss

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Live Blog: The Google Chrome OS Press Event

It always gives us joy to tell our readers that Microsoft is actually doing cool things. The company's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth , a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged. Today, the Live Labs' latest creation has launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks great and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information. Sponsor The official demo video is was pretty cool, but is proving unembeddable. Instead, take a look at this onstage demo from Neowin: In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established. Or, on a nerdier note, think about riffling through decks of Magic: The Gathering cards, zooming in for larger-than-life detail of the card's artwork and then zooming out to see how each was related or linked to others in the set. This probably reminds you - as it did us - a lot of Wikipedia. But imagine Wikipedia as an infinitely scannable, shuffleable, expandable, retractable, linked, and yet still detachable deck of digital cards; and then you have an inkling of how Pivot looks and feels. Collections can be created by anyone, including third-party developers . Types of collections include simple, linked, and dynamic, which are each progressively more difficult to create. Developers are also encouraged to create collections from existing online datasets, such as the Internet Archive or data.gov. It's very exciting, indeed; and it's available for Windows users only at the moment. Mac users, we're sorry. Why don't you go write some complaint letters on your beautifully designed, virus-immune machines? We'd love to rub it in some more by posting a few screenshots with gloating captions, but we're too busy trying to get this machine to stop being so Windows-y and just run the software Right now, the service is invitation-only. We encourage you to Google around for your invite codes or check in here later to see if the kind folks at Live Labs have passed along any to us. Discuss

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Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft just announced that it started work on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago. Steven Sinofsky , the president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, showed an early build of IE9 during his PDC keynote today. In this presentation, Sinofsky announced that Microsoft will focus on support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, as well as developing a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky candidly acknowledged that IE8 did not do well on the Acid3 test , though this early build of IE9 only scored a few points higher than IE8 (24 vs. 32). Sponsor According to Sinofsky, there is still a lot of internal discussion about how much of HTML5 to support in IE9. HTML5 is still in its draft stage . Sinofsky did not say when the company plans to release IE9. JavaScript Performance Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower that that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements. Hardware Acceleration and Font Smoothing Microsoft also plans to make use of DirectX-based hardware accelerated graphics and text in IE9. In his demo, Sinofsky showed that Bing maps can render about 14 frames per second in IE8. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second. In addition, this technology will also increase font quality and readability in IE9. Videos Microsoft already published a number of videos with the engineers working on IE9 on Channel 9 (sorry, these are Silverlight only). Discuss

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Microsoft Announces IE9: Focus on Standards and Speed

Most text excerpts that appear on search results pages aren't very useful. Imagine if instead your search engine showed a list of clear sentences summarizing the contents of each link on that search result page. That's what a new service called Factery Labs aims to provide for any service that utilizes the API it's launching today. You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning. Sponsor After building that "fact index," Factery ranks the links submitted by the quality and density of facts related to query on the page. Compare the search results page on Google News for "Paul Allen" to the information that Factery extracts from links being shared on Twitter about Paul Allen. The Google News page tells you nothing, except that Paul Allen has cancer - over and over again. Compare that with the Factery results page - I don't even need to click through if I don't want to, I feel like I got a great overview of the story just from my search page. Perhaps that's a problem - for a publishing industry that already says it's scared of search engines - but as a reader it sure isn't my problem, it's great. Why would I want Google News to tell me where I can go to find information if someone else will just give me the information? The company's test demo searches Twitter and Yahoo Boss - neither search is as exciting as I'd hoped 100% of the time, but it's often remarkably good. Factery is also testing an interesting integration with Silverlight stream reader Sobees , in which linked pages from Twitter or Facebook are annotated with automatically extracted highlights via Factery. I expect a whole lot of companies are going to at least try this API out and I'm excited to see the results. How This is Unlike Other Real-Time Search Services Factery is talking a lot about its ability to analyze links shared over Twitter, but that's probably just because Twitter is easy for people to understand. The fact is, the service can perform on-demand analysis of text behind any set of links. That's what differentiates it from other real-time search engines like OneRiot , which also analyzes the text of pages linked to on networks like Twitter and offers an API to display real-time search results on other sites. Competitor Collecta analyzes Twitter streams in real time and offers an XMPP API to push new search results live to any page. Factery is a different kind of animal, though. It's more like a smart search inside any other search. It doesn't even have to be search, though. The company talks a lot about how they make mobile reading more efficient by pulling the salient information up to the surface of a page, instead of requiring mobile readers to load multiple pages. I thought of five or six different ways I'd like to use it just while talking to the company on the phone. (I'm not going to share those here, either. I think some could offer an important competitive advantage.) I'd Love to See This Work Everywhere Yesterday I was testing a new Android app from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track members of congress. One tab in the app is a search for your congressperson in the news. Unfortunately, the page excerpts give no indication why the politician you searched for appeared in that news story - just that their name did, somewhere. That search is powered by a Yahoo API, probably BOSS, but it's not any fun to use at all. How unsatisfying, I thought, when I could have a list of key facts concerning my search query in the list of links that the search brought back. But that was yesterday, and Factery is just launching today. The possibilities are truly endless. That's probably why Ron Conway , one of the leading investors in the real-time economy, joined others in investing in the company. With $1.2 million in the bank, Factery is a modest developer play with a whole lot of potential. Give Factery's API a try and let us know what you think. It's free to use; the company says it may start inserting "sponsored facts" (isn't that an interesting phrase) into results later but things like business model and to a lesser degree de-duplication are still works in progress. I sure do love this idea. Discuss

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Factery Labs Makes Other Search Engines Look Incomplete