We are at Google IO 2011 and the focus today is on the Chrome browser and new Chromebooks notebooks running Chrome OS. Chromebooks will be initially featured by Samsung and Acer and offered in two flavors of wifi or wifi + 3G. Speed has always been at the heart of Google and their approach towards a seamless web experience lies within their cloud network. Sundar Pichai, Senior VP of Chrome, mentioned there were 70 million active users of Chrome in 2010 and more than doubled in 2011 with 160 million. Google is now adopting a 6 week release cycle in their software updates for Chrome and this is fantastic as users will see even better performance with HTML5 and WebGL support. Previous web animations that relied upon drawing on the web canvas and running on software are predicted to run at almost 100x faster by using WebGL instead. Google is focused on GPU acceleration within Chrome and a demo of the speed with animations clearly showed how 1000 objects easily were rendered. {gallery 1065} Chrome Web Store A big break for developers is the new 5% fee for web store applications. There are no fixed, monthly, signup, or licensing fees. Developers are encouraged to deploy more applicaitons and Google will help cater by expanding the Chrome web store and branching out to 41 languages. The popular game Angry Birds was demonstrated with it running within Chrome's browser and it provides a special Chrome level for your enjoyment. It is available starting today. Chromebook I had a few moments to talk with Sundar and some of his key points were the design decisions associated with the architecture behind Chrome OS. Sundar said, “We wanted to create fundamentally the most out of the box experience with minimal user input to get started.” These chromebooks are not the typical notebook computer. All of a user's photos, music, games, apps, and documents are available and everything resides within Google's cloud. Google Apps will indeed be an add-on but Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar are included. Chromebook has an instant on start up (roughly 8 seconds), always connected, an all day battery, access your web anywhere, gets better over time, and built with security in mind. A security overview can be found here http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview . Samsung and Acer will be the initial two notebook providers as stated earlier. Verizon will be the wireless provider within the US. The program stems from their original CR-48 pilot, and now with all that rich user feedback, Google is ramped for their next product. Chromebooks are supposed to get better and richer over time. We tend to see the degradation of a computer's performance as apps are installed and updates have to be managed, drivers updated, and a slew of other problematic hurdles. Chromebooks take care of all this behind the scenes with automatically delivering the most recent version directly to your notebook. The release date for Chromebooks is June 15 in the US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. We hope to see more countries released in the latter portion of 2011. Amazon and Best Buy will be the carriers. Samsung's Series 5 notebooks will be introduced in 2 versions: $429 Wifi Only $499 Wifi + 3G The Acer model will start at $349 and up. Google Pricing Model for Chromebooks Google is making a heavy push towards the corporate world by targeting a cost effective model. Businesses are targeted with a competitive price of $28/user monthly subscription and educational institutions and government clients starting at $20/user monthly. Chromebooks for business will deploy a web console, support, warranty & replacements, and hardware auto-updates. IT admins will be empowered with a robust configuration panel that will allow adding of users, apps, and granular control over policies and other access control lists. For more information visit http://www.google.com/ chromebook .